From May 28 to 31, 2019, Una Voce Canada members Theresa V and her daughter Maria attended a Sacred Liturgy Conference called “The Living Waters of the Eucharist” in Spokane, Washington. Members of the Latin Mass communities at Sts. Joachim and Ann Parish in Aldergrove, British Columbia, and Holy Family Parish in Vancouver, they were assisted by a bursary from Una Voce Canada. In a two-part series, they share what they have learned and experienced.
Part 1: Information, Impressions, and Inspiration, by Theresa V | Part 2: The Living Waters in the Sacred Liturgy, by Maria V
All photos courtesy of Marc Salvatore / SacredLiturgyConference.org.
For information about Una Voce Canada’s bursary program, please email info@unavocecanada.org.
***
The Sacred Liturgy Conference held in in Spokane was titled “The Living Waters of the Eucharist.” This theme was chosen because it is a metaphor God uses in the Old Testament to represent right worship, and a metaphor Christ Himself chooses to use in reference to his Body and Blood. This image is rich in meaning, tying in the Old Testament prefigurements, and continues to be not just a prominent symbol throughout the Church’s traditions but also the reality, finding its ultimate fulfillment in the Eucharist, the pinnacle of Christian worship.
References to living water are found throughout the Old Testament, where the idea of living water meant moving or flowing water. Scripture begins with it in the first book, with God watering the garden of Paradise with a spring [Gen 2:6, 10], and ends with it in the last book, with the fountain of life coming from the Throne of the Lamb [Rev 22:1-2]. Living water is applied to Divine Worship in the book of Jeremias, when the people have abandoned the Lord and turned to the worship of idols. The priests of the Temple having turned their backs on the Holy of Holies, God immediately uses the metaphor of living water for right worship of Him, in speaking of these liturgical abuses: “They have forsaken me, the fountain of living water, and have digged to themselves cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water” [Jer 2:13]. God identifies living water with a right relationship to Him, Himself being the Source; the broken vessels are representative of false worship.
This symbolism can be better understood when the role fresh water had for the Jews is understood. There was a twofold cleansing power of water in the Old Law: regular water was to be used for filth, and fresh, “living water” for ritual impurity [Zech 13:1]. But this is raised by God to another level: while uncleanness, the effect of sin, is washed away by water [Lev. 15:13], we also see that for the cleansing of moral evil, or sin, blood is necessary. Here it is clear that blood has a cleansing quality, acting as water on the spiritual level. God explains the reason for this to Moses: blood was the symbol of life – consequently to take something’s blood meant to take its life. “For the life of all flesh is in the blood” [Lev. 17:14]. It was for this reason that the Jews were forbidden to drink the blood of a creature, for God is the Author of life – only He may take it. If God is the Source of life, then a rejection of Him would necessarily mean death, and ever since the fall, this has been the punishment for sin. This reality was represented in the Old Covenant with animal sacrifices, to drive home to the people the graveness of sin and the concept of spiritual death that the soul suffers as a result of it. Just as the sprinkling of the doorposts with the blood of a lamb saved the Israelites from death, so God also commanded that the people be sprinkled with the blood of sacrifice to wash away their sin.
To take this a step further: In the prophet Ezechiel’s famous vision (the Vidi aquam sung at Mass during Eastertide), he saw water flowing from the right side of the Temple, from the altar [Ez 47:1]. In the Temple in Jerusalem, this was the same side from which the mixture of blood and water from the sacrifices was channelled out. Since blood represents life, so living water, which cleanses sin, means, in the language of the Old Testament, flowing water mixed with blood. Therefore the water that he saw, which made the sea fresh, was bloody water – the image of that which flowed forth from Jesus’ body, which He identifies as the True Temple, the new place of worship, as John makes sure to point out in his Gospel: “He was speaking of the temple of his body” [Jn 2:21]. St. Paul, previously a pious Jew who understood the significance of this imagery, sums it all up in his epistle to the Hebrews: “For if the blood of goats and of oxen, and the ashes of an heifer being sprinkled, sanctify such as are defiled, to the cleansing of the flesh: How much more shall the blood of Christ?” [Heb. 9:14].
Dr. Nathan Schmiedicke explained in his talk that the key to this symbolism is found in the incident in John’s gospel when Jesus met the Samaritan woman at the well. Here Christ Himself explains the meaning of living water in the context of the true worship of God. John starts out with two references: he points out that they met at the sixth hour (the only other time he mentions the sixth hour is at the Last Supper), and he mentions Jesus’ thirst, which parallels the thirst of Calvary. Then early in the dialogue, Jesus offers the woman the true living water that gives salvation: “The water that I will give him, shall become in him a fountain of water, springing up into life everlasting” [Jn 4:14]. This ties in the symbolic meaning of living water in Divine Worship – He offers this as the solution to the problem she brings up about the schism of Samaria, which concerned the place of worship. Jesus says instead that the new worship of the Father will be in spirit and truth. Elsewhere, He states that He is the Truth [Jn 14:6]; He is then, with these words, identifying Himself as the New Temple, and His body as the new location of worship – it is from It that the living waters will spring. This chapter on living water is followed by Our Lord’s discourse on the Eucharist two chapters later. He declares that whoever shall eat of His body and drink of His blood will have life [Jn 6:55]. This is connected to an episode in the following chapter, where Jesus makes the curious statement that in the man who believes, “out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water” [Jn 7:38, Douay-Rheims] – a passage that makes sense only in light of Chapter 6. The living water He speaks of is clearly a reference to the Eucharist.
Continue reading →
