https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=au66bOJ9ezE
So, how can you best articulate what happens in the midst of liturgy when you’re at church and you’re worshiping, right? And what is going on there? Well, if you look at the elements of the liturgy, you can see what’s going on. And so, the entire liturgy, there are so many ways to look at it. This is not the only way. Be careful. I’m not saying this is the interpretation of liturgy, but one of the things, for example, that’s happening during liturgy is there’s a concentration. And so, you’re ascending a mountain during liturgy, and it’s built that way. So at first, like for example, in the Orthodox liturgy, we have two parts of liturgy. We have the liturgy of the word, which is directed kind of towards the outside, you could say, or at the bottom of the mountain. And then we have the liturgy of the faithful, which is above. As we’re moving, we actually both cohere and exclude, which a lot of people won’t like that, but that’s just how the world works, right? So you both cohere and exclude. So we cohere together as the body of Christ, and then we also kind of leave at the bottom of the mountain, those things that aren’t ready to be up in the top of the mountain. And so, as we’re going up, you’ll have the catechumen will be left behind. Left at the bottom. Then we’ll close the doors. You’ll hear the doors, the doors, right? So you close the doors, and then we’re moving in. And then as we’re moving in, then we start to celebrate the mysteries. We start to celebrate the things that unite us. And we ultimately now start to then, not only that, but we start to unite ourselves with that which is above us. And so, you’ll hear, you know, we who represent the cherubim, and then it talks about how, you know, Christ is carried by the order of angels down to us. And so, we’re coming together. We’re celebrating that which unites us, but then we’re also participating in it, in that which is above us. And so then that culminates into the moment of communion, where we do something which is very, which is both, you could call it a kind of sacrifice, but it’s also a meal. And so we’re sitting together and we’re sharing the most basic thing that humans can share, which is food, but it’s heavenly food. If you look at like the priest, for example, one of the things he does when he’s making the communion bread is he’ll actually make little pieces of bread for every aspect of the church. And he’ll cut out these little pieces of bread and put it on the paten. So there’ll be like, you know, for all the different orders of bishops and everything. And you can see like if you look at a paten that has been prepared, it has all these pieces of bread. I don’t even know like all the, which pieces are for what, but they have all these different pieces of bread. And so it’s like a microcosm, it’s like a cosmos that is on the paten. So the cosmos is gathered in, gathered in us, gathered together, gathered into this point, which is where communion happens. And then we come together and participate in that point. And so it’s really is a, it is, it’s a participation in how the world exists, really. I mean, and it’s not, I’m not saying that just as a, it’s technically participating in how the world exists. Like it’s not, it’s not just a metaphor in terms of, it’s not just like a poetic thing we’re doing. We’re actually holding the world together, right? And participating in how the, how all of reality works. And so the way that this works is kind of coming together, these, these levels of microcosms that come together and that we participate in, then that goes out into the world. And that becomes a way we participate in everything. Everything that is, everything that has both multiplicity and unity, which means everything has that pattern, has to have this, this coherence and exclusion, this moving towards its purpose so that we can, so that it can actually exist. And then, you know, participating in this hierarchy of being.