Transcript

Wow, all right, Father.

So, you know, recently I said that this was going to be a tour of the chapel, right?

But you told me that that's a bit too Latin of a word.

So, what do we call this kind of space?

We call it, actually, what commonly is referred to maybe as the Church.

We call it the Temple because we're still emphasizing the fact that the Church is us; it's the Body of Christ, not a building.

So, to kind of designate, we use the word Temple because that's kind of the dwelling place of God in a way.

Also, because we're also the Temple of the Holy Spirit, of course.

And one of the things you'll notice as we get to show you this beautiful space, especially in the Holy of Holies, it's very much set up kind of like the Tent of the Meeting.

There's a lot of analogous, I suppose you could say, things with the original tent in Exodus that we have back there.

Sure.

And let's say somebody is going to Divine Liturgy for the first time, right?

First off, what is Divine Liturgy?

Do you guys call it Mass here, or what do you call it?

Right, of course, you know that you call it Mass from the ending in Latin, right?

Et Omnis Est.

We don't say it; we don't use Latin either, right?

So, uh, no, we call it Divine Liturgy.

We've called that from the beginning.

Of course, you know you guys call it Liturgy too; it's just not the common, it's common of usage, right?

So, Liturgia in Greek means really the work for the people.

Oftentimes, you hear it translated as the work of the people, but I think a better translation that I've heard is work for the people because it's really God working for us and giving Himself to us.

And, of course, we're then working too.

I guess this great word that we use in the Eastern Church called synergy comes from the Greek sunergon, to work with.

So it's us working with God to our own sanctification.

And so one of the things that we very much stress, and really kind of the difference is oftentimes between East and West, isn't so much a difference in kind because we have all the same sacraments.

We call them a different word, of course, because we use Greek or, you know, derived from Greek.

It's a difference in emphasis.

And so one of the things, especially as we look at the icons and the different things, is this emphasis that liturgy doesn't remember past events.

Of course, the Latin Church would believe the same thing about this, but the fact that really what liturgy does is make present.

So by being in liturgy, you're actually being present to all of the mysteries of the divine economy, all of the mysteries of what God has done for us with the angels and the saints, which, of course, are represented by the icons, which I'm sure we'll talk about.

So that's this enveloping by coming into the temple, this enveloping not only in, you know, beautiful things, but it's really embellishment in the things that those things represent.

Of course, the icons make present those who they represent, and then, but then also within the liturgy, the making present of the divine economy so that we participate in that, looking in the heavenly liturgy, the one heavenly liturgy, the wedding feast of the Lamb, right?

So let's say that I'm walking in, right, and Divine Liturgy hasn't started yet.

Maybe there's some prayers going on.

You know, often Catholics, or Latin Catholics I should say, they'll get the holy water and they'll make the sign of the cross or they'll genuflect and then sit down and appease.

But what's generally the first thing that someone would do when they're entering into the temple and they're getting ready to sit down or get settled?

What's the first thing that they would go to and look at?

So the first thing, well obviously the first thing you notice when we come in, you see this little space back here we call the narthex, which Latin churches have multiple, which represents the world, right?

And it's kind of cramped.

Yeah, that's where the catechumens and penitents stayed of old.

Oh right, and then when you enter across that threshold, you enter the church in the park of Peter.

The ceilings go up; now you're within the body of Christ during the church, the nave.

And so then as you would come in, obviously there's pews against the walls.

Those pews are for folks that need to sit.

Otherwise, the position of standing and reverence in the East is the position of reverence in the East is standing in prayer.

So again, what like we said, there's difference in emphasis, but we also have to take into account the cultural differences where these churches, these apostolic expressions of the faith, were founded and developed and grew up in that culture where that happened.

The cultural understanding: what does reverence mean?

How do we show reverence?

How do we show penitence?

How do we show these different things are different in the Latin West, where it grew out of the patriarchate of Rome, and in the other four Eastern patriarchates it was different.

So we don't have pews because we stand.

We don't genuflect; we generally don't kneel, especially during the Paschal season, right?

There is no kneeling at the consecration because for us, kneeling is a penitential act, not an act of reverence.

So for us, standing and bowing is an act of reverence; kissing is an act of reverence, but not kneeling.

In fact, the Council of Nicaea forbade kneeling during Bright Week because it's too joyous to be kneeling; we're supposed to be standing.

So that's a difference, a different thing than the West.

It's not that we're being irreverent; it's just reverence is shown in a different way.

So you come in, you walk in, you walk in, of course you come into the nave.

The first thing that you'll notice is what we call the tetrapod, which is actually this altar that's below.

Because we're in the Easter season, beginning on Good and Holy Friday, we actually erect this tomb that on Good and Holy Friday night we actually have an icon.

It's on a fabric backing, but it's an icon of the corpse of Christ that we do a burial procession with around the church three times and then bring and lay his corpse in the tomb, and it stayed there until Easter morning.

And then it's removed and put on the altar we call the Holy Table.

On the Holy Table, underneath everything, the liturgy has been celebrated on this icon of Christ's corpse now until the Ascension.

First in the Ascension, he goes away; he ascends.

So that's why this is trying to structure it here.

But you would come in, what a Byzantine Catholic would do is come in, and on the tetrapod is usually the icon of the feast of that season, the icon of Easter that we call the Harrowing of Hell, Christ pulling Adam up out of the tomb, or out of Hades.

