Church as Eucharistic Community

Church as Eucharistic Community

by Metropolitan Anthony Bloom ( http://masarchive.org/Sites/texts/1988-03-04-1-E-E-T-EW02-002ChurchAsEucharisticCommunity.html )
Forum talk at Pushkin House 4 March, 1988

Some years ago on a similar occasion Archbishop Alexis van der Mensbrugge said to me: 'I can't understand how it is: I am a learned theologian and I need a lot of preparation before I give a talk. You know nothing and you are always prepared to talk.’ And he left the question open. Well, this is the situation at present. I am not going to speak on Bishop John's subject, but I want to say something about the Church as a eucharistic community, because it is a term which is very widely used and which I believe is fraught with great risks and leading to great misunderstandings. Partly as a result of the theology of St Sergius in Paris, partly because of the growth of the practice of frequent Communion in the parishes, the term of eucharistic community has come to mean in the minds of most people that the Church can be defined as the gathered community around the eucharistic celebration. And up to a point this is true. The Church is the only body in the world that is possessed of this mystery of communion of our mystical union with Christ through his Body and Blood. But this conception of the Church as a gathered community, and more especially as a community centred on one of the sacraments of the Church, has, to my mind, serious consequences and very unsatisfactory ones.

One thing is that the Church cannot be defined by any one or even by the sum total of all its sacraments. Khomyakov in one of his writings says that the Church is the only sacrament, the only mystery of the world. And all the sacraments which we find in it, all the sacramental actions, all the ministrations, are only facets of its life and existence. If in this context of Khomyakov's view we ask ourselves what the Church is, again we have got not to reject but to minimize the definition of the Church which we find in all catechisms, that the Church is a human society knit together by the community of the faith and doctrine, by the unity of the same hierarchy, by the possession of the same rules of life and the same liturgy.

A definition of this kind could be applied to any church or any organized body. It does not speak of the nature of the Church, not any more than the description of a cathedral seen from the outside or even of its architecture, iconography, music, within, can give is the slightest idea of what really happens in it, because what happens in it is an encounter face to face between the Living God and living souls. What happens within it is the dynamic action of the Living God transforming and transfiguring human beings into beings that belong simultaneously to the earth and to heaven, to time and to eternity.

If we want to understand what the Church is in its nature and essence, we must realize that the Church is a body simultaneously and equally human and divine. And the same way in which the Gospel teaches us that the fullness of the Godhead abided in the flesh in Christ, in the same way the plenitude of God is present in the Church. It is human in us. It is also human in our Lord Jesus Christ, in a different way and yet in a similar manner. In us the Church is human as a body of people who have given themselves to God and whom God has received.

St Ephraim of Syria defines the Church as the crowd of repentant sinners - sinners indeed, but repentant in the true sense of the word, not bewailing their sinfulness, but sinners who have turned away from themselves, from all that is godless, alien to God, whose gaze is fixed on the Living God and who are moving Godward. In us the Church is made of sinners but not of sinners orphaned in the world, abandoned of God, estranged from Him, but of sinners who are accepted by God as adopted children - yet with a difference with ordinary human adoption. In a family when there is a child born in the family and an adopted child, their status is different. The sense in which they are children of the family is very often perceived both by the child and by the parents. There is a contrast between the adopted child and the child born to the parents. This is different in the Church, in the sense that we enter into it as strangers. We are received by an act of God which is an adoption. And yet, to use a phrase, so beautiful and daring of Iranaeus of Lyons, united to the Only-begotten Son by the power of the Holy Spirit to God, we become in our togetherness and our unity with Christ, the only-begotten son of God, vocationally, not yet perfectly, in a way which is incomplete and passes through stages of loyalty, faithfulness and unfaithfulness and falling away, and yet which cannot be taken away from us.

And in Christ, true God but also true man, we can see what a man is in the fullness of this word, the only true man, because to be true man means to be perfectly, truly human and perfectly united with God. It is only in our unity with God that we acquire our true and full human quality. We are all, as far as we are separated from God to a greater or lesser degree, by intention, by sin, by slackness or forgetfulness, we are all subhuman.

