For the Life of the World 16

This post continues with my thoughts on sections 6-7 of the third chapter of For the Life of the World. Here is the link to Deacon Michael Hyatt’s  third podcast on chapter three.

• For the Life of the World: Part Eight

Fr. Schmemann now explores the manner in which the cycle of services relates the Church and individual Christian to the time of day, and how the prayers and other liturgical acts, performed on behalf of the whole community, are an essential part of the Church’s redeeming mission. In the book and thus also in my post we’ll focus on the morning and the evening hours. In all traditions that join in the set prayers of the Church or are at all liturgical, these are the most prominent. In the podcast, Deacon Michael does an excellent job summarizing all of the hours. If you are not familiar with them, I recommend listening to the podcast even more strongly than I normally do.

Contrary to our secular experience of time, the liturgical day begins with Vespers, i.e., in the evening. This is, of course, the reminiscence of the biblical “And the evening and the morning were the first day” (Gn. 1:5). Yet it is more than a reminiscence. For it is, indeed, the end of each “unit” of time that reveals its pattern and meaning, that gives to time its reality. Time is always growth, but only at the end can we discern the direction of that growth and see its fruits. It is at the end, in the evening of each day that God sees His creation as good; it is at the end of creation that He gives it to man. And thus, it is at the end of the day that the Church begins the liturgy of time’s sanctification.

So as our day or work and play and rest winds down, the Church does not merely add an epilogue to the experiences of that day. It begins a new day characterized by thanksgiving, turning toward God, and sanctifying the new day.

There must be someone in this world — which rejected God and in this rejection, in this blasphemy, became a chaos of darkness — there must be someone to stand in its center, and to discern, to see it again as full of divine riches, as the cup full of life and joy, as beauty and wisdom, and to thank God for it. This “someone” is Christ, the new Adam who restores that “eucharistic life” which I, the old Adam, have rejected and lost; who makes me again what I am, and restores the world to me. And if the Church is in Christ, its initial is always this act of Thanksgiving, of returning the world to God.

However, contrasted with the beauty and wonder for which we give thanks, there is also the ugliness of sin. Repentance is another theme of Vespers.

In the face of the glory of creation there must be tremendous sadness. God has given us another day, and we can see just how we have destroyed this gift of His. We are not “nice” Christians come apart from the ugly world. If we do not stand precisely as representatives of this world, as indeed the world itself, if we do not bear the whole burden of this day, our “piety” may still be pious, but it is not Christian.

The third theme of Vespers is redemption. This redemption, of course, is Christ.

Now in the time in which we can thank God for Christ, we begin to understand that everything is transformed in Christ into its true wonder. In the radiance of His light the world is not commonplace. The very floor we stand on is a miracle of atoms whizzing about in space. The darkness of sin is clarified, and its burden shouldered. Death is robbed of its finality, trampled down by Christ’s death. In a world where everything that seems to be present is immediately past, everything in Christ is able to participate in the eternal present of God. This very evening is the real time of our life.

And the last theme of Vespers is that of the end announced in the words from the Gospels of the old man Simeon.

Vespers is the recognition that the evening of this world has come which announces the day that has no evening. In this world every day faces night; the world itself is facing night. It cannot last forever. Yet the Church is affirming that an evening is not only an end, but also a beginning, just as any evening is also the beginning of another day. In Christ and through Christ it may become the beginning of a new life, of the day that has no evening.

The day that has no evening. That image echoes in my mind. Fr. Schmemann then moves to Matins. I like his opening in section 7.

When we first wake up, the initial sensation is always that of night, not of illumination; we are at our weakest, at our most helpless. It is like a man’s first real experience of life in all its absurdity and solitude, at first kept from him by family warmth. We discover every morning in the amorphous darkness the inertia of life. And thus the first theme of Matins is again the coming of light into darkness. … The Church announces every morning that God is the Lord, and she begins to organize life around God.

As Vespers, rather than epilogue announces a new day of Thanksgiving, so Matins organizes our waking life around the God whom we thank.

These two complementary, yet absolutely essential, dimensions of time shape our life in time and, by giving time a new meaning, transform it into Christian time. This double experience is, indeed, to be applied to everything we do. We are always between morning and evening, between Sunday and Sunday, between Easter and Easter, between the two comings of Christ. The experience of time as end gives an absolute importance to whatever we do now, makes it final, decisive. The experience of time as beginning fills all our time with joy, for it adds to it the “coefficient” of eternity: “I shall not die but live and declare the works of the Lord.”

Fr. Schmemann reflects on the words from Ecclesiastes, “Vanity of vanities. All is vanity.” That seems to capture the essence of the sameness of daily life. We get up, get ready, and head into a day of work, joining a rush of others doing the same. And in the evening, the rush is in the other direction as tired people head home. And the cycle, in the fallen world, repeats day after day in a blur of sameness, futility, and meaninglessness.

But we Christians have too often forgotten that God has redeemed the world. For centuries we have preached to the hurrying people: your daily rush has no meaning, yet accept it — and you will be rewarded in another world by an eternal rest. But God revealed and offers us eternal Life and not eternal rest. And God revealed this eternal Life in the midst of time — and of its rush — as its secret meaning and goal. And thus he made time, and our work in it, into the sacrament of the world to come, the liturgy of fulfillment and ascension. It is when we have reached the very end of the world’s self-sufficiency that it begins again for us as the material of the sacrament that we are to fulfill in Christ.

“There is no new thing under the sun.” Yet every day, every minute resounds now with the victorious affirmation: “Behold, I make all things new. I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end…” (Rev. 21:5-6)

I love how he ends by contrasting the words of the Preacher and the words of our Lord. Indeed, Christ makes all things new, including time.