Sorry, sometimes it can be, if it's a more general time of the summer, right, in the Sundays after Pentecost, if there's no specific feast associated with that Sunday, this would be like St. Luke, the patron of the church.

So you'd come up, you'd make the sign of the cross and the vow.

The sign of the cross and the vow, in your mind, you'd be saying, Oh God, be merciful to me, a sinner.

Oh God, be merciful to me, a sinner.

And then you'd kiss the icon, and then, Oh God, be merciful to me, a sinner.

One of the variations that I learned in Europe is that you also then put your forehead, when you kiss the icon, you have to put your forehead on it as a way of like saying to God that I want to be like this; I want to be submissive or I want to be like this.

One of the things that we never do in any of the icons is kiss the face because we know who kissed Jesus' face.

I don't want to be like him.

And it's really cool; there's actually wooden churches, these little small wooden built churches in these small villages in Ukraine and Slovakia that are built without metal nails.

Everything's wood, and the reason they did it is because Jesus was nailed to the cross with steel, with metal.

Yeah, so as to not be even close to that, they build their churches with all wooden pegs rather than spikes or metal nails.

Every single thing is filled with meaning and detail and richness.

One thing that always amazes me, and there were a few times that I've come to Divine Liturgy here, I always noticed that the icon was suited for the feast day or whatever it was.

So I'm wondering, first off, how many icons, if you had to do an estimate, do you think you have just in the church itself?

Oh wow, yeah, probably 50 or 60, maybe 100. Okay, by the time that, you know, we have, as you can see, we have 3, 6, 7, 12, 15. You know, there's 20 or 30 of these on the walls.

Then along the back, we have those ones that are on this upper level.

We have the 12 major feasts of Christ and the Theotokos, Mary, the Mother of God, right?

Theotokos means God-bearer in Greek; that's why we use that name.

And so those are the principal icons that then come down and are placed here.

And then, of course, we have the same thing on the second upper row of the icon screen, right?

Those are the principal icons, and then the other ones, which each icon is there in a specific place for a specific reason, which we can sure talk about if you'd like.

Yeah, well, you know, right now one hot topic online has been the subject of icon veneration.

And it's interesting because, you know, you might be surprised to hear this, but Nicaea II has actually become a very, I guess, viral council right now because people are talking about whether or not it was a valid decision regarding icon veneration.

And obviously, we just saw, you know, you venerate an icon.

And I guess hearing it from you, right, as an Eastern Catholic, as someone who venerates icons, even for me as a Latin Catholic, but especially for you because icons are such a big part of the Church itself and the life of the Church, why do you venerate icons?

How is it okay?

These are some questions that somebody might have.

Sure, well, and I think that where it kind of flows from, if you read Exodus 19 and 20, where offense claims to be the second, the second commandment is to not have any graven images.

Of course, then God goes to tell them to make cherubim and those stuff, so that's qualified, obviously, right?

And so in that time before Second Nicaea, the emperors of the Holy Roman Empire of the East, right, felt that way about icons, and the iconoclasts went in and destroyed, tore all these icons out of the church.

When the council convened and talked about it, though, and this is what's really an important part, is that these aren't just pretty pictures, and they aren't just sacred art; they're liturgical objects.

So they enter into worship.

One, two, they really are painted revelation, but they aren't just simply my estimation.

I could sit down and go, I want to paint an icon of the heroine of hell.

I just start at it.

No, every one of those things is detailed about how that's supposed to be placed in there because it's not my interpretation of it; it's me painting in a way.

It would be like if I sat down to copy.

If you take the monks of, you know, the Benedictine monks writing, copying the Scriptures, they were going to go, Well, you know, I don't like this word, put in their own thing.

That might be a glossary, but anyway, they're trying to be accurate.

That's what that's about.

But really, ultimately, what the question of icons comes down to is the question of the Incarnation.

Because if the Son of God, the second person of the Blessed Trinity, the Son who has divine nature, took on a human nature, assumed a human nature to Himself and walked among us, then He, the Son, was in a material nature.

And if that, you could see Him, you could touch Him, you could speak to Him as I'm speaking to you, which means I can take a picture of you or I can paint a portrait of you, right?

Now, if I did that, I wouldn't just be painting someone's human nature because you don't paint human nature; you paint people, right?

So if you want an analogy, which I think then validates Second Nicaea, just because of ethicists, because really what the question over icons is, is a question over Nestorius.

Because what Nestorius basically said is that Mary wasn't the God-bearer, Theotokos; he said she was a Christotokos, trying to wiggle out of the fact that she bore His divinity.

But the logical human problem was, right, then what you do if you accept this kind of Christotokos idea?

Then you have a divine person and a human person, as I like to say, in the same meat bag, right?

Well, that's like me; that's like you.

You have the Blessed Trinity living within you.

It's two persons.

We don't profess two; Chalcedon didn't profess two persons; he professed one person of two natures.

So it's the same thing here.

If I paint Christ's image, I'm not painting His human nature because if you ask, Who is that?

Well, that's the Son; that's God.

Just like Mary didn't give birth to a human nature; women don't give birth to human nature; they give birth to persons.

So I like to ask people, I've done this a lot, is Jesus a human person?

You cannot believe the number of people who are like, Yes, here he is.

