Fellowship Hour II
In our last post, we talked about the connections between the meal we serve at Fellowship Hour and the porch on our new temple and the Divine Liturgy, and we pointed out how all of that is a foretaste of the Kingdom of God.
To illustrate all that, I shared with you an experience I once had during a big family breakfast, and, believe it or not, I do have enough self-awareness to know that a lot of you are going to just regard that as one more Old Guy Story.
So, in this post, we’re going to work on those connections from the opposite direction: we’ll start, not with a meal, but with the Divine Liturgy itself. Here’s how one of our contemporary holy fathers, Elder Zacharias of Essex, describes that service:
“In the Liturgy, we invest all our prayer and best dispositions in the bread and wine. God receives these gifts and fills them with His own divine life, returning them to us so that we might live.” (Monasticism, p 69)
Elder Zacharias goes on to point out that the Divine Liturgy constitutes an “exchange of our mortal life with the infinite life of God”, and he further observes that same “exchange of lives” also takes place in the fellowship of a genuine community.
At its best, that’s what Fellowship Hour is all about: it is an “exchange of lives”. During that meal, we invest ourselves in the lives of others, we share who we are with our sisters and brothers in the parish, and that is an icon of the way the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit share Themselves with each of us in the Divine Liturgy.
So, when you get right down to it, the interaction that takes place in that Fellowship Hour meal is one of the ways that we become a genuine community—which is just another way of saying it’s one of the ways we actually enter into the Divine Community of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
There’s just a whole lot more to say about that amazing dynamic—and, in the weeks ahead, we’re going to do a whole series of posts on Fellowship Hour. But, right now, it’s worth pausing (and, yes, that’s a preemptive pun) to consider just how different all this is from what you typically find in American Christianity.
The small congregations in which I grew up would often have a once a month potluck, and I’m sure that there are parishes that still get together in that way. Larger communities now expect folks to get their fellowship in small groups that meet periodically. And, of course, congregations of all sizes have been experimenting with technological approaches to fellowship. But rarely does a community provide a weekly opportunity to share a meal and spend unstructured time with folks.
But this is where we need to circle back around and remember what the porch on our temple symbolizes: it’s an invitation to participate in that “exchange of lives”; an invitation to share with others the way the Most Holy Trinity shares with us.
Now, granted, once our new temple is up and running, the actual food service is going to happen in the building we now use for worship. That structure will be our Fellowship Hall, and it’s the middle building in this site plan
But here in Central Texas the weather is pretty nice all year long, and we already have picnic tables under the trees all around the property. Folks like to spread out at those tables, and the same thing is going to continue to happen, even when we also have a nice indoor space in which to eat.
That means any number of folks are going to end up on the porch of the temple. As we’ve already noted, there will be nice, wide benches and lots of shade…and, actually, I’ve already got my spot picked out
If you’ll look closely, you can just make me out on the left hand side of the porch, behind that big end column, where the shadows are going to be thick, right before you get to the chapel entrance.
That’s where I’ll be. Just bring me my plate of food and a cold drink, and we’ll catch up on everything or just sit together for a while.
In the meantime, if that sounds like the kind of thing you’d like to do on a weekly basis, join us here in Central Texas.
If you relocating isn’t an option, come visit.
If you can’t come for a visit, why not support what we’re doing and help us get that porch and temple up and running?
You can support us with your prayers (Akathist for a New Temple: PDF/video). You can restack this post, share it with everyone you know, or pay for a subscription. You can pick up some of our Come See Something Beautiful merch, remember a beloved pet by commissioning an image for the Calming Room of our new temple or make a donation to our building fund.
And just to wrap all this up with a proper Texas Take, we’ll leave you with a little bluegrass gospel.