In the last issue I began a description of the Communion Service which takes place after the Anaphora. While it can begin with a litany, the true beginning of this service is the praying of the OUR FATHER, the Lord’s Prayer.

Immediately after this prayer, the celebrant again offers a blessing and invites people to bow their heads for the Head-Bowing Prayer. Almost all of our services include a Head-Bowing Prayer. It is a very ancient ritual.

The Head-Bowing Prayer in the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom is a true declaration of our faith. It starts out by making a declaration of our faith that the God we are worshipping is the God who has “fashioned all things”. We acknowledge Him as the Creator of the Universe. It also states that we believe that He brought “all things out of nonexistence into being.”

This is an important part of our faith. The God we worship created all things out of “nothingness.” Even if we take into consideration evolution, He, we believe, started the process and initiated it out of “nothingness.” This is stated to express our belief that there was nothing but God Who originally existed and that He is the source of all things.

The prayer then states something that I believe is very important. It says that we bow our heads to Him and then adds that we do not “bow to flesh and blood but to You, our awesome God”. This statement, I believe, declares something that is so very important, namely that the bread and wine are not just transformed into the elements of Christ’s Body and Blood but, rather, into Christ Himself. We sometimes fail to realize this fact. The words Body and Blood could mean that only Christ’s bodily accidents are present and, therefore, He is only “represented” by them. Our faith tells us that HE, Christ, is truly present and that the Body and Blood are only an indication of His presence since all hu-mans have both a body and blood.

The most important thing is to believe and realize that HE, Christ, is truly present among us. This is the way that Christ fulfills the promise He first gave to the Apostles that He would be with them until the end of time. HE, Himself, is present in our midst just as He was at the Last Supper.

It is critical that we understand that we believe in Christ’s REAL PRESENCE. Communion is not just something symbolic or representative of Him. Through our faith and prayers HE IS WITH US.