No, he's a divine person of two natures, and if you say he's a human person, then immediately you're a Nestorian.

That's where you lose it.

So Ephesus, where he was condemned in the kind of whole still Arian kind of thing that was going on, really the same thing is happening now about these images in Second Nicaea.

So really what Second Nicaea was about wasn't about can we venerate these things; it was really about hopefully they understood that it was about the Incarnation.

So if this does represent Jesus, then, well, what should I do with it?

Then I can reverence it because I'm not worshipping or reverencing wood and paint; that would be idolatry.

But what I'm reverencing is that which it represents, which by the liturgical, the blessing that we give it, makes present, not substantially like Eucharist, right?

This isn't now the harrowing of hell, but the substance of the wood is gone.

But in a way, you hear this word window, right?

Because the people here are on the other side; there is something that is between us, but they're present to me like you would be present to me even if I were to have plexiglass here.

In a way, you're on this other side of this thing, but you're still present to me.

That's really what we see here.

And the beautiful thing, this is a great icon to show this.

If you notice, it's kind of weird that the background is higher than the foreground, right?

That's on purpose.

It makes these things look kind of odd because you don't, when you go down to the Nelson-Atkins Art Museum and you see a painting of a landscape, and of course, you look into the painting because the road is wider at the front and disappears, right?

So the artists call that the vanishing point, and the vanishing point of the painting is in the painting, right?

Because you're looking into the painting.

Icons, it's the opposite.

That's why the back is bigger than the front, because the vanishing point of the icon isn't in the icon; it's you.

Oh, yeah, okay, so it's the icon looking at you by that vanishing point being you, right?

Because this is bigger; the foreground is smaller.

So it's actually the vanishing point that's incredible.

And if you look at all the other icons, you'll see that the backgrounds are all bigger than the foreground in order to show and indicate that reality of what the icon is.

You could say saved.

Yeah, wow, that's incredible.

So, speaking of the icons that are in the temples, I want to look in particular at the one that's right above us.

Sure.

So, you know, I've gone to Orthodox cathedrals before; I've gone to Orthodox churches and visited them, and I've noticed that throughout, let's say, Eastern architecture, Eastern Christian architecture, there's always this image of Christ right at the ceiling.

So, I mean, first off, what do you call that image?

We call it the Pantocrator, okay?

Right?

And so basically that's a Greek term that means the Almighty.

You can see that it's Jesus always holding the Scriptures, the Gospel, in His left hand, and then He's blessing with His right.

Jesus is always portrayed with a red inner tunic, which is indicative of divinity, clothed in a blue tunic, which is indicative of humanity.

So if you look at icons properly written or painted of the Theotokos, it's opposite because she was human, covered in humanity.

You can see she has the blue underneath; you can even see her in the little cuff that she's got on her arm there.

But if you see images of her, you'll see that it's blue underneath red because she was human, but basically covered in divinity like the Holy Spirit.

That's what I thought about that.

The letters there are Greek; what looks like an I and a C and an X and a C are Greek letters that basically are the first and last letters of Jesus.

Greek doesn't have a J like Latin, and the sigma at the end, the S at the end of the word in Greek, looks like a C with a little tail.

So a lot of times people say that's I-C X-E; it's not.

Those are S's, so it's Iota Sigma Iesus.

And then the X is transliterated as K, right, in English, and that's another S. But Jesus Christos, the other letters look like an O, a W, and maybe an H or an N. Again, Greek stands for Ho-On, which is translated the one who is.

So if when Moses asked God in Exodus, What is your name?

if God spoke Greek, if you look at the Septuagint version, He would have said Ego Mi Ho-On, I am the one who is.

So those three letters around His name, His mandorla, always are indicating His divinity.

Now His blessing, the way He's holding His hand, if you look at other icons, especially of bishops or priests, they're often holding their hands in that sign of blessing.

And if you watch any priest that blesses during the Divine Liturgy, they do the same; they hold their hand.

We don't get a hand cramp; that's not what that is.

So we hold our hand in this kind of funky way, I guess you could say.

But actually what it is, if you look, it's Iota Sigma Chi Sigma, okay?

So we are blessing in the name of the Lord, right, by forming those exact letters with our hand when we do it.

Wow, that's incredible!

Yeah, and then I guess looking at the other icons that you have around on the walls, maybe, you know, sometimes you'll see in a Latin church the Stations of the Cross, right?

On the walls here, what do we have, let's say, in terms of the stained glass windows, for example?

This is Nativity, and let's see, moving on.

Yeah, so one of the things that has been a challenge for our church since we reunited—so our particular church comes from the western part of Ukraine, eastern part of Slovakia, northern Hungary, and northern Romania—and it came back in union with Rome at the Union of Uzhhorod, now 400 and some years ago.

In doing so, what happened was that we, trying to prove that we were Catholics, often found that we took up Roman Catholic practices into ours, kind of melded in a way.

They did meld, you know, brought other things in that were inappropriate and not part of our tradition.

One of those being, I've seen churches like ours before that have like the Stations of the Cross.

Right?

Well, that's not our tradition.

Unfortunately, the stained glass windows in this church—I'm not sure when they were installed.

This building is from 1920. I wouldn't be surprised if they were from that time—are very Roman Catholic.

Right, yeah.

