Prayer is Breathing

Metropolitan Georges Khodr: Prayer is breathing 

Original text here: 

The way we are with our Lord is that we are always tormented and the Lord always heals us. It is not for us to wonder why we are like this-why we are in suffering, why we exist in suffering. Divine inspiration does not give an answer to this question. It does not say why we are subjected to pain, to pain of the body, to pain of the soul, to pain of the conscience. The Divine Scripture is content to observe this and to start off on this basis in order to reveal to us how we can leave this suffering, how we can bear it and change it into the power to create and approach God, turning it into a ladder by which we go up to heaven.  

In the Divine Scripture we have promises of healing, and of sure salvation from sin. When he promised the joy and revealed the life that will come when we accept the mystery of God and obey him in all the afflictions of the world that we taste, whether in spirit or in body. When we are in such a state, in torment like what those who sought healing from the Lord were in, we cry out like them: “Lord, have mercy!”

“Son of David, have mercy on me.” “Lord have mercy on my son, for he suffers greatly…” We observe that all these words are seeking mercy, which in more comprehensive than healing. When we ask for healing, most of us ask for healing of the body, which is something good, but we have not reached the point of suffering from sin leaking in to us, so we ask for it to be removed from us and we remain Christ’s. What is our stance toward the stricken after we fall into evil, after darkness engulfs our souls? What prayer do we pray? Do we trust that God Himself will come down to us if we pray? Do we know that God wants us to speak to Him? For us to enter into dialogue with Him?   

Naturally, God is capable of responding at all times, and he responds effectively if we ask or if we do not ask because He knows all our needs. However, the Lord prefers for us to speak to Him so that we might be trained in His friendship. He asks this boldness of us, the boldness of children with their Father. This is what we ask him in the Divine Liturgy, before we recite the Lord’s Prayer, when we say, “And make us worthy, O Lord, that with boldness we may call You Father…”

God wants to be among us, to be friendly with us, so that we might know that we have risen to the rank of divinity and so we might realize that God has come down to the rank of humanity. If God has come own to our souls as they are, as we know them to be, in their weakness, in their disgrace, in their filthiness, if God visit these soul then He is their Healer.

The problem of modern, contemporary man is that he is content with himself because he has made puppets, toys that he plays with and he thinks that this is enough, especially if he has acquired some wealth and spared himself hard living and so closes himself off and does not ask about anything. This is mankind’s evil in this generation that we are in and for this reason the Lord says, “You unbelieving and perverse generation, how long shall I stay with you? How long shall I put up with you?” (Matthew 17.17). If a person completely closes all the windows to himself, he suffocates because he cannot breathe. When we are content with toys that we have made, we close the window to heaven on ourselves and we suffocate. People do not only suffocate through their lungs, their mind also freezes, their heart withers, their conscience goes idle and they spiritually die.

What is prayer before this situation? Prayer is us opening the windows when we feel shut in. it is us opening the windows of the heart to heaven so that God can visit our souls. Only then are we able to love.

Prayer is breathing. If we are certain of this we can conquer all the world’s trails because our spirits will be filled with the air of grace.   

The Eucharist Dimension of Death

The Eucharist unites those who are broken in the body of Christ. Many times we think that because we are broken this brokenness we carry can never be restored. Humanity begins to develop different ideologies on how to be fix the brokenness of human beings in which, these ideologies, will always lead you back to step one. An example can be medicine. People take medicine in order to physically get better however, some individuals can develop an addiction which leads back to step one-brokenness. Now I am not saying medicine is bad, actually quite the opposite is true. With the rise of medicine, we as a specie have been able to advance far more in the past 150 years than we have in the last 2000 years before then. The natural question that stems from this then if we have advanced to this degree why is it that humans are broken beings? To answer a question is not easy but many points have been made from all sides. I would suggest that one common answer or common action that unites every human being no matter what religious belief or background one takes is death. Death, as we know it, will come to all human beings. Death is a certainty for all. Growing up I sarcastically was taught that two things that can never be avoided are taxes and death. Death is guaranteed to all, so by understanding death and what it means this will allow us to understand the brokenness of humanity.

