Mystical Supper
In the last issue, I began singling out the prayers that are different in the Liturgy of St. Basil. I covered the antiphons that are a part of the Liturgy of the Word (Psalm 103 and the Beatitudes). Further, like the weeks of the period of preparation for the Great Fast and all holy days, there are special “Tropars and Kondaks” for each week of the Great Fast. These prayers are always closely connected with the special theme of a season or the feast being celebrated.
The next prayers in the Liturgy that are different are the two Prayers of the Faithful. I would draw your attention to these two prayers. The first prayer states that God has revealed to us “this great mystery of salvation.” To me this mystery is the meaning and purpose of human life and how we humans can come to a deeper understanding of it.
The prayer continues and suggests that somehow an understanding of this mystery is closely connected to what we do as a Christian community around God’s “holy altar” – or as we say in the Eastern Church, before His “holy throne.” The prayer then goes on to ask God to “prepare us for this mystery” which is connected with offering God the “sacrifice of praise.”
I have found that it truly helps us to understand what we do in our worship if we understand that the “sacrifice of praise” that we are called to offer is to join with Jesus in offering our lives back to God in thanksgiving for the gift of life itself. Can there be any greater praise given to God than an act of offering ourselves back to Him for the gift of life? I offer myself back to God by deciding and desiring to live my human life in the manner in which God intended when He created me. Jesus demonstrated this in the way that He lived and died.
The prayer concludes by asking God that our offering of our very lives may “be acceptable” to Him. We know this to be true since in doing this we are modeling our lives after the one, true human being, Jesus.
Again, all this means that we pay particular attention to the prayers that we offer as a community and that we mean the prayers that we say and hear, making them our own prayers. This is one reason why our liturgical tradition is so dialogic in nature. The back-and-forth praying of priest and people calls us to make the prayers we offer our own.
Because there is repetition in our style of prayer as a community, we must always guard against just going through the act of praying and focus our attention on meaning the prayers that we say together.