So, for example, over the one of the Blessed Trinity, we would never show God's authority, right?

That's the biggest iconographic no-no you could ever imagine.

No icon ever shows the Father.

If we're going to indicate the Trinity, we have an icon of the three angels that met Abraham, right?

So that is like, I saw that and went, Oh! So that, yeah, the same Costarindos really aren't fitting to our tradition.

The icons here, again, are indicative of the presence of the saints and the heavenly hosts that are here with us worshiping God.

And so, you know, whatever the parish, there's no like prescription here about them.

Now, the icon screens are prescribed; those have to be in certain rooms.

The ones around the building, you know, and of course you have the Pantocrator always here.

But what you find around the walls of any given church is really up to that particular, that particular, you know, who designed it and who did it.

Sometimes, I mean, if you really, you know, the Orthodox have these beautiful places where just like every square inch is, I mean, that's just, of course, we're a small community, so we don't quite have that.

You have to have iconographers that can do that too, right?

Which is not easy.

But yeah, so out here really isn't prescribed.

So probably the best place to start is the main four icons here, right?

So you always find Jesus to the south.

So we're always facing east.

Any Byzantine church is not facing east; we can call it liturgical east.

No, we should be facing east.

Why?

Because that's where Jesus rises.

We're facing the risen Lord.

So to the south, we have always Christ.

Again, we talked about those letters and whatnot.

He usually is holding the Gospel open with some kind of scripture.

For this one, it's on the light of the world.

Then we have what we call the royal doors, which these doors actually open.

I'll talk about what's on there in a minute.

And so then to the north, we have the Theotokos, and almost never, I think there's one icon where she's shown alone.

She's always shown with Christ.

And again, you can see that she's got the blue, right?

The blue indicating that that's her humanity covered in divinity, right?

And then also, you can see these little stars.

There's a third one over here on her shoulder that's obviously covered by Christ, and that is indicating that she's a virgin before, during, and after.

Anyway, it's the sign of her perpetual virginity.

So then those two icons, every church you go into would have those.

Then the furthest large icon down there, that's actually St. Nicholas.

Okay, the original, right?

We look at him a little bit differently than Santa Claus.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But he's actually the patron saint of Byzantine Catholics, so the Byzantine Catholic Church.

So that's the patron of like the largest, I guess, how would I say, structure of whatever Eastern church goes there.

So like if you went into a Russian Orthodox church, that'd be St. Vladimir.

St. Vladimir, okay.

And so then all the way to the other side, again, the major icon to the far right, that's typically, this is an atypical one, but that is typically the patron of the church.

So that should be St. Luke, right?

This church was not named St. Luke originally.

I think it was St. Joseph.

It changed hands on numerous occasions, but that's actually St. John the Forerunner, and he is our eparchy patron.

So it fits.

I mean, he's a patron of our eparchy, which is the Greek word for diocese.

Okay, yeah, there we go.

I'm just going to ask about that.

Yeah, there we go.

And then on the royal doors, again, these doors at the moment are closed.

They do open during particular times during the divine liturgy.

You have the Annunciation, right?

So you have the Archangel Gabriel and the Theotokos there.

Again, the better sign of you see the blue and red contrast better.

And then the four evangelists.

Then there's doors.

Then also we call these deacon's doors.

We call them deacon's doors because they are the main entrances of the way people get in and out of the holy place, the sanctuary.

And on those, there's always icons.

And because the word angelos in Greek means messenger, and the deacon is the one who comes basically from heaven to stand in front and lead everybody in prayer to God because he leads a lot of the litanies and the prayers that we pray.

You usually or typically on the doors either have angels for his indication or actual deacons.

Yeah, right?

So you could have, you know, St. Romanos, you could have St. Stephen, you know, any of those guys.

And then usually here again, we have the twelve principal feast.

The next row up is the twelve principal feasts of the Theotokos and Christ.

On the center is the mystical supper, the Last Supper.

That can vary.

Sometimes it's called the Dies, that has Christ on the throne with his mother.

And then you see this other person next to him.

Everybody always thinks it's John the Theologian.

It's actually the Forerunner.

So oftentimes we depict Mary, the Theotokos, and the Forerunner with Jesus rather than Mary and John, who we call John the Theologian, the writer of the Gospel.

When you say John the Forerunner, that means, for people who might be wondering, John the Baptist, John the Baptizer, otherwise known.

Yeah, because again, interestingly enough, again it's a little bit different in emphasis.

I'm a convert to the Byzantine Church.

I was, as a young man, grew up in kind of a social Protestant home.

It was kind of, anyway, it was what it was.

I had a conversion experience, became Roman Catholic.

I was Roman Catholic for a number of years and then became Byzantine.

I never heard anything but John the Baptist, and we rarely say John the Baptist; we just emphasize the fact that the Forerunner.

Why?

Because that was the ministry given to him that he fulfilled in Malachi and Isaiah.

He himself says, right, I'm the one that's in order to prepare the way of the Lord.

And so, yeah, we venerate him a lot.

I mean, he's a very important saint to us, much more than, much more, again, much more emphasis in our Church than what I experienced in the Roman Church.

So we celebrate his Nativity, we celebrate every time he's beheaded, and then they found his head three times at a feast for every time he found his head.

So we've got all kinds of stuff there, so I guess maybe if we can move behind the screen, unless there's anything else you want to say about anything here.

