www.byzcath.org Forums Faith & Christian Life The Christian East & West Eucharistic Adoration

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Bless me a sinner, Father Kimel!

While Cantor Joseph has presented the traditional Eastern liturgical view here, you are quite right in what you say.

The Eucharist is truly adored in the East within the context of the Divine Liturgy.

In the Ethiopian tradition, I believe, the priest actually kisses the Eucharist following the Epiclesis.

And in the classic rebuttals to Protestant overtures, the Eastern Orthodox Church emphatically affirmed that Christ in the Holy Eucharist is to be adored and worshipped!

As Byzantine Christians approach the Eucharist, they are to make one last full prostration to the ground before the Chalice. Afterwards, they are not to do any prostrations throughout the day as they have themselves become living chalices containing our Lord.

Orthodox Archbishop Kallistos Ware has also said there is no theological, versus liturgical, reason why Orthodox Christians should not show honour to our Lord in the Holy Eucharist outside of the Divine Liturgy.

But in the Eastern Catholic Churches, especially the East Slavic Churches, Eucharistic adoration is very strong, especially in the "old country."

Our New Martyrs practiced it fervently i.e. St Pavel Gojdic and St Theodore Romzha of the Ruthenians and the Ukrainians and Russians as well.

St Basil Velichkovsky reported that this became a favourite devotion of Orthodox who came into communion with Rome and who even insisted on kneeling a lot on Sundays, even after he asked them not to break the Eastern rubrics in this regard . . .

And just before Gorbachev helped bring the USSR to a long-overdue close, the story circulated about a group of Byzantine Catholic Ukrainian nuns who were dedicated to perpetual Eucharistic Adoration.

They were sentenced to death and placed on a high, frozen peak where people froze to death quickly.

Their guards returned there after three days to find the nuns sitting in a circule, singing their Eucharistic hymns and perfectly warm . . .

We also get a hint of Orthodox desire for such adoration in the Way of the Pilgrim where the Pilgrim "prays and worships" before the Holy Gifts being brought to an ill person.

Alex

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>>>The Canons to Jesus and His Most Holy Mother, the Canons of repentance and to Christ in Holy Communion, the Akathists, the prayers of the Saints, especially the Prayer of St Dmitri of Rostov - the West has nothing like these!<<<

I suppose that Novenas and litanies are the closest thing the West has in this regard.

I love to pray the Communion Akathist before Mass. It truly puts me in the correct frame of mind.

Columcille

Dear friends,

In all humility (I hope!) I would suggest that the main thing for all Christians here, East or West, to remember is that the Sunday (or daily) liturgy in which we receive the Body and Blood of our Lord is the chief and normative liturgical event in our lives. However, with all due respect to Joe's comments, the fact that Eucharistic devotion is not mentioned in Sacred Scripture is not a determining factor in my own appreciation of Eucharistic devotion. Catholic spirituality, East and West, has undergone many developments since the beginning of the Christian era and we have never been hemmed in by the literal restriction of the written Word in our practices as have some non-Catholic Christian traditions.

Having said that, this Latin Christian would never in any way consider the East to be deficient in its Eucharistic practices because they do not mirror those of the West. Why on earth would they?

For those of us who are guests on this Eastern forum, perhaps we sometimes need to be more careful in how we state our questions, not their content. We should feel free to question and ponder but always in the context of our mutual bonds in Christ.

Khrystyna

Dear Cantor Joseph,

Yes, I know you do, Big Guy!

There was much that our Lord left up to His Church to do upon reflection on His words and actions, and certainly liturgical worship is one of them.

And our liturgical heritage is also inspired by the Spirit and informs and nourishes our faith as a living experience and encounter with God and Christ.

(Now how's that for someone who didn't go to seminary? ).

I'm off on a cruise later so have a great week!

Alex

Thank you, Alex, for your thoughtful post (as all of your postings invariably are).

On this question of eucharistic adoration versus eucharistic communion, why would we want to divide that which the Fathers and Saints always keep together in catholic wholeness? The Son of God did not incarnate himself in human flesh to be an object of adoration--he came to save us from sin and bring us into the triune life of God--yet once we recognize who is present before us, we inevitably and rightly adore and worship him. "My Lord and my God!" the Apostle Thomas declared.

If the Divine Liturgy is itself a participation in the Divine Liturgy in heaven, then we will adore him in the Eucharistic elements, just as the angels and saints adore and worship him eternally at the messianic banquet.

Certainly St. John Chrysostom well understood the adoration of Christ in the Eucharist:

The oft-quoted words of St. Augustine:

And then there is the remarkable prayer of Philoxenus that I cited in my first posting to this thread.

