Reading Saving Paradise: Chapter 6, Part I

The beautiful feast of life: Eucharist

The loaves and fishes

Fresco in the Catacomb of San Callisto, Rome (early 3rd c)

Throughout the early Christian world, the Eucharist – gathering for the sacred meal in Jesus’ Name – took place on Sunday, the day of his resurrection.

The nourishments of beauty

In the great offertory procession, members brought gifts to support the church, and offered foods for the Eucharistic meal.

After blessing the offerings, the bishop recited the Great Thanksgiving,  re-telling the creation story from Genesis, recalling God’s many acts of redemption throughout history, and remembering Christ’s incarnation, teachings, and compassion for those in need.  (Saving Paradise, p. 142-144)

Then the bishop prayed for the coming of the Holy Spirit.  Bishop Cyril of Jerusalem taught that the Spirit’s descent reopened paradise… and that communicants received the spiritual power of divinity in their own flesh, just as their bodies received energy from food.  (See p. 145) 

In every celebration of the Eucharist, Christians believed they were feasting in paradise, and that the Eucharist was training them – body, soul, mind and strength – to see the Spirit in their world.

Homilies on familiar gospel passages taught people that wise perception was necessary to find the presence of God’s Spirit in the world:

• In the story of the disciples on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24), the disciples’ physical eyes worked just fine, but they lacked the perception needed to see Jesus. 

• In the story of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7), Jesus said no one can help someone else without first removing the log from his or her own eyes. 

The power of beauty

The practices of the Eucharist, in their sensory richness and beauty, were designed to help worshipers perceive the beauty in the world around them.  Beauty was thought of a shining Presence of the Spirit in all things – not just in the eye of the beholder, but in the relationship between the beholder and the Presence that shines through things.

The Eucharist itself, as an experience of beauty, was held in contrast to the world outside the liturgy, a world with both goodness and heartbreak.  The world was brought into the Eucharist by participants, and the Eucharist’s power evoked profound love for the world and a hope for deeper, life-affirming relationships with it.  (See p. 150-151)

The apse mosaic in the church of St. Apollinare, Ravenna, places beauty at the heart of the cosmos.  

 Beauty at the heart of the cosmos 

The apse, St. Apollinare, Ravenna (5th–6th c)

And in the center of the apse’s cross, note the face of Jesus Christ at the very heart of the cosmos – a  Presence that shines within the night’s stars and the day’s sunlit meadows.  

  The face of Jesus is at the heart of the cosmos 

Detail of the apse mosaic, St. Apollinare, Ravenna

To this day, theologians of the Eastern church speak of ‘the transfiguration of the world.’  Eastern theologians define salvation as an awakening to the whole world, illumined by the brilliance of divine Presence.  God has intertwined the spiritual and the material in Christ, restoring divinity to humanity and returning ‘the world to the beauty in which it was first created.’ Sacred art and ritual initiate people into this life-changing knowledge.   (See p. 155)

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on the next blog,

The ethics of beauty