And so within the Church we can see two things. We can see true, perfect, fulfilled humanity in the Son of God who has become the Son of Man, in whom the fullness of God abides in the flesh, and we can see humanity in us, humanity in the making, a humanity which we should not really call humanity and confuse it with what our vocation is, with what human nature is called to be. And then Christ is not only true man and perfect man. He is God come into the world, the Word that has taken flesh, the Living God in our midst, Emmanuel, our Saviour, Jesus.

And so even on this level of humanity through the presence of Christ, inalienable from us, one of us - doesn't He say after his resurrection to the women: 'Go and tell Peter and my brothers?’ Yes, his brothers we are, and his sisters in humanity. The fullness of God is present, but not only in and through Christ. The Holy Spirit was given to the Church, and each of us becomes the dwelling-place of the Holy Spirit through Chrismation, through this extension of the gift of Pentecost throughout the ages.

And again we are not simply temples of the Holy Spirit - and the expression is scriptural; it belongs to St Paul. The presence of the Holy Spirit in us is not simply an indwelling which might give us a sense that He and us are separate, that we are, as it were, only a vessel containing his presence. He pervades us like fire pervades iron, like warmth pervades a human body. He pervades us in spirit, in soul and in the flesh, singly, and He lives and acts sovereignely within the Church.

And again if what St Iranaeus of Lyons said in the quotation which I indicated, we are the sons and daughters of the Living God, the fullness of God with the totality of humanity, this is the Church, a body, an organism equally, simultaneously fully human and divine in the making in each of us, already fulfilled in Christ, already revealed as victory in the Mother of God and in the saints. If that is the Church as seen by Khomyakov as I have tried to present it, then isn't it obvious, that one cannot reduce the Church to one situation, to the gathered community participating in the holiest meal one can conceive, because all and everything in the Church is communion with God, and all and everything in the Church is God at work, calling, saving, transforming, transfiguring each of us - and not only this but also sending us into the world, because this is another dimension of the Church which we ignore too easily because it is so easy to be the gathered community rejoicing in one another, participating in the gifts of God and separated from the rest.

St Paul — and I am using now a translation of Dr Moffatt in his rendering of St Paul's epistles - the Church is the vanguard of the Kingdom. We are people whose mother country is God's Kingdom. We are in the world, yet not of the world if we are aware of who and what we are, and we are sent to conquer this world for God to make it into the Kingdom of God.

But here again I believe we should introduce a nuance in the notion of this conquest. Secular armies, kingdoms, countries, nations conquer one another and by doing this they subdue those who have been conquered. The role of the Church, of this vanguard of the Kingdom is to penetrate into the world that is fallen away from its fullness and from God and to set it free. We are called to enter the world which is now alien to God in order to free it from all the fetters that make it a prisoner of death, of sin, of evil, of Satan. We are a liberating army. But again, as St Paul puts it, our role is that of the soldier, and a soldier must be prepared to shed his blood and to die in the service of his king and in the service, in the fulfilling of his duty. And this we can see throughout history in the missionaries that gave their lives to proclaim the Gospel, who were not only preachers of the Gospel but the very message of the Gospel incarnate in persons,

The supreme missionary is perhaps St John the Baptist, of whom St Mark's Gospel, repeating the words of Isaiah, says: ‘a voice shouting in the desert’, not a man that shouts the words of God. He is God's voice mediated by human being. He is the message. There is nothing in him which is not the message. Nothing is left in him but that. And that is what we should learn. And when in our Churches we try to develop a spirit of community, to be the gathered community and rejoice in our closeness and in our participation in the divine mysteries, if that is all we do, we betray our essential function; we are not what we are called to be.

The Church is sent into the world to sanctify it, to make it holy, to make of it the first fruits of the Kingdom that will come, when the Lord will come again and reign supreme. In that context I want to go back to the expression of the eucharistic community. It is the word eucharistic that so often beguiles us, because the word Eucharist has come to mean for us that particular celebration of the Last Supper of the Lord. But the Greek word and its Slavonic renderings cover a much wider range of notions. I will think in Slavonic terms because I feel safer. As Archbishop Alexis pointed out, my knowledge is very limited; I feel safer. And the word blagodat in Old Slavonic means more than one thing. It means a good gift, a supremely good gift. And this supremely good gift is the gift of God to us. It is the gift of the life, the death and the resurrection and the ascension of Christ. It is the gift of himself creating the Church as I have tried to describe it. It also means gratitude in Slavonic. Indeed you probably remember the psalm in which King David says: ‘How shall I reward God for all that He has given me?’ And the answer is: ‘I shall take the cup of salvation. I will sing his praises in his courts.’ The first move of gratitude consists in accepting, receiving wholeheartedly, with a rejoicing heart, the gift of love which is given, which is offered. This is the first move of gratitude, not a word or a prayer of thanksgiving, but the sense of marvel, what the French would call emerveillement, the sense of ‘oh, to be loved in this way, oh the joy of it, all the wonder of it’ - that is where gratitude begins.

