Mystical Supper
The priestly prayer that follows the Holy, Holy, Holy of the Anaphora of St. Basil the Great, is typically heard only in part by the faithful because it is so long. I would encourage all to take some time and read the entire prayer. It is a magnificent statement of our beliefs about God and His actions in our world.
The prayer begins by declaring to God that we are making our prayer – our worship – together with the blessed powers, namely the angels. We declare there is “no measure to the majesty of Your great holiness.” The prayer then goes on to state the entire history of salvation, beginning with the creation of humankind when God “formed man by tasking dust from the death and, stamping Your own image on him, O God, had placed him in a paradise of delights.”
So, the prayer indicates that God, after He had created inanimate things (i.e., the earth and all other things), used that very creation to form man by infusing it with His breath. This indicates that all things are joined in a miraculous manner. This supports the more recent ideas that scientists have hypostasized about the universe and all living things.
Basil then offers this prayer to God:
You did not utterly turn away from Your creature whom You had made, O gracious Lord. You did not forget the work of Your hands but devised for him a salvation through regeneration coming from Your Christ Himself.
The regeneration that comes from Christ that St. Basil mentions is, of course, achieved when we cooperate with God and strive to become more like Jesus – when we truly embrace personal transformation. Theosis, this spiritual process of becoming a spiritual person like Jesus, is what the journey of life is all about. We are here on this earth to “learn” how to be truly spiritual as well as material beings – to learn how to be a child of God, a person like Jesus.
St. Basil then, later in the prayer, asserts something that is important, namely that
On the third day He rose again, having established the way to the resurrection of all flesh from the dead because it was not possible that the Author of Life Himself should be the victim of corruption.
This is a clear declaration of our faith that Jesus is truly God Himself Who became incarnate as a human for the sake of revealing to us how to live this earthly life and come to a deeper union with Him. The purpose of human life is to come to a deeper union with our Creator-God. Do you understand this to be the purpose of your life?