What is death? Death in a physical sense and in a simple manner is when one's body stops functioning. Your heart stops to beat and life has left your body. You cease to exist. All human brokenness will cease once death occurs. However, society today treats death in the complete opposite manner. Death today is glorified and celebrated in way that people do not want to see death anymore. 50 years ago if a family member would die the body would remain in the home for a few days before the funeral took place. This practice today however, has ceased because people cannot see death no more. By not seeing death we as a society have forgotten what it means to be "dead". This is the simple reason why death is the hardest thing to accept. Death has become a "passion" and a form of brokenness to many because it is at the point of death that we as human beings cannot carry anything with us to the afterlife. This is a known fact that any human being can acknowledge no matter what one believes in. In death we lose all our positions. This is why death is hard for many. I would challenge the reader to take another perspective, or paradigm in regards to how one should view death. In order to accept death (seeing that it is the one thing that unites all human beings) we must understand what it means to live. It is in death that life begins. The church has always taught that through baptism and Eucharist we enter these mysteries through our death. We must die to the world in order to receive life. This is exactly what Christ gave to us through his own death. He was crucified and then was risen into life. This is why at the last breathe Christ said, "It is finished". What is finished?

The restoration of the human being. Humanity once again was restored in the image and likeness of our original creation. As God spoke in Genesis by making us in his image and likeness, through Christ death and life we have been restored. Brokenness is shattered and new life has been given to all. This is why we chant during Pascha (Easter) Christ is risen from the dead trampling down death by death. Through Christ death He abolished death and through death he gave life to all. Unfortunately, many in our society cannot comprehend such a notion of destroying death because there paradigm of death is limited. If death becomes a separation of the individual from their positions then death surely will be a great travesty to all. However, if we are "separated" from our positions and we learn to die daily to the "passions" that constantly bombard us then death will truly be a reward as the spirit goes to its rest in Christ. Positions are good and we need them to survive and expand however, when I speak of separation I speak of attachment. We cannot be attached to positions. To be attached means to be "addicted" (for lack of better terms). One example that comes to mind is Frodo from the Lord of the Rings. He grew attached to the ring that at the end he did not cast it into the fire until he realized how much pain it caused him. If we learn to live in harmony with creation and see the good in creation then surely death, when it comes to us, wont be painful, but rather a restoration to the one who gave us all that is good. This culminates in the Eucharist. What it means to partake of the Eucharist is to die daily to that which holds us captive. The passions we have created around ourselves are what we constantly need to die to in order to have life. Then and only then will we be able to say, "into why hands do I commend thy Spirit" as we depart from this world.    

The following are two passages that inspired this entry. Fr. Alexander Schmemann and Fr. John Behr look at the dimension of the Eucharist and what this means for us today. The life of the church has never been perfect, but we are all united in the body of Christ by our participation in the Eucharist. I highly recommend both books as they both lay the ground work of the Eucharist. Fr. Alexander was a liturgical theology professor at St. Vladimir's Seminary and the dean up to his death in 1983. Fr. John is a patristic professor at St. Vladimir's Seminary and is the current dean of the school.                      
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For more than thirty years I have served the Church as a priest and a theologian, as a pastor and a teacher. Never in those thirty years have I ceased to feel called to think about the Eucharist and its place in the life of the Church. Thoughts and questions on this subject, which go back to early adolescence, have filled my whole life with joy—but, alas, not only with joy. For the more real became my experience of the Eucharistic liturgy, the sacrament of Christ’s victory and of his glory, the stronger became my feeling that there is a Eucharistic crisis in the Church. In the tradition of the Church, nothing has changed. What has changed is the perception of the Eucharist, the perception of its very essence. Essentially, this crisis consists in a lack of connection and cohesion between what is accomplished in the Eucharist and how it is perceived, understood and lived. To a certain degree this crisis has always existed in the Church. The life of the Church, or rather of the people in the Church, has never been perfect, ideal. With time, however, this crisis has become chronic. That schizophrenia that poisons the life of the Church and undermines its very foundations has come to be seen as a normal state.