And then it must overflow like the cup of which the psalms speak. It must overflow in being to God all that we can be, to live in such a way that we should be a joy to him, to be such people that He could rejoice in us, feel happy that He gave his life and his death and his message to us, rejoice. I was about to say ‘console the Lord for his crucifixion by showing that He did not die in vain’, rejoice him by the fruits which his life and death and resurrection and ascension has brought to us. So the Church is the place of the supreme gift of God to us, and everything that goes with it - the sacraments indeed, and prayer, and our sonship and the condition of being daughters of God and brothers and sisters of one another and what not. But this exultation of gratitude that must break up the gathered community and send us into the world not with a theoretical message collected or learned by heart in the Gospel or in other parts of the Scriptures, no, a message received, a message that has made us into living beings from corpses that we were, or if you prefer, an image of C. S. Lewis, transformed statues that we were, into living beings, share with others something that is of a supreme importance to us, that has made all the difference to what we are, what we live for, what we long for. We should be people who are so entranced by our encounter with God, by our integration into this mysterious body which is the Church, that we should unable to keep our peace. We should be bubbling over with this experience in the way in which we do bubble over when we have read a book that has entranced us, seen a film, heard a concert or met a person and turned to everyone saying, ‘Have you read it, have you seen it, have you met him or her?' Are we like this? Then there would be no such thing as Sunday Christians and then a whole week of drab existence, because it is in this week that we would be the Christians that we are to be. Coming to church, praying together would be a joy unutterable, communion with God through prayer and sacrament would be a new life poured into us. But this life should overflow and reach everyone whom we meet, not in the form of pious discourse, but in the shining of a life which is an act of gratitude to God, an effort, a longing to make Him rejoice in his death upon the cross because of the fruits it has borne.

So that would indeed be the Church understood as eucharistic community, but not the kind of eucharistic community of which one speaks all the time and which is a community gathered upon itself, forgetful of the fact that the whole world is dying and that we are called to be the messengers of Christ, the salt that prevents corruption, the light that dispels darkness. And you could find so many other images in the Old and the New Testament and indeed so many examples in the life of the Church throughout the centuries of people who have been all these things.

And now I want to go back for a moment to this eucharistic community as we think of it all too often as the gathered community and its structures. The gathered community as we see it round the Eucharist, which is only - I repeat it - one of the sacraments of the Church but not the whole of it. One does not become a Christian through the Eucharist but through Baptism. One does not receive the Holy Spirit through the Eucharist but through the extension of the gift of Pentecost. One does not enter into marriage through the Eucharist alone, and so forth.

But there is more to it. Those who have made the eucharistic celebration into the pattern of the Church have been instrumental in creating a church which is in a way false in its structures, a church which is built hierarchically according to liturgical schemes. The lay people, men and women, then an ordained priesthood, then an episcopacy, and then the gathering of the bishops. And if we are logical in our building, then we must imagine -which is a heresy against the Church - that at the summit of this pyramid there must be someone who represents the unity of the Church. Well, I have used a rough word by saying ‘a heresy against the Church’, but this is exactly what I think of the position of the pope as the vicar of Christ. There can be no vicar of Christ, because the summit of the Church can be occupied by no one but the Lord Jesus Christ himself. Moreover, no one is a celebrant of any of the sacraments but the Lord Jesus Christ. No one can fulfil, perform a sacrament otherwise than the Holy Spirit. No apostolic succession, no ordination, no consecration can give a human being power to take the bread and the wine, creatures of God, free from human enslavement, and force them to become the Body of Christ and the Blood of Christ. And no one by dint of any ordination or consecration can force God into the bread of the Eucharist or into the wine of the Chalice. And this is a statement which I know is hard and which I am prepared to support.

