Between
Word and Eucharist
10. Monasticism
shows in a special way that life is suspended between two poles: the Word of
God and the Eucharist. This means that even in its eremitical forms, it is
always a personal response to an individual call and, at the same time, an
ecclesial and community event.
The Starting
point for the monk is the Word of God, a Word who calls, who invites, who
personally summons, as happened to the Apostles. When a person is touched by
the Word obedience is born, that is, the listening which changes life. Every
day the monk is nourished by the bread of the Word. Deprived of it, he is as
though dead and has nothing left to communicate to his brothers and sisters
because the Word is Christ, to whom the monk is called to be conformed.
Even while he
chants with his brothers the prayer that sanctifies time, he continues his
assimilation of the Word. The very rich liturgical hymnody, of which all the
Churches of the Christian East can be justly proud, is but the continuation of
the Word which is read, understood, assimilated and finally sung: those hymns
are largely sublime paraphrases of the biblical text, filtered and personalized
through the individual's experience and that of the community.
Standing before
the abyss of divine mercy, the monk can only proclaim the awareness of his own radical
poverty, which immediately becomes a plea for help and a cry of rejoicing on
account of an even more generous salvation, since from the abyss of his own
wretchedness such salvation is unthinkable.(27) This is why the plea
for forgiveness and the glorification of God form a substantial part of
liturgical prayer. The Christian is immersed in wonder at this paradox, the
latest of an infinite series, all magnified with gratitude in the language of
the liturgy: the Immense accepts limitation; a virgin gives birth; through
death, he who is life conquers death forever; in the heights of heaven, a human
body is seated at the right hand of the Father.
The Eucharist is
the culmination of this prayer experience, the other pole indissolubly bound to
the Word, as the place where the Word becomes Flesh and Blood, a heavenly
experience where this becomes an event.
In the Eucharist,
the Church's inner nature is revealed, a community of those summoned to the
synaxis to celebrate the gift of the One who is offering and offered:
participating in the Holy Mysteries, they become
"kinsmen"(28) of Christ, anticipating the experience of
divinization in the now inseparable bond linking divinity and humanity in
Christ.
But the Eucharist
is also what anticipates the relationship of men and things to the heavenly
Jerusalem. In this way it reveals its eschatological nature completely: as a
living sign of this expectation, the monk continues and brings to fulfillment
in the liturgy the invocation of the Church, the Bride who implores the
Bridegroom's return in a maranatha constantly repeated, not only in words, but
with the whole of his life.
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