Well, maybe the one difference a lot of times people see is that our cross looks a little bit different.

Here's a representation of that, right?

So we have, usually you'll see this lower bar that's at an angle for a cross.

We don't have crucifixes that have actual corpses on there; we might have crosses that have an icon painted of Jesus' corpse, but not like a body like what you guys are used to.

And really, the only difference is that this is the titulus where the title was, this is where his arms were, and this is the footrest.

And there are some traditional reasons of why it's angled.

One is pointing at the good thief that's going up, and the other thief that went down—this kind of justice kind of thing.

But really, in the end, it just simply is an indicator of his footrest.

If you go to Eastern Europe, Byzantine Catholics make that parallel; the Orthodox make theirs angled.

It's really interesting.

That's one of the ways you can always tell if you're in, like, Ukraine, if that's an Orthodox church or a Catholic church—is this third bar parallel or angled?

Like on the Slovakian flag, if you look at the flag of Slovakia, there are three parallel bars.

They're largely Catholic there.

So, well, this area here, just in general, so you know where, you know, Lady will be here usually.

And then you have the—would you call this the sanctuary?

This kind of area, just the whole expanse, you know?

Yeah, so we call this, there's a step up.

We don't have multiple steps up; we have this one that can be called the solea, typically.

And so when the deacon typically comes up to do, and we do prayers, we usually come, we stay on the solea unless we're doing an entrance through the people.

The people don't come up onto the step; that's kind of fair voting, but can be anywhere kind of behind that.

And then from the icon screen on the other side of what we would call that the sanctuary, the holy place, again, the icon screen isn't there to keep people out, but what it is to do is it delineates what is kind of the Church of the world or in the world and heaven.

And so, of course, in heaven, the heavenly people, the hosts, and the angels and the saints are looking upon those in the world, right?

You might call it the Church Militant, right?

The Church Triumphant, I suppose you could say, is looking upon the Church Militant gathered to pray with them, to pray for them, to worship the Father in the Son by the power of the Holy Spirit.

So this isn't so much like a wall, a block, but an interface.

It's a delineation that this is really heaven, and out here is not.

But what we're going to do, right, and part of the divine liturgy, we actually take the Gospel and we come out of the sanctuary, and then we walk out to the people, come back up, and then we enter into there.

And the prayer that I pray silently, people don't hear it, that I say silently is that, Make this our entrance an entrance of holy angels to celebrate of us that glorify in your goodness.

So really what we're indicating by doing that is now we're going to enter heaven.

And we also then, of course, come out with the bread and the wine and make another entrance to bring that back to the holy table.

So it's this kind of Platonic emanation from God and return to God.

But what it's doing is it's indicating that in the liturgy, because we're going to participate in the wedding feast of the Lamb, the one divine liturgy, we aren't chopping up the liturgy into these different locations, but we're actually entering into the one heavenly liturgy.

That that's true, these movements aren't just practical; they're theological in the sense of trying to indicate what's actually happening, which is we really are entering heaven.

And by doing that, then we get to worship God, and then in a way, we're going to end up coming back out with communion that God comes from there then to give us Himself in holy communion.

I noticed that in Latin architecture, generally speaking, in traditional Latin architecture, you have a lot of points that point upwards, right?

And I heard somewhere that the idea was that these angles are supposed to be directing or showing that your prayers are going up to heaven, right?

Whereas a lot of Eastern architecture is bringing heaven to you, like heaven is coming down to look upon you, to see you.

Is that a fair way to kind of maybe summarize that?

I think it is right that kind of rounded arc, and then of course we use lots of incense.

Yes, and of course you know that, and we indicate that even by, you know, the prayers that we pray around.

Is that right?

This incense, according to Psalms, of course Psalm 140, 141 in the Hebrew numbering, 140 in the Greek numbering, about the fact that our prayers rise like incense.

And so it really is, incense is not only like a sanctifying kind of thing, but it's also indicating the prayers of the saints rising before the throne of God.

So we do that a lot to indicate, continue to draw us to that idea that we really are in the presence of God, that there isn't this separation.

I think we have to be very careful because as Catholics we can really get easily caught up into what Father Stephen, an Orthodox priest, a fantastic book called Everywhere Present makes, that we can kind of end up making a two-story universe: God's up there and we're down here.

And I ask my people all the time, I'm like, you know, where's God?

Well, if you say up, well then what do the people in China say?

Because they point in the opposite direction, right?

So God isn't up; He's in me.

The primary place of God's presence is you, me.

We're the temple of the Holy Spirit, right?

And even the tabernacle, we call it an archiforium.

Archiforium means bread, even though He's present there.

But that presence is only ordered to His presence in me.

It isn't just presence for its own sake.

There'll be a day that the Eucharist will go away as a sacrament because we'll see Him and know Him, as John 17:3 says.

Yeah, exactly.

Eternal life is this: you know, the one true God and Him, Jesus Christ, whom He sent.

So this interaction and this oneness and this bringing together, always emphasizing that God's not up there; He's here.

He's in everything.

The sacramental worldview isn't just that there's these seven occasions in water and oil and bread and the words of a priest in absolution, but that's where we interact with Him in material things.

But every material thing, because in the beginning all material things were supposed to be shot through with His presence, right?

The theophany.

And it was the fall that obscured that, right?