But the danger of this eucharistic, liturgical structuring of a theology of the Church results in structures of power, structures of submission and enslavement. And this is exactly the contrary of what the Church is called to be. I told you earlier that the vocation of the Church is to be a body of people that set the created world free from all forms of enslavement. The Church knows nothing about power. God in Christ has never been a manifestation of power but of authority. And the difference is important. Power means the ability to force people to do or to say or to act in one way or another. Authority is the ability of a person, through example, through the shining of personality, through words that convey meaning and life, to change the attitude of people.

You remember how when Christ spoke to the crowd a number of his listeners turned away and went. And Christ said to his disciples: 'Are you also going to leave me?’ And Peter said to him: 'Where should we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life.' It was not words by which Christ described eternal life. There is not one passage in the Gospel in which eternal life is described. It is not a way in which He called people into eternal life. It was words which reached people at the very core of their being and awakened eternity in them, made them partakers of eternal life now, not in any kind of mechanical, even sacramental way, but by calling out of the human chaos the image of God and the divine quality of man.

And so it is important for us to free ourselves from this imagery of the eucharistic community built as a liturgical function that may be small in a parish, vaster in a diocese, far too big, not too great, in a patriarchate, and ultimately a betrayal of its very idea if we think of the Church universal with one head that represents Christ. No one represents Christ. Christ is the only Head of the Church, the only Shepherd, the only Lord, the only Saviour.

And if you look further at the structures of oppression which this causes, yes indeed one can speak of structures of oppression in the Church, because if you think - and I am speaking of the Orthodox Church; I am not touching anyone else although I believe it applies perfectly well to all human bodies, Church or not - when you look at the Church, you see power at work, the superior overpowering the inferior, the inferior only in the hierarchical scheme, not because he is spiritually less, not because he is unworthy, not because he is not a saint, but because he does not occupy a hierarchical situation. Orders can be given. Orders must be fulfilled.

And then on another level, the situation of different types of people, the fact that we have forgotten, practically - I am not speaking of theologians who write about it; I am speaking of the reality of the Church - we have forgotten what the universal priesthood of the laity is. I was described once at a youth meeting to which clergy were not allowed to come as a layman in clerical orders. Well, a priest is a layman in clerical orders, but a lay person has got a sacred function, because all Christians by vocation are people who must sanctify, make holy the world in which we live and transform it into a city of man vast deep and holy enough for its first citizen to be called Jesus, the Son of God become the Son of Man. I have no time to enlarge on it. There is a great deal one should reflect on, about the situation of women in the Church, the way in which their status has been gradually debased and ruined in a way that was alien to the early centuries, gradually developed into something it was never meant to be in the Bible or in the Church and has resulted in canonical statements or in practices that should be rethought, revised and brought back to their original purity and wholeness.

That will explain to you what I mean by eucharistic community, and I hope that what I have said about the eucharistic community being indeed the gathered community, but a community that explodes into being the vanguard of the Kingdom, the scattered community being almost more essential than the gathered one. If you remember the words, for instance, of St Justin Martyr, who said that it could be enough for a Christian to be baptized, receive the gift of the Holy Spirit and Communion once in his life, it could be enough, because the gifts of God cannot be taken away, and what is given once is ours for ever. So if we were deprived of Communion throughout our lives, we might be deprived of a joy, but not of our oneness with Christ. So we could receive Communion once and go into the world, as so many martyrs have done, as so many missionaries have done in olden times. And unless we recapture this dimension, we betray the world, we betray God, we make useless the Incarnation and the death of Christ and his Resurrection.

Questions and Answers

How would you correlate the cosmic dimension of the Church with the intensely personal and mission-orientated dimension?

I think that God has created nothing inert and dead. We see matter around us as though it was lacking the kind of life which is ours, and obviously it is not living our intellectual or emotional life. But God has not created anything which cannot relate to Him. He has called, in an act of love, into existence everything that exists, including the material world. Moreover, the Incarnation tells us that it is not only the spirit of man or the psyche of man but the very body of man that can be united to the Godhead. Christ's Incarnation is not an act of God by which God lived within a body that remained alien, unrelated to the divine presence. St Maxim the Confessor tells us that in his very body Jesus was immortal because his very body, his very flesh was pervaded with divinity. And it is only by taking upon himself our mortality that He can die, not because there is in him anything that belongs to mortality. And mortality of course is clearly marked in our body and flesh.

