Parish the Thought
Upon arrival, I joined the parishioners in the confession line. I partook of the custom of bowing to my co-penitents just prior to approaching the confessor, which I am told is particular to Russian tradition. This soborny gesture attuned me to the sacrifice to come qua reparation of a shattered covenant (Hebrews), reflecting on the horizontal axis what the priest’s “forgive me, brothers and sisters” effects on the virtual axis. The minister, ever simultaneously a disciple, surprised me by grace, cutting off my laundry list of depravities and meeting my willingness with Christ’s debt-surpassing gift of absolution before I could even cleave myself from and to it with my tongue. “Of Thee is the whole, and out of Thy hand have we given to Thee” (1 Chronicles 29:14) for the Kingdom’s upbuilding.
This wasabi-sharp loving-kindness almost atoned for the missed intimacy where the kiss of peace should have fallen. The event broke upon the congregation unmarked by any gesture—the priests substituted for us, just as the choir’s responses substituted for ours. I virtually alone initiated the responses from the nave but, each time I did, my neighbours—sprawled sporadically with each other like sylvan thickets—vibrated along like sympathetic strings on a baroque or folkloric organic instrument, bowed with me by the Hand of the Almighty in pneumatic resonance.
Whatever Schmemann’s misgivings about our “magical” ex opere operato technological phronema, our natural inclination towards the epiclesis as “the moment” was manifest in our timely metanias. The romance of anything thrice-repeated—let it be Amen or what thou wilt—and our mirroring of the priest’s full prostration isolated it nicely. Even if the cerebra rebel against “hocus pocus,” the viscera respond with joyful relief to such rhythmic and embodied assurances that the one-many anthropos has arrived at completion (John 19:30)—the palpable signifying the ineffable as in the anaphora. I gloss this living grimoire we are not as substitute but as epitome of how grace wholly pervades the popular work. Communion is received by the preponderance of attendees, ripening—however belatedly—the revivalist effort initiated by the Kollyvades Fathers.
From the cloud-wreathed Mosaic mountain, the penitential and individual language of the pre-communion prayer, the post-communion litany, the persistence of entreaties for protection, and other worldly-wise elements of infra-symbolic realism elicit tension with the eschatological vision of the Eucharist wherein the whole Body of Christ that we become in active-receptive participation has been sublated into the nuptial bond strong as death of mutual indwelling in the perichoretic triune Life, sharing in anticipation the martyrial Crown—no longer called servants but friends (John 15:15). Even so, the in-between (metaxic) character of dwelling in the “already but not yet”—“noli me tangere” (John 20:17)—reminds us of how the lifting of our hearts on high is not dissociative but rather liberative for the sake of accompanying our fellow sufferers, sharing His kenotic fullness and descending ascent (Ephesians 4:9), “straitened between two” (Philippians 1:23) in post-ecstatic incarnate enstasis.