Taken from the preface of Fr. Alexander Schmamann's "The Eucharist".

There is clearly a close relationship between the dynamism and the faithfulness of the Spirit and the action of the Word operative in the processes that lead both to the Eucharist and to the resurrection. It is by receiving the Eucharist, as the wheat and the vine receive the fecundity of the Spirit, that we are prepared, as we also make the fruits into the bread and wine, for the resurrection effected by the Word, at which point, just as the bread win receive the Word and so become the Body and Blood of Christ, the Eucharist, so also our bodies will receive immortality and incorruptibility from the Father. As such, death, within the overall economy of God seen in the light of the Passion of Christ, takes on a Eucharistic dimension, alongside its educative and limiting function, and the economy as a whole can be described as the Eucharist of God.

Fr. John Behr, The Mystery of Christ, page 106.  

Why Fasting?

St. Catherine of Sienna-A role model to us all who held fasting in high regard throughout her life.

The church imitates Christ. Fasting in the life and works of Christ represent our first response to the act of unction and being filled with the Holy Spirit. Sadly enough many think that fasting is a physical act of giving up food and a simple change of diet. This of course is important to the concept of sanctifying a fast because if we cant learn to give up our own desires and pleasures how do we expect to imitate Christ if the passions have taken a hold of our nature. If we look to scripture we see that many forms of fasting had taken place and this did not necessarily include giving up food. If we look to the Samaritan woman in the gospel of John we find an individual who came to get water and left with the everlasting water, the water that will never make her thirst again. What was this water? Christ! How did she receive this water? By stripping away her passions through her honesty in answering Christ's questions and allowing Christ to penetrate her life in order to purify her body and was made worthy to behold Christ.

Fasting is a divine act of life which we have received from Christ himself. The first act Christ did following his Baptism was to go into the wilderness and fasted for 40 days and 40 nights. The church from the very beginning has always infused its own body, the acts of Christ' life, in order that those acts become life-giving for the life of the world. The church, which is one with Christ, becomes the image of the life of Christ. If the church becomes imitators of Christ then fasting has become a fundamental phase that not only Christ went through but we also must go through to sanctify our bodies. To claim that we live in the body of Christ and to overlook fasting is to misunderstand the person of Christ. If we are to follow Christ in our baptism, death and resurrection we are to also follow with our own fast! We should take note that all actions done in the person of Christ, revolve around Christ and end up in him. This is why He spoke and said "for my sake", "come, follow me", "for my name's sake", "come after me". All these acts, fasting, baptism, enduring persecution and suffering lead to our union in the body of Christ.  

Why then do we fast? Fasting is a test in which the personality defies the self. It is an an exercise in which the self is resisted by man. Fasting then, should be considered an act of love of the highest order, a physical way of entering into the experience of the cross (Good Friday in the Coptic Rite calls for all parishioners to abstain from food). The fasting that Moses and other prophets did was to profit them and mankind. On the other hand, the fasting of Jesus, was not done that He might receive anything, but to make a free offering of Himself in an act of love and to manifest the coming sacrifice of the cross. We fast by offering our bodies as a sacrifice. The outward form is naturally our fatigue, but the true essence is the our intentional acceptance of death, that we may be born again in life in the mystery of Christ. It is then and only then we become, in the sacrifice we make, a pure sacrifice, capable of interceding and redeeming in the image of Christ for the life of the world.

Fasting should not be viewed from the paradigm of changing your diet as we naturally are taught but rather fasting should be viewed from the paradigm of death and life. We die to the world in order that we are given life in the body of Christ. All acts within the church lead to our salvation. All acts the church administers and teaches is meant to bring us in the body of Christ. All the mysteries of the Church point to the paradigm of death and life. If we learn to shed the passions of the body then we become imitators of Christ. Fasting is one of many acts that lead to this realization.  