So we even pray a prayer for our theophany, which is not—you guys celebrate Epiphany, which is the Magi.

We actually read the Gospel of Magi on the Sunday of Christmas.

So for us, theophany is about the baptism of Christ, but it's the fact that God entered the water of the Jordan, and in doing so, He purified the water of the Jordan.

In other words, because of the baptismal water, the blessing of the priest in that, by the power of the Holy Spirit, that water becomes what it was always meant to be.

It doesn't just bless it like there's this kind of something slapped on top of water, but the water actually becomes what it was prior to the fall.

It becomes this life-giving thing that gives us God through it, like everything else was supposed to do.

So it's like Christ, His redemptive work didn't just lift up men to Himself, but it's redeeming all of creation.

In a way, it's bringing back what was under the power of Satan, under the power of death, this material world that was supposed to be full of life, right?

And it's been restored through Christ, right?

So the Incarnation, right?

The work of the Cross, the Resurrection, all that, it's not just for people, although, you know, that is the main thing because we are, I guess, the priests of creation, with a high point, if you will.

Amen, right?

But then through that, He also cares about other living things and the rest of the material world.

The material world is not something we're trying to escape from and hate or something like that.

Exactly, and you'll find that these two are very cosmic about that, Adam and Eve, because of the fact that we're immaterial and material.

They were primarily, you know, constituted as priests that in themselves would gather up the cosmic.

We use this Greek word, microcosmos, right?

The small universe that in them they were to take up all of God's creation in one great Eucharist and offer it back to God.

And they refused, and then, refusing to be that, then God had to restore that through the high priesthood of Himself, like Melchizedek, the Lord of Melchizedek.

And then, through Christ's high priesthood, all things are made new.

Like we make the point, the first two words of the Septuagint Bible in Greek is en arche.

The first two words of the Gospel of John are en arche.

John's making a point here, right?

That in the Incarnation, all things were made new.

And this restoration is not just us, but it's that God isn't up there somewhere, but He's, as we say in our prayer to the Holy Spirit, like your creator, Benny creator.

We have this that we call heavenly clean.

We say everywhere presence and filling all things, like Aquinas says, right?

God's power of presence.

And, well, Father, so I do have a question.

Yeah, are we able to see on the other side, or is that kind of like, no, that's okay?

Okay, yeah, what we'll do is, well, one thing that I think is important to note here is the fact that this place back here isn't just wide open for anybody to traipse through, that we have still retained and tried to maintain an idea of sacredness.

And so, even like the chalice and all of the holy things, the holy table itself, yeah, yeah, yeah, delineates that.

So, yeah, we can go back, but it isn't like anybody just goes back there or anybody goes back there without my permission or blessing, because there's this, again, it's this sense not to be exclusionary but to indicate otherness.

And remember, holy isn't just moral rectitude; holiness is otherness, and it's that God isn't us, isn't us like we are us, and that there's something so magnificently glorious about Him that we have to honor that by the way we act around it, I guess you could say.

So, yeah, one of the differences between the East and the West, where because of the priest in the Novus Ordo anyway, right, faces the people, we don't. Yes, so for us, the holiest place in the building is in between the royal doors and the front of the table, and nobody except the priest crosses that.

The deacons don't; if they're going to come to the other side of me, they actually go out and around the holy table to the other side.

But you can see, like, I remember in the beginning I told you about the Tent of the Meeting.

So, we have the altar of sacrifice; you can see we have the Holy of Holies.

This is the tabernacle, Artiforium is what we call it in Greek.

We have a seven-branched candlestick, right?

We have, you might say, the altar of incense, right?

So, we kind of have all of these aspects, these liturgical fans we call ripidia, and you can see there's icons of these.

They're actually seraphim, right?

Because if we remember from Isaiah, it says that they had six wings, many eyes, right?

Two covered their feet, and two covered their face, and with two they fly.

And so, during, you can even see it on this, this is actually a deacon's ripidia.

You can see that's in Sivanic.

Shvat, Shvat, Shvat means holy, holy, holy.

And during part of the consecration of the gifts, the deacon actually stands and waves this over the gifts, consecrating them, indicating the presence of the heavenly host, because we're now in heaven through that entrance.

Again, now we're in heaven, and the heavenly hosts are there to witness and be there in the transformation of the bread and wine.

So speaking about the icons in the Theotokos back here, I noticed that in a lot of, if I'm not mistaken, a lot of Eastern churches, like when you get really to the way back of the church, right, or the eastern-most portion of it, maybe up there, you usually see the Blessed Mother with her hands spread out and then the Christ as a child there too.

So what is this icon here?

What's the meaning of it?

What's going on here?

Right, so that's called the Plakiterá, right?

And it's basically a Greek term that her womb is as wide as the earth, as wide as the universe, right?

Because within her, right, she carried Christ, and that's the indicator, right, is that he is within her, and so that her womb is as wide as the heavens.

And there she's in this position of praying for all of us.

And here you can see in this particular, you can see the three stars, two on her shoulders and one on her head.

That's the declaration of her perpetual virginity.

And then the icons back here, they can vary.

We have one, again, of the Mystical Supper, Christ giving the Eucharist.

This we have the sacrifice of Isaac, or the offering of Isaac, Abraham.

