How Divine Liturgy Service Reinvigorates Your Commitment to Participate in The Sacraments of Healing Offered By The Church.

Jesus Heals the Paralytic

There is something about a Divine Liturgy service that envelopes you in the arms of Christ. Many times after service, members are in a festive and good mood—it is not showy. It is more like an inner glow that manifests itself in people being loving toward each other.  Even when the human element of strife breaks out, it can be characterized as what doctors and nurses like to refer to as break-out pain. The breakout of strife is analogous to a feeling of physical discomfort that breaks through a painkiller's strength to mute that pain. Although participating in Divine Liturgy is not an opiate, it is an interactive medicine that gives strength to overcome the weaknesses of the fallen man by alleviating the suffering of participants.

Suffering, aka passion, is a type of pain, albeit in the case of social interaction, it can be more accurately characterized as a spiritual-emotional pain that can be the cause of or the result of mental anguish. Which is then, you know, shared.

This sharing can have violent ramifications, but I think, because we Christians are focused so much on our own sinfulness and recognize the suffering of our brother or sister as being the result of an attack from the enemy, and we love them or work to love them through the agency of the Holy Spirit, these sharings of distress are minimized. People listen, try to find solutions, don’t contribute as boisterously to escalations, and things die down…and over time, issues get resolved. Somehow, a spiritual smoothing of rough edges occurs, and in this way, the mystical healing of this small society, which has participated in the Divine Liturgy, takes place.  It’s a microcosm of how the Christian Church heals the world, which is its mission. The healing of the world is brought about by each person working on their own salvation, working to heal from the many wounds in their lives that make being a human difficult. This is the crux of the self-control that St. Paul talks about in Galatians and other places as a fruit of the Holy Spirit.

But generally, during and just after Divine Liturgy, people are just happier, more loving, more forgiving, more able to take on the burden of others, and let it not become a personal worm.  After all, St. Paul says and we repeat each Sunday, that we, ourselves, are the chief sinners. We've got our own sinfulness to contend with.

The Church expects that we will fall, and The Church gives us the mechanism for rising again, and when we participate in the Trapeza, what some recognize as the Agape meal, we are able to practice what the Church teaches as disciples-in-practicum, when the lessons of the Church is still strongly affecting our hearts, purifying our soul and strengthening the resolve of our will to conform to the likeness of Christ.

Approach your planner this way. Know that the good goals you have, God has implanted in your heart. Use it to record what you have done, what needs work, and what victories the Lord has given you. Sure you've planned for the future and didn't quite get there, but the past can show you that you made good faith efforts, and that kind of effort always gets an A. In this way when you are confronted with your imperfection, you won’t be so crushed when your use of the planner is not as perfect as you would like. Just remember that it is a tool to help you order your day in conformity with the hours of prayer, and with the obligations of life that God has situated you in, and that the Church is always going to provide you with the structure to enter again into the Grace of God.  That is why, no matter what occurs in your life, it is important to go to Church and experience the Divine Liturgy and Trapeza (aka Agape meal), which works invisibly on the souls of those serious about healing the wounds of their heart.