Liturgical Experience

Last week I was speaking to my father about the progression of the church from the 1st century to the modern times. We concluded that the beauty of the church is not about how "it has stayed the same", which it has, but rather the progression of the faith throughout the century has made the church what is it today. Many complain that the church is out of date and that 3 hour liturgies need to be dropped. I would challenge such an idea and ask the question since when did 3 hour liturgies ever remain the same? In the early church celebrating the Eucharist probably took less than an hour however, the fellowship spent at the church house probably lasted the whole day. Liturgy should then not be viewed as an "3 hour service" but liturgy should be taken in as the service of love. Liturgy lived for the life of the world is the liturgy that people can see Christ in us. By seeing Christ and seeing the love we live by then Christ becomes the ever present reality for the life of the world. Liturgy by definition is the ever lasting work of the people. It is not about a priest doing a few funny things in front of the holy of holies but it is the work of the people coming together in the body of Christ to fulfilled the commandment of Christ. To go out to the rest of the world and to preach the word of Christ baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. In the liturgy of St. John Chrysostom the priest always recites "Your own of your own we offer unto you, on behalf of all and for all". The work of the people is the liturgy that is lived for the life of the world. The following is a nice passage I came across from a book I was reading that relates the message of the progression of the liturgy. Enjoy. 

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Liturgical Experience

'During divine service be trustful, as a child trusts his parents. [...] Cast all your care upon the Lord [...]; "Take no thought how or what ye shall speak: for it shall be given you in the same hour what ye shall speak. For it is not ye that speak, but the Spirit of your Father, which speaketh in you." Long ago has the Lord freed us from this care, having by His Spirit taught the Church what to say, how to pray, at divine service." Such an attitude to the worship of our Church does not stem from conservatism.

Nor were the Church's hymnographers inspired by the principle of newness. New elements do not come into Orthodox worship from any feeling that past forms are stale, but for positive reasons:

• 1) Teaching - for example when heresy threatened, or a Feast was instituted to focus more specifically on an event such as Christ's birth.
• 2) New events, such as a saint's canonisation or a miraculous deliverance.
• 3) An aspect of life is made the subject of common prayers - for instance, the environment, or a child's beginning school.
• 4) Local celebrations and adaptations are more widely adopted.
• 5) God inspired the composition and its insertion without any previous pastoral decision giving rise to it.

Orthodox teenagers were speaking disparagingly about forms of worship they had experienced at an ecumenical service.

Girl: 'They even had guitars in church.'

Another girl: 'We had to sing - and mime! - a "harvest" thanksgiving chorus about MacDonald's hamburgers!' [I was treated to a rendition.] 

S.M.: 'I'd feel an idiot singing that in a church! But be careful to get your reasons for being so scathing right! At least they were thanking God, singing about Christ. That's quite something nowadays. You can glorify God by a guitar. Or just enjoy it anyway, there's no sin in that. The really important point is not that it was laughably corny, but that it is a mistake to keep adapting the Liturgy, to replace inspired services. It is not wrong in itself to add another means of worshipping for other moments.'

Girl: 'The girls at school don't want it; the teachers make it up to try and be up to date.' 

S.M.: 'Yes, to "keep the young people in Church". C.S. Lewis says, "If something is not eternal, it is eternally out of date." Look at the rock charts. By the time you compose a service based on this week's style and get it approved by a liturgical committee  you'll be ages behind the fashion and have to start again. And there's no guarantee you're inspiring truth about God. It is not a service tested by centuries of praying saints. I'd rather struggle to pray like St. John Chrysostom myself. It's more sure. And it will take me a lifetime to get all I can out of it. The things that don't matter so much can change week by week.'

The saints who expressed reservations about elaborated hymnography in comparison with monologistic prayer (monologistic means concentrated in a short phrase; the Jesus prayer is the most widely practised of this type) were not rebels. Some ascetics live at such a depth of prayer that they have less need of liturgical richness. For the rest of humanity, the forms of our public services take people in a positive direction, freeing their minds from heterogeneous preoccupations. Common worship is also valuable as means of uniting with others in prayer. Athonite monks are taught that even thought prayer in the cell can go deeper than prayer in the church, monks who conclude that it is therefore better to skip the services will not gain grace in their cells.