Several years ago I had a lengthy email conversation with an Orthodox monk who was working on his doctorate at Drew University. He was quite hostile to prayer directed to the personal presence of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament. I'll never forget two things that he said:

First, he accused Western Christians of artolatry, which I never quite understood as applied to the discussion we were having, since we were not discussing "when" the bread and wine became the body and blood of Christ. He made a distinction between the presence of our Lord's body and blood and our Lord's personal presence. For this monk, it is Christ's body and blood that is present under the forms of bread and wine but not Christ as person. Thus prayer directed to the Holy Gifts is inappropriate. It was because of this reply that I later took up the matter with an Orthodox priest and theologian, whom I cited in my first posting. As I said, he too was puzzled by my question. Thus his reply to me: "They ARE Christ's Body and Blood; yet we cannot pray to THEM as such."

Second, in answer to my question why Orthodox Christians did not reverence the Reserved Sacrament, the monk replied that outside the Divine Liturgy Christ's presence was "inert." What a very different sensibility. For those of us who practice eucharistic adoration outside the Mass, our Lord's sacramental presence is never inert, never lifeless. Which sensibility do you think best captures the faith of the Church catholic?

In Messias,
Alvin+

Bless me a sinner, Father Kimel!

Well, not all of my posts are as you so kindly say!

There is no doubt but that some Easterners tend to go overboard in trying to show "difference" between East and West where no such difference exists.

Kallistos Ware pointed out once that when the Assumption doctrine was proclaimed by the RC Church, there were Orthodox who said Orthodoxy never held to it . . .

With respect to Eucharistic Adoration, the East would prefer to maintain it within the Divine Liturgy and anyone wishing to practice Eucharistic Adoration may certainly do so.

In fact, the Eastern Catholic Church is currently very much like the Anglican Church in a number of respects.

We too have our "Low and lazy, Middle and hazy, and High and crazy!" (As now retired Canon Greene told me once).

There is the venerable story of how St Pavel Gojdicz, before he was arrested by the soviets, would spend his last hour in Adoration before the Blessed Sacrament. And how he would be kicked by his captors for continuing with the Divine Liturgy, fermenting wine from grape juice squeezed out of the raisins he received for his rations . . .

Our Patriarch-Confessor, Josef Slipyj, did his hour of Adoration at the Church of St Nilus in Rome and never missed it.

It could just be that the Adoration of the Eucharist is very much an emblem of Latin Catholicism and therefore it is suspect in and of itself.

The same could be said of the Rosary devotion, although St Seraphim of Sarov, St Seraphim Vyritsky, St Seraphim Zvezdinsky and a host of others practiced a form of it daily and recommended it to others.

St Tikhon of Zadonsk had a whole series of life-size icons that was a form of the Stations of the Cross . . .

There is even a miraculous Orthodox icon of "Our Lady of the Scapular" in the town of Horodyshchenske . . .

Of course, when the Rosary became very popular in the Russian Church, the Orthodox denied they borrowed it from the West (which probably happened as groups of Uniates returned to Orthodoxy), but said, instead, that the Eastern Church received the rosary revelation from Our Lady AHEAD of the West . . .

If Eucharistic Adoration ever became really popular in the East, perhaps this tactic could be employed again so everyone would be happy!

Kissing your right hand, I again implore your blessing, Reverend Father in Christ!

Alex


And we

Dear Alex,

Please, do not forget that the Christian East is not only Russia and Ukrania. Nobody can deny the strong Western influence on the theology, liturgy and popular devotion of the Rusian and Ukranian people in different periods of the history of these Churches but, please, do not forget that this influence was completely unknown in other areas of the "Byzantine or Eastern Oikoumene" or had a completely different character. For instance both the Ukranian and Armenian Churches had somekind of Western influence but this influence has got completely different character according to the different historical periods they received this influence and the Western people they were in contact with.

Yours in Christ
F

Dear Francisco,

The Eastern Church isn't only composed of Russians and Ukrainians?

Since when?

Latin influence has been felt, as you know, amongst Greek theologians, as Fr. Meyendorff has pointed out throughout his writings.

There were even Greek Orthodox theologians who accepted such RC doctrines as the Immaculate Conception - and who fully understood the Augustinian concept of Original Sin.

Only those Orthodox Churches were free of Latin influence that did not come into direct contact with the Latin Church.

Even the ever-so Byzantine Melkites accepted several Byzantinized Latin feasts.

And sometimes Latin influence in certain Eastern churches exists while the Orthodox in those churches steadfastly deny that it does.

And to point out, as I have, those Latinizations does no one any good . . .

Alex