I can imagine therefore that all the created world, all things material, beginning with the smallest atom and the greatest galaxy could recognize itself transfigured in glory in the body of the Incarnation, because this body of the Incarnation is in no way different from any material particle of the created world. So that in Him the whole world could recognize itself glorious and having attained to the extreme perfection of its vocation.

And this also is important, I believe, for our realistic attitude to sacraments. The bread and the wine of the Eucharist, the waters of Baptism, the chrism, even the words which we pronounce in prayer, can be filled with divine presence. And in the service of reception of converts we say: 'Dost thou believe that in the mystical forms of bread and wine the believer participates to the Body and Blood of Christ?’ God has not created the material world in order to annihilate it, to make it into something different, not any more than that in the Incarnation the humanity taken by Christ upon himself was made different as far as humanity is concerned from ours. It was filled with divine life but it was not made into another kind of humanity. And in the same way the bread and wine are filled with the divine presence that made them into the Body and Blood of Christ. The Holy Spirit fills by his grace the waters of Baptism, relates to the chrism. But in each sacrament the way in which the Godhead, either of Christ or of the Holy Spirit, is united to the materiality, the material support of the sacrament, is different. We can say that the bread and the wine are the Body and Blood of Christ. We cannot say that in a container where we have holy chrism the holy (tape turns over here)... We should think and take stock. There is a very great variety of ways in which God unites himself to the materiality of this world or, as I said before, even to the words, words of prayer, words of command. 

When Christ says to the sea and to the wind....... our words when we exchange occasional remarks. They are loaded with the divine power. A blessing pronounced is not simply an act of good will. It conveys blessing, and so forth. And so I do believe that a day will come when the words of St Paul will be truly fulfilled in a realistic, concrete way and that God shall be all in all, all things created being pervaded by God, who will still be beyond all things created but the created things will be filled and made alive in a new way by the divine presence.

How to answer people who say that it is possible to meet God in precisely the way that you describe but the Church is not meaningful. How would you answer people who say that whether individually or collectively we can all plug into Jesus, or however you want to put it?

I do believe that God relates to every creature He has called into existence in an act of love. The act of creation is a moment when God calls out of nought the innumerable beings that exist or potentially, virtually will exist and gives himself, offers himself to them as love. And I do not believe that any one who says that he has met God in one way or another is alien to the knowledge of God. We could not have the notion of God or any experience of God unless we had met him. We may have touched the fringe of his garment, we may have met him face to face, we may have met him as Moses in the burning bush. It doesn't matter. But no one who says that I have met Him and this brought me to my knees in an act of adoration knows anyone but the real God. The word God in English comes from a pre-Germanic, Gothic root which means one before whom one prostrates in adoration. And this is also one of the derivations suggested about the word theos in Greek. This is a primal experience and no one can have this experience unless he has actually met God. Now if what I said makes any sense at all, I would say that this kind of meeting is a personal encounter. But the human race, and indeed the cosmos, is a whole. One does not relate to God individually, apart from you and in total indifference to you. Relating to God means communing with him and communing with one another in him. And the Church as I see it, as I tried to convey it, is the body of those people who are aware of it, who are in possession to a degree that may be small but real, of this experience. And the Church is a vision within time and within the limits of a distorted and sinful world, of what is to be, in the end, the oneness of all things with and in God. In that sense, whether you believe in the Church or not, to the extent to which you are with God, to the extent to which you are in God, you participate in it. You may not have any notion of it and yet somehow belong to it. I remember a few months ago two persons who come regularly to church, who have been coming year after year, asked me ‘What is our place in the liturgy, in the services? We are not Orthodox. Are we simply onlookers, alien to what happens?’ And my answer, for better or worse, was: 'To the extent to which you are immersed in God, to the extent to which you are worshipping, adoring God and communing with Him in prayer, you are in the Liturgy, while any Orthodox who stands there hoping that this endless service performed by this boring clergy will come to an end sooner or later, however Orthodox he is by baptism and what not, has nothing to do with this service. He is totally outside of the Church at that moment, I remember also Bishop Nikolai Velimirovich being asked how many Orthodox have you got in your diocese, and he said, ‘I don’t know how many are in a condition of prayer, adoration and communion with God. Today this one is. Tomorrow he is not. At the moment when he is in adoration, communion, worship, unity with God, he is in the Church. The moment he is not - and I am obviously not speaking of concentrating one's mind on the event but being with all one's being - well, he falls out of it, and that is that’.

