Our task is to acquire the Mind of Christ so that we might become more like Him. God has presented Himself, we believe, as a human being in the person of Jesus as the model of what human beings should be like and act like in order to fulfill their meaning and purpose. We acquire the Mind of Christ not just by trying to imitate Christ but by participating with God’s grace to change our hearts and minds. Once our thinking begins to change, we begin to live in a different manner.
One of the ways that God has given us to achieve this as Christians is the Divine Liturgy. While our personal interior prayer life must be strong, it finds its real benefit when joined to dedicated regular attendance at the Liturgy since it inspires in us a very important feeling, namely THANKFULNESS. If we are thankful for the gift of life, we will do everything in our power to fulfill the meaning and purpose of our life. And, of course, the meaning and purpose of our life is to spiritually grow so that we might be more closely united to our God.
We will never have time for the Church and the things of God unless we make time, prioritizing our life so as to put God first. If we say that we love God, that means that we pray. There are two sides of the life of prayer which are inseparably bound: there is personal and communal prayer. Each supports the other. We can enter more thoroughly into communal prayer if we have integrated personal prayer into our lives and, likewise, communal prayer can truly help our personal prayer. We need both if we are to make progress, for they both nourish each other, respectively strengthening and reinforcing each other.
Today is the day of salvation. Each moment given to us is a moment that we can live in the presence of God. It is time to awake from the slumber of the world and to put on Christ, beseeching Him to grant us a continual renewal of our repentance and of our life in the Church.
Our Church, although for some out-dated because of its ritual, is truly a gift to help us encounter our living God. Humans since the beginning of time have used rituals to help them come into contact with God. Ritual for the sake of ritual, however, can become very off-putting. Intelligent and reasonable ritual, however, has the power to allow us to actively enter into the dimension which is beyond – to engage in actively remembering our God with us.