And then we have Melchizedek offering the bread and wine in Genesis 12, whose Christ priesthood, as we've read in the Book of Hebrews, we know whose priesthood comes from not from this Aaronic priesthood, but the one that predates it.

And then over this side altar, over to the side there where the chalice is, we call this the altar of preparation.

And here we prepare the bread and wine prior to the liturgy.

And usually there's an icon of, we call this the icon of extreme humility of Christ.

He's got his hands folded with all of the tools of his crucifixion, his head bowed in complete submission to his Father.

And then the icon of the Nativity.

And then we have John Chrysostom and Basil, which is the two, basically the two liturgies that we celebrate.

The Anaphora, the Eucharistic prayers, were written or edited or put together or expanded.

There's some editing and there's some historical stuff either by St. Basil the Great or John Chrysostom.

And so it's interesting, even the Divine Liturgy and some of our movements, and a lot of the movements and a lot of the scheme still follows what was done in the Hagia Sophia in the 5th, 6th century, especially when the bishop is celebrating hierarchical liturgy.

Some of the things that he does still allude to what was going on in Constantinople in the 5th century.

Both of those guys were about that time, and their liturgies were handed down.

Of course, liturgy develops organically; it's not dead, it's alive.

So there's been appropriate modifications and growths over the 1500 years that we've been celebrating it.

Yeah, very beautiful.

So we celebrate the Liturgy of Basil McRae typically during the Sundays of the Fast and individual liturgies prior to the super major feasts like Christmas, Pascha, Theophany, and then the typical Sunday liturgy or other times during the week we celebrate.

Let me ask you maybe two last questions back here, and then we can start moving on again.

One is, I noticed that the chalice is just humongous.

Is that typical of a Byzantine liturgy to have a large chalice?

Because I know the Roman ones are typically a bit smaller; they're not quite as large.

And then the other question I have is, obviously in the East you use leavened bread, whereas the West uses unleavened flat bread.

I was wondering, like, you know, why is there that difference?

What's the history behind that?

You know, two big questions.

Sure, sure.

Yeah, well, part of our distribution of Holy Communion is the fact we do use leavened bread, which we'll talk about in a second, which has been placed on this, which looks kind of like a cake plate, but this is called a discos.

It's prepared and cut, praying these beautiful prayers of the suffering song of Isaiah.

So I'm actually praying these prayers of like a lamb that led to the slaughter, and then I cut part of it.

One of them is even a soldier pierced his side with a lance and actually stabbed the Eucharist, what's called the lamb, actually the center part, with a liturgical lance, actually.

And then blood and water flowed out, and he was born witness, and his witness was true.

And that's when we add the wine and the water to the chalice.

So it's just beautiful, you know, using Isaiah to prepare this bread for the sacrifice by going through these sacrificial movements, I guess.

And then after the consecration, when it's time for Communion, there is a fraction rite.

We break the bread apart, this lamb, which is this square piece of the bread.

What's interesting is, and then of course we return some of it to the chalice because body and blood separated, his death, body and blood reunited, his life.

And then the clergy commune from one of those four pieces, but then the other two are cut up actually at the holy table during liturgy and then placed into the chalice that has the consecrated wine.

So everybody at liturgy receives from the one lamb.

There's not like reserve posts or anything that we use, and then we give it on a spoon.

So the precious body goes into the precious blood, then Communion is that we give it to you on a spoon.

And so, and the beauty of that is, and then I even say a prayer silently that you don't hear me say, that behold, this is touched lips will take away your iniquities and cleanse your sins, which is a quote of Isaiah 6 when the seraph, right, when Isaiah had his vision of God in the temple, right?

And he said, Oh, woe is me, I'm a man of unclean lips.

And the seraph goes to the altar of incense with these tongs, grabs a coal, comes and purifies his lips.

The word in Greek that we use for this spoon is the same as the tongs in Greek, Isaiah.

It's a libidah, so you eat fire, which is the Eucharistic coal that purifies you.

And that's what's indicated by calling it, it's really called a libidah.

And you know, some of the use of leavened bread, there's, you know, practical reasons.

We don't emphasize so much that it's a Passover meal because there are, you know, it didn't seem, there's been, you know, a lot of theological discussion was, was what Jesus did at the Passover, the Passover meal, or was it something else?

Right, right.

And it's interesting if you read in the Scriptures, it says during the Feast of Unleavened Bread, that Greek word for unleavened bread is azymes.

That's like a specific term, and it says at the Feast of azymes, Jesus took artos.

Well, artos is leavened bread.

Oh, okay, yeah.

Right, so that's just bread, right?

Bread that's leavened.

So Jesus, by the Scriptures, didn't take azymes and say He took the partos.

And so I guess there's scriptural justification in some way, but also it's kind of symbolic too in that because we don't emphasize the Passover, we aren't trying to look at it.

We understand, I mean, we call these trapostas, so it's not like we don't think that Jesus is the Passover Lamb.

That's not what I'm saying, but that the Eucharistic meal isn't, you know, based on the Passover meal in some ways so directly.

So for us, right, the thing is that leavened bread is alive.

So this bread is alive, and in fact, during one part of the liturgy towards the end, we actually, after the consecration, before we place the people's communion parts into the chalice, we add boiling hot water.

So when you come up to receive communion, it's warm again because dead things are cold; alive things are warm, right?

