Between the first and second comings of the Lord, between the God-man and the God-universe, between the fallen and transfigured states of being, stands the Church, as a boundary and a crossing-place. And every Christian, through communion with holy things, i.e. the Eucharist, and in the communion of saints, is himself a ‘living boundary’, a place where death passes over into life.
The cosmic history of the Church is the history of a childbirth, that of the cosmos as the glorious body of deified humankind. And the Church is the divine-human womb in which this universal body, the body of the new humankind, of new men and women, is woven: The whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now,’ waiting for the moment of regeneration (Romans 8.22-23).
The ‘mysteries’ of the Church, the various aspects of the life of the Church as the sacrament of the Risen Lord, constitute the heart and the meaning of the life of the universe. Things exist only through prayers, blessings, the transformations of the Church: ‘By such means, matter that was hitherto dead and senseless conveys great miracles and receives into itself the strength of God’ (St Gregory of Nyssa, PG, XLVI, 581 B).
And the eucharistic metamorphosis is the culmination of all. St Irenaeus says that we offer the whole of nature, ‘eucharistizing’ it. And Cyril of Jerusalem says that in the offering, ‘we make a remembrance of the heaven, of the earth, of the sea, of the sun, of the moon and of the whole creation’ (Mystagogical Catecheses, V, 6).
The sap rises from the earth, the water circulates and makes fruitful, heaven is married to earth in the sun and rain, humanity toils in seedtime and harvest, the storeroom thrills with dark scent, the old grain dies in the earth and the new grain under the millstone – all so that in the end we shall have food bringing us nothing but life, that in the end the flesh of the earth may become, through our work, a chalice offered to the Spirit.
And the effect is also the cause; for from this luminous centre, from this dot of matter brought into the incandescence of the glorious Body, the fire spreads even to the rocks and the stars whose substance is present in the bread and wine; the Eucharist guards and sanctifies the world, gradually pervading with eternity the heart of things, and making ready the transformation of the world into Eucharist.
So the Church appears as the spiritual place where we are apprenticed to the Eucharistic life, where we learn what it means to be priests and kings; through the liturgy the world is revealed as transfigured in Christ, henceforth cooperating in its final metamorphosis. The Church’s cosmic mission is multiplied in the world by every liturgical person humbly exercising his kingship. It is in blessing that we are blessed.
~Olivier Clement, On Human Being: A Spiritual Anthropology