+ Sister Magdalen of Essex, "Conversations with Children: Communicating our Faith," (Essex: Stavropegic Monastery of St John the Baptist, 2004) 194-6. ISBN 1 874679 21 5

I Believe in God but I don't go to Church

I cam across this blog entry: http://www.johnsanidopoulos.com/2013/07/i-believe-in-god-but-i-dont-go-to-church.html and I thought this would be excellent to re-blog here because it deals exactly with a lot of issues that many priests and clerics deal with on a daily basis. Archimandrite Paul Papadopoulos get's to the heart of the issue which is focused on egoism. Egoism fuels the drive to be above scripture, to be above the church and everything that it stands for. Of course being united to Christ is not the work of the individual but the work of the community.

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I believe in God but I don't go to church."

We often hear the above phrase from acquaintances, friends and relatives, so our discussion will focus a little more on spiritual matters.

The basic argument of people who say that they believe in God yet do not go to church to participate in the Mysteries of our Orthodox Church, is that they are bothered by certain things, such as the luxuriousness of churches, obnoxious priests and chanters, the language is ancient (they don't understand it), the microphones, the lights, the candle offering (where they give money for a candle), the time the Divine Liturgy is celebrated, etc.

The excuses are certainly a lot when someone DOES NOT WANT to live according to how the Church says. Unfortunately these people consider themselves outside the Church since they do not accept the basic components of the life in Christ, which is the participation of a Christian in the Mysteries of the Church. These people are not Christians, at least not Orthodox, because while they (supposedly) believe, they do not follow any word of Christ.

The issue of course is that most baptized Christians do not know who Christ is or what the Church is, and what Christ and the Church offer to people. Thus they do not attend church, because essentially they do not know what they are missing, and they do not know what the sacramental life can offer.

The Church, with all Her Mysteries, transforms us, sanctifies us, and brings us into communion with God. Our participation in the Mysteries of the Church is the key to this personal resurrection of ours.

The Church does not exist merely to take the position of medicine and exhaust all its capabilities, as some wrongly treat it. The Church exists to lead people, the faithful, to the Love, the Light and the Life in Christ through the Mysteries.

To say you believe in God is easy, but to believe in God in an Orthodox manner and to do corresponding works is difficult, though not impossible.

If a person really wants to know Christ, they can do this through the sacramental life offered by the Church. If you want to fool yourself you can claim to achieve this on your own. However, I do not know anyone that has been sanctified outside the Church. (The crazy thing is that some people consider as saints people like Elder Paisios, Elder Porphyrios, etc., yet they do not accept their lives.)

All this happens for just one reason: Egoism. When each person believes themselves to be a better interpreter of the Scriptures, and they believe the God-bearing Fathers of the Church are beneath them, and they believe they are smarter, more worthy and holier than the old "religionists" as they call them, and when they believe they have no need to repent of any of their sins (!), and they could be saved by themselves (whatever that means to them), then this text will probably not trouble them at all, rather it has been a long time since they fell into the abyss of self-love and delusion.

The biggest obstacle that prevents contemporary man from reaching communion with God is precisely this: they are trying to know Him the wrong way, using the wrong means, outside the Church. They dismiss the mystery of love and remain willfully grounded in a sterile faith which in a best case scenario simply means "acknowledging the existence of God" and not trusting and surrendering to Divine Providence.

Holy Week Contemplation: By Father Matthew the Poor

The following contemplation by Father Matthew the Poor (Matta El-Misken) is from the chapter entitled Gethsemane and the Problem of Suffering in his book, Communion of Love.

How did Jesus accept the shame of man?