So it's a symbolic, it's also a palatability kind of thing, but it really is an indicator of the fact that this is alive.

It's not just dead.

Well, Father, let's head back out, sure, and I want to ask you just one last question.

Thank you.

Yeah.

So Father, obviously this is a beautiful church or a beautiful temple, but it's not the biggest thing in the world, right?

And that doesn't take away from its beauty at all.

I mean, every time I've come here, it's even, I'd say, added to the intimacy, how close we all are.

But you've been talking about a moving project, and so I want to give you a moment to just talk about what's going on.

Why do you need to move, and how can people help?

Thank you.

Yeah, so one of the historical aspects of St. Luke is for the longest time the parish was serviced by a ritual Roman Catholic priest, one of them being a Benedictine monk at Benedictine College, which is an hour away.

Fantastic man, God bless him, what a sacrifice he made!

But that's really hard to build a community more when we're just ragging him out to try to get him here on Sundays.

So I was the first, really the first full-time, fully dedicated, in the sense that I have no other thing to do, priest than basically for most of the history of the parish.

And in that time then, in this little space, we've basically doubled.

We have about, we've calculated the nave is about 800 square feet or so.

Last Sunday we had 77 people in here, and it's just so tight that we need to move because what I'm afraid of is that we're going to get so big that people won't come because they're so packed in here that they'll just opt out to go somewhere else.

And so we need to move.

What that looks like for us, we're not quite sure yet.

We don't want to go into something that's massive because then all of the intimacy is lost, and then suddenly it's like taking a fire that's burning brightly and then spreading it out all over the ground.

It's just going to go out.

And so we've been looking at properties, we've been praying.

We started just after COVID. Just after COVID, we started as a parish praying the Psalter in the East.

We break up the Psalter into 20 blocks; we call it Kathisma, and people signed up to pray that for a week.

So if everybody's praying what they signed up for, the church prays the entire Psalter weekly.

Mm-hmm.

In this sermon, we've been doing that for two years, and then once a month we pray what's called a Malebon.

It's like a prayer service after liturgy to the Holy Spirit, praying for guidance.

We've been doing that for a little over two years now.

And so we're in this place of waiting because we're in this kind of chicken and egg kind of thing where we're too big to stay here, but we're too small to afford to move.

And so we're just in this kind of quandary.

For example, people are still moving to Kansas City.

This is a place where people are coming, and people are coming here.

I just had a woman the other day, a young family that are moving here from back West and are going to join the parish.

You know, young family, she's going to have another, she's expecting, right?

And so what's amazing about the demographic of St. Luke is we're probably 60 plus percent, maybe more, under 45. So we're very young.

You know, people want authentic worship and an encounter with Christ in the liturgy.

The East and the West does it too, I'm not saying it doesn't, but there is a definite encounter in the Divine Liturgy done well.

And I think, I hope and pray that people come and do encounter Christ here because that's why we're here.

One last thing.

Where can people find the link to donate, or how can they help?

Yeah, so we have a website that's kind of fitting, just being Byzantine and being small.

We aren't very fancy in that way.

It's byzantinekc.org,

and right on the landing page there's a donate button that takes them to this electronic giving.

Many of our Roman Catholic parishes are not a fly-by-night place; it's a solid, reputable place that you can be sure that all the security is there.

If you wanted to write a check, if they wanted to do something like that, they could send it.

Just look up the address of the parish.

We have a Facebook page too, and send it there.

But yeah, anything that would be helpful, because we're just small enough and a lot of young people, and we just aren't established.

In this time I've been here, it'll be five years in June, and we just need to, yeah, in a capacity that we comfortably hold probably 40. We're sticking almost 80, and even on those days, not everybody's here.

So if we all showed up at the same time with the number of guests we get, we could be over 100, and that just makes it hard.

We can hardly make the entrance; that phone has to push people out to get through.

Well, Father, thank you for your hospitality and showing me around.

Every time I've come here, I've always been blessed to see like other young people actually around my age and just a bunch of other people too from all different walks of life.

Father, I know that the ministry you're doing here means a lot to the people, and so I hope that I can, with my channel, with my podcast, help in a way.

So, thank you.

Thank you very much.

Yeah, if I could say one last thing: we are not an ethnic thing, so you don't have to be a Slovak or Ukrainian to come, right?

We're Catholic, and we'd love to have anybody.

As you've seen, the diversity shows that, which is beautiful.

That's what we're shooting for.

Before we end today's episode of Intellectual Catholicism, I do have one last thing to say and to share.

And so, let's do that real quick.

Hi, I'm Father Michael Lee.

I am the administrator of St. Luke Byzantine Catholic Church in Turner Creek, Missouri, and I just wanted to appeal to you today to pray about helping us in our moving project.

I've been the administrator of St. Luke for the last five years, and in that time, we basically have doubled our size.

We went from a congregation of kind of the low 30s up almost into the 80s, and we're just really trying to find a new space where we can expand and grow and offer this beautiful apostolic brand of Christianity to anybody that wants to come.

So we are just appealing for your help.

If you would like to get in and help us to move and to grow and to be able to have this unique and beautiful expression of Catholicism, please visit our website.

It's byzantinkc.org,

and on the landing page, there's a donate button that will take you to another website that you can donate electronically.

We really appreciate anything that you can do, and we're praying for you.

God bless.