Mystical Supper

While I realize that the previous article in my Bulletin, Understanding Our Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church, truly seemed to overlap this article on the Divine Liturgy, it is my intention that this article stress more the liturgical theology connected with our Divine Liturgy. I am attempting to share in the article on page 3, that our Church calls us to EXPERIENCE, on a sensual level (all of our senses), what we do together. Hopefully this article presents the spiritual-intellectual aspects of our worship.

I am very aware that the whole idea of anamnesis is, perhaps, very difficult to understand. Because we are humans living in a particular time and space, we find it hard to disregard these aspects of what we do. And yet our Liturgy is designed to transport us beyond space and time and, like God, to experience all of the events in the life of Jesus as current events – things that we experience right now, here in the present. As I have expressed to my readers in the past, there is no time or space in God’s world. He is beyond all time and space and everything exists in the present since there is no past or future.

I realize that this is difficult to comprehend since humans tend to always think about the past and the future and yet, is we are honest, the only things we can truly experience are within the present moment. The past really doesn’t exist – they are only memories and the future is also not real since we have no real guarantee that the future will turn out how we anticipate it to be.

When we come to church, we must leave behind our thoughts about the past and the future and experience God in the present moment. Typically, we humans live in the past because we wish the past had been different and also live in the future, hoping that it will be different than the past. Both are truly faulty ways of living. We cannot change the past and we have no real control over the future. We can only accept life as it presents itself to us in the present moment.

So, for our worship to be real to us, we must embrace the things that we do as things that are happening right now as they did in the past. Christ is present to us, giving us, at the present moment, His Body and Blood as He did to the Apostles.