the prayer
“Taste and see that the Lord is good.” This is the “Kinonikon” (το κοινωνικόν), the hymn of preparation for “Kinonia” (κοινωνία) – Communion. The Church chants it during Lent, when the believer is fasting from “the foods of this world” and focusing his attention and desires on the “essential bread,” the heavenly manna.
In front of these spiritual phrases, which urge us to approach the Holy Cup “with longing and faith,” the faithful chant in response to the priest’s cry “Holies for the holy”: “One Holy One, One Lord Jesus Christ, to the glory of God the Father. Amen.” Then the priest goes out calling, “With the fear of God, faith, and love, draw near!”
It is quite clear that the dialogue between the faithful and the priest reveals two things: the first is the longing for the Holy Cup; the second is the awe and hesitation before it. The Holy One is one and the one who approaches divine communion must approach “with fear, faith and love”! The words of the Apostle Paul are similar, that whoever partakes of the blood and body of the Lord unworthily takes for himself judgment and fire instead of light.
Who is worthy? Except the contrite one?! No one can ever deserve the precious Body and Blood of the Lord. We can feel the need, as the prayers of preparation for Communion say, “so that by my long separation from your divine company I may not become a prey to Satan.” Repentance is the mother of contempt. And repentance in the midst of daily life, its pressures, its needs and its temptations, is a difficult matter. Therefore, the Holy Church has arranged some ways for her children, which help them to approach the Holy Chalice with contempt – worthiness.
The first of these is the examination of conscience and confession, without which man does not see his shortcomings and cannot be crushed before divine love. Repentance is the result of seeing human denial of divine love, and of meeting the gift of grace with human abandonment. All of these remain absent without “seeing” this difference between the call and reality, between what we are called to and what we do, between our reality as children of God and our choice to remain children of the world – often, between the color of the baptismal garment and the colors of life’s behaviors. Therefore, it is always good for us before proceeding to pause, even for a moment! And to make the evangelical commandments a judge of our human actions.
In the Gospel, the Lord Jesus attributed the reason for the lack of repentance among many of his contemporaries to “hardness of heart.” Hardness of heart is formed by the turmoil of life, excessive concern for it, and excessive indulgence in its pleasures. All of these are, in one way or another, a picture of our man today. Therefore, one of the most important things that helps in liberating oneself from this hard shell on the heart is reverent prayers.
Therefore, the Church has arranged for the faithful the prayers of “Matalibsi”, that is, the preparation for communion. These are prayers of reverence, all of which present divine love and human coldness, and the most beautiful Gospel stories about repentance, divine compassion, and the acceptance of the sinner, “because the Lord wants the sinner to return to life” and not to die. Reciting these prayers of reverence actually places us before ourselves in the face of divine love. A sincere pause like this, that is, when we pray these prayers from the heart, is enough to generate in us contrition and a spirit of repentance.
In the face of the awe of the Holy Chalice, one also offers a certain reverence expressed by fasting, which plays an important role in the preparation of the believer, when he puts aside secondary foods in order to prepare for the “essential bread.” It is customary for the believer to fast at least from the evening of the day before the morning Mass. As for the Mass that takes place in the evening, one can also put aside a previous meal, as a kind of preparation for Communion. If one eats his three meals during the day every 6 hours, for example, then one should approach the Holy Chalice after at least 6 hours of fasting, or resort to eating lunch early and keeping it simple!
Where are we from confession, prayers and fasting before receiving the precious Body and Blood of the Lord? The Body of the Lord is “good” for the fasting, the contrite and the praying, and it is then light. The more we prepare, the more open we make ourselves to divine grace and its work in us, and vice versa. These, fasting and prayer, make us more able to see the One “who is with us, invisible” and to address Him as seen, as present among us, handing us His pure Body and precious Blood with His dear hand.
Fasting
“Taste and see that the Lord is good - Hallelujah”
With these wonderful words we come forward to receive the Holy Eucharist during Lent! “So that we may become partakers of eternal life with longing and trembling!”
Man is a “dependent” being, meaning that his life does not continue without nourishment from the sources of its components; therefore, he is dependent on those sources and follows them. Man is a being composed of two natures, a physical one from this world, and a spiritual one that connects him to the world of God. Therefore, he cannot continue living without always obtaining the appropriate food for his body from the elements of this universe. At the same time, the life of the body and its biological cycles do not meet the needs of his entire life for happiness and creativity! He therefore needs to draw life from the divine source as well. As a contemporary saint (Father Paisios) says: Man is like an eagle, and if you put a goat in a cage for him, instead of eating it, he dies! Because the life of an eagle is in reality to fly free from restrictions in the firmament of the sky and watch the mountains from above, so no matter how much you feed his body, if you deprive him of flying, he dies. Likewise, man does not live by providing food for the body only! But also by quenching the divine and sublime thirst within him. Perhaps spiritual food is the most important for man. The cases of the martyrs prove this. They are the ones who, when the body and the spirit conflicted, paid the price of their spiritual life with the body, not the other way around!