Christ’s acceptance of the shame of man must be counted a mystery. In order for us to discern it we must drain ourselves of all feelings and emotion; there are few who can attain to this. Just as the Lord took our nature and was united to it without its diminishing or changing His divinity, so too He consented that His body should, in Gethsemane, take on our stain without being soiled. He did not take sin upon Him merely in thought, or symbolically or in imagination, for as the Bible says, "He Himself bore our sins in His body on the tree” ( l Pt. 2:24).

At this point, who can discern the mystery of Christ and the heart of redemption?

All we can say is that just as He approached the incarnation and brought it about through His will, so by His will He bore our sin in His body. And when God wills anything, it is so. If His hunger, thirst, and weariness are evidence to us that He was incarnate in a truly human nature, so His distress and grief and the sorrow of His soul are evidence that of His free will He mysteriously accepted what mankind was to lay upon Him on the cross.

Just as the lamb of the sacrifice in ancient times used to bear a person’s sin and die with it for the sinner without the lamb itself being considered sinful, so the Son of God, the "Lamb of God” (Jn. 1:29) who takes away the sin of the whole world, became sin for us, but remained utterly sinless. "For our sake He made Him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteous of God” (2 Co. 5:21). He remained just as He was, "holy, blameless, unstained, separated from sinners, exalted above the heavens” (Heb. 7:26).

Just as He, in us, became sin although He remained utterly sinless, so we, in Him, have become utterly without sin, although we are sinful human beings. "He took what was our portion and gave us what was His, so let us praise and glorify and exalt Him.” (Coptic Psalmody: Theotokia of Friday).

We met together in Gethsemane and with that the problem of suffering, which has bowed our back and crushed our soul, comes to an end forever.

St. Ephraim the Syrian - On the Power of the Cross

The Cross abolished idolatrous adulation, enlightened the whole universe, gathered all the nations into one Church and united them with love. The Cross is the resurrection of the dead. The Cross is the hope of Christians. The Cross is the staff for the lame. The Cross is comfort for the poor. The Cross is the deposing of the proud. The Cross is the hope of those who despair. The Cross is food for the sailors. The Cross is haven for the bestormed. The Cross is the father for orphans. The Cross is comfort for those who mourn. The Cross is the protector of children. The Cross is the glory of men. The Cross is the crown of elders. The Cross is light for those sitting in darkness. The Cross is freedom for slaves, wisdom for the ignorant. The Cross is the preaching of prophets, the fellow-traveler of apostles. The Cross is the chastity of maidens, the joy of priests. The Cross is the foundation of the Church, the establishment of the universe. The Cross is the destruction of idolatrous temples, temptation for Jews. The Cross is the cleansing of the lepers, the rehabilitation of the enfeebled. The Cross is bread for the hungry, a fountain for the thirsty. The Cross is the good hope of monks, clothing for the naked.

By this holy armor of the Cross Christ the Lord has terminated the omniconsuming bowels of Hades and blocked the many snares in the mouth of the devil. Having seen the Cross, death trembled and released everyone whom she possessed with the first creature. Armed with the Cross, the God-bearing apostles subdued all the power of the enemy and caught all peoples in their dragnets, and gathered them for the worship of the One Crucified. Clothed in the Cross as in armor, the martyrs of Christ trampled all the plans of torturers and preached with plainness the Divine Cross-bearer. Having taken up the Cross for the sake of Christ, those who renounced everything in the world settled in deserts and on mountains, in caves and became the fasters of the earth.

But what language is worthy to praise the Cross, this invincible wall of the Orthodox, this victorious armor of the Heavenly King?! By the cross the Almighty One bestowed unspeakable blessings on humanity!

Therefore on the forehead, and on the eyes, and on the mouth, and on the breasts let us place the life-giving Cross. Let us arm them with the invincible armor of Christians, with this hope of the faithful, with this gentle light. Let us open paradise with this armor, with this support of the Orthodox faith, with this saving praise of the Church. Neither in one hour, nor in one instant, let us not forget the Cross, nor let us begin to do anything without it. But let us sleep, let us arise, let us work, let us eat, let us drink, let us go on our way, let us sail on the seas, let us go across the river, let us adorn all our members with the life-giving Cross. And let us not be frightened 'by the terror of the night, nor by the arrow that flies by day, nor by anything roaming in darkness, nor by any calamity, nor any noonday demon' (Ps. 90:5, 6). If, O Christian, you will always take up the Cross of Christ on yourself as a help, then 'evil shall not come towards you, nor any scourge come near your habitation': for the opposition power seeing it trembles and leaves.

