The Comforter

 Since the bright day of our Lord’s Resurrection, we’ve refrained from using “the prayer of the Holy Spirit.”  In none of our Divine Services have we uttered His prayer:

O Heavenly King, the Comforter, the Spirit of Truth, Who is everywhere present and fills all things.  Treasury of blessings, and Giver of Life: Come and abide in us, and cleanse us from every impurity, and save our souls, O Good One!

Our refraining from offering this prayer in no way detracts from our worship of nor our honor toward the Third Person of the Holy Trinity.  It is simply a move toward first and foremost the importance of the Resurrection in our lives.  For those forty days we dedicate deference to Christ’s Life Creating work of Resurrection, His destruction of death BY His death!

And for the intervening ten days we give that same deference to the recognition of His Glorious Ascension, for it is by this creative act that mankind is blessed to receive the path to His heavenly kingdom, and that we as His created race find a body like ours seated at the right hand of the Father—in Glory!

Today, the Holy Church returns to Her “normal” practice of worship.  Today we reinstitute the practice of kneeling, something that also “disappeared” with the advent of our Lord’s Resurrection.

There’s another Liturgical ‘change’ that we reinstate today that has also been missing for the past fifty days.  This is our offering the hymn sung after the Holy Eucharist is returned to the Altar after communing the faithful:

We have seen the True Light.  We have received the Heavenly Spirit.  We have found the True Faith, worshipping the undivided Trinity, Who has saved us.

Our Lord taught us, I am the Light of the world.  He who follows Me shall not walk in darkness, but have the light of life.” (John 8:12)

And so within this prayer, we acknowledge the fullness of the Trinity—Christ as the One Who illumines us in faith, the Holy Spirit Who fills us with His understanding, and the Father as the Completion of the Divine Trinity.  For as the hymn states clearly, it is through the Holy Trinity that we find salvation.

We find the full revelation of the Trinity once again in the Church’s hymnology from Vespers:

Come, O people, let us worship the Godhead in three Persons: the Son in the Father, with the Holy Spirit.  For the Father timelessly begot the Son, co-eternal and co-enthroned with Him; and the Holy Spirit was in the Father and is glorified with the Son.  We worship one Power, one Essence, one Godhead, and we say: “Holy God, Who created all things through Your Son with the cooperation of the Holy Spirit; Holy Mighty, through Whom we know the Father; and through Whom the Holy Spirit came to dwell in the world; Holy Immortal, Comforting Spirit, Who proceeded from the Father and rests in the Son.  O Holy Trinity, glory to You!”

On this day, let us all worship God in Trinity, one in essence, and undivided, Who loves His creation mankind sufficiently to become one of us, and to dwell among and in us!