The historical role of the Orthodox Church. (Alexander Nevsky?)

I am not a historian, but Father Michael is giving a talk every fortnight on the history of the Russian Church in the last thousand years...

If you overemphasize the missionary aspect, don't you run the risk of narrowing the Liturgy on Sunday to some sort of instrumental thing that strengthens you for mission instead of the Liturgy being, let's say, the marrying of heaven and earth?

May I draw a parallel which is on my level of intellection? If you meet the one person on earth whom you love with your whole heart and after an encounter that may last minutes or days you go out about your business - it may not be missionary work, it may be the work of an engineer, of a doctor or anyone else - don't you think that everyone meeting you will see the shining and the glory of love and of the encounter in your eyes and your face, hear it in your voice and see that you do all the things which you might have done otherwise in a way which is totally transfigured? I think that could apply mutatis mutandis to the Eucharist. It is an encounter which in itself is self-sufficient. It is an encounter which is enthralling, which is a glory in itself, which is a miracle and a wonder. And indeed whenever it will happen it will have total, ultimate significance. And yet it will overflow in everything else. It is not an event like a meal, which you take and comes to an end. It is an entering into your life, mind, heart, will, body, your whole self, of the divine presence and the awareness of the divine love given you and of your response. And the whole of your life can be, if I may quote an atheist, Garaudy, who was the secretary-general of the communist party in France, it will make of all your life a dance. He wrote his biography called To Dance One's Life. Well, that's it. Is it instrumental or is it not? Yes it is instrumental, but not in the sense in which a little event that passes is an event that continues, because you receive communion, but you remain in communion. If you drop out of it, it is another business. But it is a quite different proposition. It is the miracle of entering into communion ever deeper, ever deeper, with a newness that has no end, in the same way in which a love relationship, a friendship is totally new every time and yet is the same. You know, as the French saying has it, ‘I love you infinitely more today, although I did not love you any less yesterday.’ And that is true. Logically it may be absurd, but experientially it is true. And that applies to the Eucharist and to the gathered and scattered community. Yes there is a joy of this meeting. There is a joy in meeting those people who together with you enter into this communion, but there is the same joy which the apostles had after the Last Supper and went in all the corners of the earth carrying with them all there was. You know there is a French writer called Estonie (?) one of whose characters says: ‘You must realize that to part doesn't matter unless one abandons one another.’ And Staretz Parfeny of Kiev said, ‘When two persons love one another truly, it becomes unnecessary for them ever to meet again’. Indeed none of us is capable of that kind of perception, but it shows how far it may go.

Now there is one point at which the Eucharist is instrumental. It is in the sacraments of initiation, that is in the three acts that make you into a Christian: Baptism, the gift of the Holy Spirit, whatever form it takes - it took the form of laying on of hands; it takes now the form of anointing with the chrism - and the first Eucharist. This grafts you totally into Christ, fills you with the Holy Spirit, establishes your relationship with God and in God. At that moment it is instrumental in the sense that without it the act is unfulfilled, you are not yet a Christian, but only then. And then it becomes a joy and a possibility. It is a possibility and a joy which is strangely balanced between our heaviness and our perceptiveness, because St Symeon the New Theologian says that if we receive Communion without tears — and he did not mean obviously a face covered with tears, but a heart crying - we may not have received Communion. Communion may have passed us by. And he adds something which is tremendously serious, when he says that as God's Body and Blood cannot be given and wasted, if you approach it that way, God retires from the bread and wine and you receive bread and wine with the degree of reverence you can, but not more. At the other extreme there is a story of a saint called Pafnuty Borovsky, who was a contemporary of Johann Grozny (Ivan the Terrible) and the teacher and guide of Joseph of Volokolamsk, who played an enormous role in the formation of the Russian religious piety in his time. Pafnuty Borovsky had retired as a solitary. And one day a Liturgy was to be celebrated and there was no priest, and he was asked to celebrate. He celebrated the Liturgy, received Communion, and then he said to the brethren: 'Don't ask me ever to celebrate again even if you are in dire need. I could not be faced and experience what I have experienced and remain alive.’ So that is the other extreme. The same piety that calls millions of people, including saints, to frequent communion - John of Kronstadt received Communion daily, celebrated the Liturgy daily - he called people to frequent and possibly daily Communion, and Pafnuty Borovsky and others said 'No, I can't do it. I can receive it once, and then days, weeks, months must pass before I can approach it again. So we should be very supple in our appraisal of things. We can neither call someone to Communion nor debar someone from Communion. His or her spiritual father may have something to say, but ultimately it will be God's decision.