- St. Ephraim the Syrian

Reflections on Fasting- Part 3

The following are reflections on fasting written by Father Matthew the Poor. In the book, Communion of Love, it has a chapter entitled "The Deep Meaning of Fasting" which these reflections are taken from. A recommended read for all during the Lenten period. The book is a complication of Father Matthew's smaller booklets put into one book:

-For whoever fails to offer his life totally, or is dismayed at the prospect of self-sacrifice, and so of death, finds that his intention retreats and that he rejects death. He becomes evasive and offers an outward sacrifice, such as an act of service or an offering of money, or uses some other stratagem to avoid sacrificing his own self. So he loses his portion in Christ the Redeemer, for Christ redeems from death those who have accepted death.

-Once more we repeat that Christ, blessed be His name, cannot become a ransom for the human soul unless man offers his soul on the altar of love, in death to the world, making a total offering with all his will, relinquishing himself forever, raising the knife with his own hand in determination and earnest resolve, proving that he has accepted death.

-The Lord crucified Himself for the world before the world crucified Him. He carried out the offering of His body, His self, as a sacrifice on behalf of the world immediately after He was baptized when He was led by the Spirit. He gladly obeyed and went to face the test of fasting. This is the volitional aspect of the cross. Thus it was that the Lord was careful to institute and celebrate the rite of the Eucharist prior to the cross, not after the resurrection, to show that the sacrifice and offering were a free act.

-That is the meaning of “Take, eat . . . Take, drink . . . this is my body . . . this is my blood.” This was said a whole day before the crucifixion, but He saw that the coming events were completely in accordance with His will. He saw the cross standing and on it the body being slain and the blood being shed; He saw Himself content with it all. And so He took bread and filled it with the mystery of the broken body, and wine and filled it with the mystery of the shed blood, and He fed His disciples. They ate from His hands the mystery of His will and drank the mystery of His love, the mystery of His sufferings, the mystery of salvation. Therefore, when we share in the mystery of the body and the blood in the Eucharist, we share not only in the cross, but also in a mystical life poured out and a body that has struggled with severe fasting, deprivation, want, and pain.

-When asked what, then, is our fasting? Father Matthew replies: We fast and offer our bodies as a sacrifice; the outward form of this is bearing fatigue, but its essence is the intentional acceptance of death, that we may be counted fit to be mystically united in the flesh and blood of Christ. It is then that we become, in Christ’s sacrifice, a pure sacrifice, capable of interceding and redeeming.

-Fasting, since it is an incomplete sacrifice because of sin, has to be consummated in Communion, partaking in the pure body and blood, to become a perfect sacrifice, efficacious in prayer and intercession. Every Holy Communion Has to be preceded by fasting, and every fast has to end with Holy Communion. When we receive Communion in this way it is right for us to intercede, for our offering and sacrifice are made perfect. "Pray to receive Communion worthily. Pray for us and for all Christians” (Coptic Liturgy).

In Lent we prepare ourselves for the Last Supper. We prepare for two like things coming together. How could those who do not sacrifice themselves be worthy of Him who sacrificed His life? If we eat of a sacrificed body and do not sacrifice our own selves, how can we claim that a union takes place? The Mystical Supper on Thursday, which is the intentional acceptance of a life of sacrifice, is but a preparation for accepting sufferings openly, even unto death.

Whenever we eat of the body and drink of the blood, we are mystically prepared for preaching the death of the Lord and confessing His resurrection. Every testimony to the death and resurrection of the Lord carries with it a readiness for martyrdom. And every martyrdom carries with it a resurrection.