Quotes from Alexander Schmemann

Eucharist is the only full and real response of man to God's creation, redemption and gift of heaven. But this perfect man who stands before God is Christ. In Him alone all that God has given man was fulfilled and brought back to heaven. He alone is the perfect Eucharistic Being. He is the Eucharist of the world. In and through this Eucharist the whole creation becomes what it always was to be and yet failed to be.

In the great religions which have given shape to human aspirations, God plays on an orchestra which is far out of tune, yet there has often been a marvelous, rich music made.

At this stage we shall say only this: the Eucharist is the entrance of the Church into the joy of its Lord. And to enter into that joy, so as to be a witness to it in the world, is indeed the very calling of the Church, its essential leitourgia, the sacrament by which it "becomes what it is." In

When we see the world as an end in itself, everying becomes itself a value and consequently loses all value, because only in God is found the meaning (value) of everything, and the world is meaningful only when it is the "sacrament" of God's presence.

Homo sapiens," "homo faber" … yes, but, first of all, "homo adorans.

Whether we "spiritualize" our life or "secularize" our religion, whether we invite men to a spiritual banquet or simply join them at the secular one, the real life of the world, for which we are told God gave his only-begotten Son, remains hopelessly beyond our religious grasp.

Not given, not blessed by God, it was food whose eating was condemned to be communion with itself alone, and not with God. It is the image of the world loved for itself, and eating it is the image of life understood as an end in itself.

In the story of the Garden this took place in the cool of the day: that is, at night. And Adam, when he left the Garden where life was to have been eucharistic—an offering of the world in thanksgiving to God—Adam led the whole world, as it were, into darkness. In one of the beautiful pieces of Byzantine hymnology Adam is pictured sitting outside, facing Paradise, weeping. It is the figure of man himself.

Christianity does not condemn the world. The world has condemned itself when on Calvary it condemned the One who was its true self. "He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not" (Jn. 1:10).

We know that real life is "eucharist," a movement of love and adoration toward God, the movement in which alone the meaning and the value of all that exists can be revealed and fulfilled.

To live in the world as if there were no God ! "-but hon esty to the Gospel, to the whole Christian tradition, to the experience of every saint and every word of Christian litu rgy demands exactly the opposite : to live in the world seeing everything in it as a revelation of God, a sign of His presence, the joy of ·His coming, the call to communion with Him , the hope for fulfillment in Him

No one has been 'worthy' to receive communion, no one has been prepared for it. At this point all merits, all righteousness, all devotions disappear and dissolve. Life comes again to us as a Gift, a free and divine gift...Everything is free, nothing is due and yet all is given. And, therefore, the greatest humility and obedience is to accept the gift, to say yes - in joy and gratitude.

The Eucharist is the sacrament of cosmic remembrance: it is indeed a restoration of love as the very life of the world.

Sad brightness": the sadness of my exile, of the waste I have made of my life; the brightness of God's presence and forgiveness, the joy of the recovered desire for God, the peace of the recovered home. Such is the climate of lenten worship; such is its first and general impact on my soul.

For the Gospel is not only a "record" of Christ's resurrection; the Word of God is the eternal coming to us of the Risen Lord, the very power and joy of the resurrection.

We simply forget all this—so busy are we, so immersed in our daily preoccupations—and because we forget, we fail. And through this forgetfulness, failure, and sin, our life becomes "old" again—petty, dark and ultimately meaningless—a meaningless journey toward a meaningless end. We manage to forget even death and then, all of a sudden, in the midst of our "enjoying life" it comes to us: horrible, inescapable, senseless.

Homo sapiens," "homo faber" … yes, but, first of all, "homo adorans." The first, the basic definition of man is that he is the priest.

In the process of replacing the old religions, Christianity became a religion.

We should have understood long ago that there is, in this world, religion without God, religion as a center of all idols that possess fallen man, religion that is the justification for these idols.

Man is a hungry being. But he is hungry for God. Behind all the hunger of our life is God. All desire is finally a desire for Him.

If the Church is in Christ, its initial act is always the act of thanksgiving, of returning the world to God.

Love is the essence of the holiness of the Church.

It seems to me that any ideology is bad because it is inevitably reductive and identifies other ideologies as evil, and itself with truth, whereas both truth and goodness are always transcendent.