Do I understand your question to mean that can we speak of loving if our love is imperfect? (Yes)

For one thing, I do believe that the word love is a very complex one and we should be very careful about using it too easily, because in normal speech we would say 'I love strawberries with cream’ at one extreme and we will say 'I love God', Also within the various gradations of love, love may be a joy or a calamity for the poor object of it. There is a passage in Isaiah, 58^th chapter I think, in which it says 'Set free those whom you have enslaved.' And I have said more than once to parents, 'Remember that that applies to you and your children, to friends, to spouses. Be careful that your love should not be a prison out of which the beloved one longs to escape.' There is also another aspect of love which is described by C. S. Lewis in Screwtape Letters. The old devil who tries to instruct his young nephew in the art of being a proper devil, is puzzled. He said 'I can't understand what our enemy, which is God, means when he says that he loves his creatures. He loves his creatures, he says, and he leaves them free. When I say that I love you, what I mean to say is that I want to possess you, I want to devour you, to digest you so that nothing be left of you except what has become me.’ Well, here are examples of a string of types of love. But on the other hand in what we call love in normal speech with sincerity, indeed there are gradations, but in each gradation there is a spark of truth. And we can say 'I love you within my own limits. I don't love you as God does. I don't love you as I will love you later, but I love you with all the heart I have.' The only thing is that if we love, not possessively, not in a predatory way, but love with all the generosity of which we are capable, love by seeing in the other one someone who must be made free by our love, must be made himself as perfectly as possible, even at the cost of forgetting ourselves, to become nothing but the servant of the beloved one. Even if we are very mature but are directed in that way, we can say 'Yes, I love', in the same way in which a little fire is not a beacon and yet it is as much fire as the Burning Bush. The quality is different. The degree, the extension, the value is different. But unless we learn to love a little we will not learn to love a lot. On the other hand, if we allow ourselves to love with all the heart we have, even if it is a very minute little heart, very selfish and very afraid of opening itself and giving itself, love will soften it and widen it, and all the time it will grow wider, deeper, until it becomes capable of containing not only our human love with an inspiration from God, but divine love running through it and reaching God's creatures. I am afraid I am speaking of things I don't know about, because who of us can say that he has got an experience of divine love, but I have seen it in others, and that is what I feel.

You spoke about structures of dominance and subordination which should be loosened. Is there any part for ordinary lay people in that process?

