himself and what is his own in the prayer of the Church. . . . What , then, gives this chief, truly ‘consummate’ prayer of the liturgy its unity, transforms it into that whole, in and through which we affirm that this sacrament of sacraments is accomplished? The Church has answered this first and fundamental question literally from the first day of her existence by naming not only this prayer itself but also the entire liturgy with one word. This word is eucharist, thanksgiving. . . . The Church lives in thanksgiving; it is the air she breathes. Let us listen and, to the measure of our acceptance of this thanksgiving, we shall grasp, and not by reason alone but with our entire being, that here and only here, only in this knowledge/thanksgiving, occurs our entrance into the sole true—for it is of God—freedom. It is the freedom that the Holy Spirit . . . grants both as our breath, our royal nobility, and as power and perfection, fullness and beauty of life, or better still, life in abundance.” Italics Schmemann’s.
78. Bieler and Schottroff, Eucharist, 96, 104, 107, 109: “The economy of grace is about an exchange of gifts in which not accumulation but spending is the primary action, and in which is established an order of gratuitous wasting and not of calculation. . . . Thus the act of thanksgiving is intimately connected with the acknowledgment of God as the giver of life in its very basic physical sense. . . . The appreciation of the givenness of life as it is expressed in this kind of prayer acknowledges the limits to total accumulation and ‘thingification’ or ‘commodification’ of human productivity and natural resources. . . . What is given to me is not earned by me; it is not my exclusive possession. The gift rather refers back to the giver and the relationship it constitutes. . . . When we give thanks to God as the giver of life we reject the invisible mechanisms that come with the fetish character of goods.” Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 321: “Oh, when you think of God, never forget that he does not have the least understanding about money.”
79. Cf. John 4:34.
80. See Schmemann, For the Life of the World, 25, 37, 55, 87.
81. Cf. Rom 12:1.
82. Jenson, Triune God, 67 n. 16.
83. American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, 2nd ed., s.v. “kwel-1”: “Greek telos, ‘completion of the cycle,’ consummation, perfection, end, result.”
84. The host (Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “host, n.4”) is both host and guest (Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “host, n.2”).
85. A reader of Kierkegaard may be tempted to write “existentially.”
86. Meyendorff, Christ in Eastern Christian Thought, 77: “The hypostasis is not the product of nature: it is that in which nature exists, the very principle of its existence. Such a conception of hypostasis . . . implies the existence of a fully human existence, without any limitation, ‘enhypostatized’ in the Word, who is a divine hypostasis. This conception assumes that God, as personal being, is not totally bound to his own nature; the hypostatic existence is flexible, ‘open’; it admits the possibility of divine acts outside of the nature (energies) and implies that God can personally and freely assume a fully human existence while remaining God, whose nature remains completely transcendent.” Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 182: “Think of an arrow flying, as is said, with the speed of an arrow. Imagine that it for an instant has an impulse to want to dwell on itself, perhaps in order to see how far it has come, or how high it is soaring above the earth, or how its speed compares with the speed of another arrow that is also flying with the speed of an arrow—in that same second the arrow falls to the ground.”
87. Barth, CD 1/2, 346, 348, 355, 356–57: “The name of Jesus Christ creates the Christian religion. . . . We have to think of [the Christian religion] in the same way as we think of our own existence and that of the world, as a reality which is to be and is created by Jesus Christ yesterday and today and tomorrow. Apart from the act of its creation by the name of Jesus Christ, which like creation generally is a creatio continua, and therefore apart from the Creator, it has no reality. . . . There never was a man Jesus as such apart from the eternal reality of the Son of God. . . . The human nature of Jesus Christ has no hypostasis of its own, we are told. It has it only in the Logos. The same is true, therefore, of the earthly-historical life of the Church and the children of God, and therefore of the Christian religion. . . . In a secondary sense we can, of course, explain the necessity of the rise of Christianity in the light of Judaistic development and the political, spiritual and moral circumstances of the Mediterranean world in the Imperial period. But in its reality we can never explain or deduce it from that source. . . . It is this name [of Jesus Christ] which stands in relation to the world of religions, as does the sun to the earth. . . . It means that the Christian religion is snatched from the world of religions and the judgment and sentence pronounced upon it, like a brand from the burning. It is not that some men are vindicated as opposed to others, or one part of humanity as opposed to other parts of the same humanity. It is that God Himself is vindicated as opposed to and on behalf of all men and all humanity.”
88. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “sacrifice, adj.1”: “Etymology: < Latin sacrificus, < sacri- , sacer sacred (sacra neuter plural, sacrifices) + -ficus : see –fic suffix”; s.v. “-fic, suffix”: “Repr. Latin -ficus ‘-making, -doing’ ( < weakened root of facere to make, do), forming adjs.” “Sacrifice” thus signifies “making sacred or holy.”
89. “Is this Brazilian woman an actual, living, flesh-and-blood human being, a woman with a name and address? I mean, do you know this woman, have you met her, have you talked with her? Because if she is and you have—how dare you tell her story?! What gives you the right to steal her narrative voice? What gives you the right to objectify her? Frankly, I find it offensive and demeaning that you would presume to represent her here, to commodify her, to force her into this work and force us to become voyeurs with you!” “There is no answer that I—or anyone—could articulate to resolve such questions. Everything would be so much simpler, if I could simply answer that I have made it all up. But something like this, someone like this, something so exceptional, so contrary to the demographics of ‘immigration trends,’ cannot be made up. If these are my words (and, of course, in a litigious world of property claims and rights, one could argue that case), it is my prayer that, by the time another day of hard work is done, they will have at least stopped being ‘mine.’ ‘Is all this, then, fictive? Is she a symbol of something?’ If she is a ‘symbol,’ she is a non-representational—an iconic—one, or at least this is my prayer. And, if she is ‘fictive,’ she exceeds fiction, the way every saint, Catherine of Siena, for example, exceeds not only her story, but all the stories of the saints.”
1
The Root from Which They Spring
Introductions
Take off your old coat and roll up your sleeves,
Life is a hard road to travel, I believe.90
I have been a university teacher for about a third of a century. My area of presumed expertise is theology.
