Communion Without Consecration

Great Lent poses a liturgical dilemma the Byzantine church solved with characteristic ingenuity. The full Divine Liturgy is a paschal act, a celebration, and the ancient instinct of the fast forbade celebrating it on the strict weekdays of Lent. But the same church did not wish its faithful to pass whole weeks without communion during the very season of deepest effort. The answer is a service with no anaphora at all.

At the Sunday liturgy additional Lambs are consecrated and reserved, and on the appointed evenings the church gathers for vespers, into which the Presanctified rite is grafted. The psalms and hymns of the evening office proceed; the reserved gifts are brought from the table of preparation to the altar in a silent entrance before which the whole congregation kneels, an entrance often accompanied by the hymn Now the Powers of Heaven; the prayer of the day is offered; and the faithful receive the presanctified mysteries after a day of fasting. Nothing is consecrated, so the service is not a eucharist but an extension of the previous one, a design that expresses the theology of the reserved sacrament with total clarity. The atmosphere is unlike anything else in the Byzantine year: candlelight, prostrations, the great Lenten prayer of Ephrem the Syrian, and the sense of a church deliberately holding back its own joy until Pascha releases it.