I’ll give you probably a cynical reply. I have never heard of anyone in power willingly giving up power, except perhaps the dictator Sulla in Rome, who, having been in total power, where he had achieved what he thought was good for Rome, resigned all power and went back to plant his cabbages in his garden, as Roman history teaches us. But apart from this, very rare are those who simply abandon power. On the other hand, rebellion and snatching power is not a solution either, because the people who do that take power. There was in Russia at a certain moment a saying that capitalism is the oppression of the many by the few, and communism is the oppression of the few by the many. Well, this is this interplay of power at the two extremes. So that what we must learn are several things. The ministers of the Church: patriarchs, bishops, priests, deacons and whoever else imagines that he is on the structure of the Church without whom nothing will stand, must learn that power is totally alien to the notion of the Church. Christ has taught his disciples: Let him who wishes to be first, be last, him who wishes to be a leader, let him be a servant. This is the way in which the Church must be built and must live, short of betraying its internal vocation and structure. On the other hand, while people in power, let us say, unlearn to wield power and replace it by authority, that is by an example, a personality, and words that reach the hearts of men and bring into them the newness of the Gospel, the laity must play a role partly by telling those who imagine that they are in power that it is not true. There is far too much readiness on the part of the laity to be bleating sheep and never confront their parish priest or their bishop with things which are true. And I do not mean insult them, but telling them in a brotherly way. I tried to do that once in the army without much success. We had a young lieutenant who imagined that he was in command of all and everything, and he was the object of universal ridicule. I felt terribly sorry for him, so I went to his office, knocked at the door, stood at attention, and he said 'Forward’ so I marched and stood still, and he said ‘What have you got to say?’ I said to him ‘I want to tell you that you are making a fool of yourself and everyone knows that you are one by the way in which you behave.' He looked at me and said 'Get out of here before you are under arrest.' But the thing is that a bishop or a priest cannot put you under arrest. So in that sense you are safe. On the other hand - and that I think is important - anyone in the Church has a right to be helped not to be in the wrong. Anyone including the patriarch has a right to be told 'Look, what you are doing is a mistake. What you are trying to be is a caricature of what you are as a person and the beauty of Christ's image in you. We all have a right to be helped. So we must take that into account. The next thing is that there is such a thing as the universal priesthood of the laity. And if you reflect on what this universal priesthood is, you may easily realize from the Bible that the function of the priest is to detach from the fallen and distorted world in which we live what can be detached, brought back to God and sanctified. When we perform sacraments, we take a piece of bread and a cup of wine that were born in the monstrosity of the fallen world, but we take it and bring it back to God. They becomes his own through an act of faith of ours, because we are his own and it is our function to do this. And we bring it as an offering. And we bring upon everything which we can bring to him - human relationship, love, objects which we bless, and so on, his divine grace, making them already in this fallen world to partake of the ultimate victory of the Kingdom. They are already of the Kingdom and they can convey to us what we can no longer possess because we are fallen. So the universal vocation of the Christian is to bring back to God, in all the walks of life which are his what is of this world and sanctify it. As far as we are concerned, we must — to use the words of the Prayer Book - bring to God as a perfect offering our souls and bodies, our whole selves to be his, and through that everything which we touch can be sacred or made sacred or left to be secular; in other words profaned, because there is nothing which is profane by nature. And then when we think of our function, we have a function in common with Christ as far as his humanity is concerned, if I may put it that way. Although He is the High Priest of all creation, He is also a layman in this creation. He is a man among mankind. And what was He. He was King, Priest and Prophet. We think of kings as beings who rule, who command and wield power. But if you think about what either St John Chrysostom or Basil the Great says somewhere, - he says 'Anyone can rule. Only a king can give his life for his subjects.’ Christ is our King, and He gave his life for his subjects, for us. And each of us, to the extent to which he is an extension through space and time of the incarnate presence of Christ, is called to be a king on these terms, give one's life to those who need life eternal. A prophet is not someone who foresees and predicts the future.

Hosea, I think, says that a prophet is one with whom God shares his thoughts, who, sharing the thoughts of God, proclaims them to others. To prophecy means to speak for God, not instead of him, but to be his mouthpiece, a voice shouting in the desert. And lastly priests, not in the sacramental sense in which an ordained priest is, but priests in the sense which I indicated in the very beginning, people who make all things holy by sanctifying them in the act of bringing them to God. That is the universal priesthood of all believers. It includes equally, without any nuance, men and women. It has no discrimination in that respect. And then there is the ministerial priesthood. In the ministry of the laity we bring ourself as an offering to God, our whole self. In the ministerial celebration Christ, in and through us, brings to God his own life and death and descent into hell and resurrection and final victory in the ascension. And that is a dimension which is different, because in the Proskomedia, the service of preparation, the priest prepares the Lamb, a cube of bread which will be consecrated. At a certain moment he cuts it crosswise and says 'The Lamb of God is slain for the salvation of the world.’ Now at that moment it is a crucial challenge to the priest, because if He is not at one with Christ, if it is not his own crucifixion, he accepts, he is one of the crucifiers on Calvary. And every priest should remember that, that if you are not in Christ, being slain, crucified, given, you are a murderer. There is no other alternative. And in that sense the priestly ministry is Christ's ministry only enacted by the priest. I remember what a young priest told me, that he was celebrating the Liturgy, and a moment came when terror took him in its grip. He felt he could not continue, it was impossible. Being who he is he cannot pronounce the sacred words of the Liturgy. And he turned and said, 'Lord, you are the High Priest. Do it while I only say the words.’ And he told me that at that moment he had to step back because someone stood between him and the Holy Table. And he continued to celebrate. He said every word of the Liturgy, but he knew that he was not the celebrant. It was the Lord Jesus Christ, who in his mercy took over and included him in the celebration but did not put the unbearable onus of it on his shoulders.