Hence, maintaining this balance is the wisdom of life in our world! The Church has arranged its sacraments, fasts, and worship in order to preserve human life in its entirety and not in a fragmented form, so that it can offer the soul more than the world offers the body. There are three ways in which a person eats his food:
1- “Pornography”: When a person eats, it is not to be satisfied, freed from hunger, and give the body its due for the sake of life, but for gluttony and gluttony. When he drinks, it is not “a little wine that gladdens the heart of man,” but a lot that makes his heart heavy with the worries and pleasures of this world. When he dresses, it is not for clothing, but as an example of seduction. When he organizes his life, it is not for order, but for deadly luxuries. If we review the details of our lives, we find, with true confession, that there are at least tails and extensions of this permissive form in our lives, short here and long there! This does not serve life, but is always at the expense of the spiritual food of our lives. There are many examples in the Bible that illustrate cases in which “gluttony” became a killer of “understanding.” Esau sold his birthright and the right of the eldest son for the price of a bowl of soup. Judas sold his master for thirty pieces of silver. After the first miracle of multiplying the loaves and fish, Jesus turned away many of the Jews who sought Him and came to Him because they had received the miracle materially and not spiritually, so they returned to ask Him for bread as well, and the miracle did not lead them to God but to the desire to satisfy the flesh! Thus, unfortunately, the “morsel” becomes deadly to the “Word”, although it was originally given as a gift from God to become a servant who gives thanks!
2- “Daily”: When we strive and are vigilant to balance our food intake! We satisfy the needs of the body and do not forget the food of the soul, acting according to the words of the Lord: “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God” (Mt 4:4). We work not for perishable food but for lasting food. We give our “essential bread” its due and its adequate share of life. This is the moderate state that we strive to maintain throughout the year, between success and failure. We persevere, alongside our professions and daily work, in sharing the Holy Cup with all that it signifies in terms of depth and commitment to God and neighbor. Thus, “food” serves “human life.” This is what our prayer that we repeat before dinner expresses: “The poor shall eat and be satisfied, and shall praise the Lord, and their hearts shall live.” This is the universal biblical hope, that all people may be satisfied, but in order to be freed from the stumbling blocks of life and turn to praising the Lord, because from that their hearts will live. Physical satisfaction “liberates” and praise “lives.” Only the liberated can live. The heart cannot live when it is restricted!
3- “Fasting”: When we deprive our body - if this word can be used only for clarification - of a few of its rights and needs, but willingly, out of our desire to devote ourselves for a period of time to the "Word"! That is why the prophet David says in the Psalms, "I have shriveled like grass, and my heart has withered; I have forgotten to eat my bread; my flesh clings to my bones," and his tears became his drink and ashes his food. When repentance wounded his life, he longed to fast. Thus there are periods in which we fast, and we leave by our will - and not deprive ourselves - some of our physical needs in order to pay special attention to our spiritual needs, for a certain period of time that we call spiritual exercise. In fasting we do not only give up luxuries, for this is the case of the second, previous form. In fasting we even give up some of what is necessary. That is why we eat not to be satisfied, but so that a little hunger remains, and we drink not to be quenched, as is generally the case, but to the point where a memory of thirst remains. This part left is of a size that does not harm the body, but rather helps to invigorate the spirit, and teaches us through practice to change our tastes from worldly lust to heavenly lust. By fasting like this we kill the passions, not the body.
Jesus fasted for “forty days and forty nights” until he was hungry! Here the word “until he was hungry” means to the point that the body could no longer bear it without harm. He fasted “as much as humanly possible.” This is how the great prophets, Moses and Elijah fasted. In the event of Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman, the disciples went to buy food and then returned and found the Lord speaking to the Samaritan woman, and they said to him: “Lord, eat.” This is due to the second form mentioned above, according to which the disciples acted. He said to them: “My food is to do the will of my Father” (John 4:34). This is an image of the third form. Here Jesus’ words do not mean eliminating food from life, but that a specific spiritual need required some free time, that is, leaving some need of the body now in order to attend to the need of the soul. This is fasting.
Jesus is “the bread that came down from heaven.” Our fathers ate manna in the desert and died. But whoever eats the body of Jesus and drinks his blood as real food and real drink lives forever. This truth draws us in Lent to forget some of the “daily bread” and seek more of the “essential bread.” Then a longing and fervor for the Holy Cup is born within us. At a moment when the body is hungry, how beautiful is the psalmist and the believer who cries out: “Taste and see that the Lord is good!” Alleluia!