Night Office Reading.
Thursday 18/06/2015
Community Monthly Memorial of the Dead
..."the Church and Our Anticipated Victory over Death,"
Mass Intro: Today we celebrate the Monthly Mass for our dead;
Our brothers and sisters in the Order among our relatives and friends and benefactors have all gone before us. We pray for them and that we may in our turn and that we may in our turn join them in the joy of heaven.
OFFICE OF THE DEAD - 9
A Reading;
about the Church and Our Anticipated Victory over Death,
from a Book 13y Fro-Alexander Schmemann *..
about the Church and Our Anticipated Victory over Death,
from a Book 13y Fro-Alexander Schmemann *..
THE liturgy
of Christian death does not begin when a man has come to the inescapable end
and his corpse lies in church for the last rites while we stand around, the sad
yet resigned witnesses of the dignified removal of a man from the world of the
living. It begins every day as the Church ascending in to heaven, "puts
aside all earthly care"; it begins every feast day; it begins especially in the joy of Easter. The whole life of the Church
is in a way the sacrament of our death, because all of it is the proclamation
of the Lord's death the confession of his resurrection.
The Church is
the entrance into the risen life of Christ, communion in life eternal, "joy and
peace in the Holy Spirit." And it is the expectation of the "day
without evening" of the Kingdom; not of any "other world," but
of the fulfilment of all things and all life in Christ. In him death itself has
become an act of life, for he has filled it with himself, with his love and
light, In him "all things are yours; whether the world" or life, or
death, or things present , or things to come; all are yours; and you are
Christ's; and Christ is God’s" (1 Cor 3 21-23). And if I make
this new life mine, mine this hunger and thirst of the Kingdom, mine this expectation of Christ, mine the certitude that Christ is Life,
my very death will be an act of communion with Life, For neither Life nor death
can separate us from the love of Christ.
I do not know when and how the fulfilment
will cameo I do not know when all things will be consummated in Christ. I know
nothing about the "whens" and "hows." But I know that in
Christ this great Passage , the Pascha of the world has begun , that the light
of the “world to come" comes to us in the joy and peace of the Holy Spirit , for
Christ is risen and Life reigns.
________________________*
Sacraments and Orthodoxy, New York 1965, 130-133
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