“Let us lift up our hearts—We lift them up to the Lord” (Anaphora of Divine Liturgy)
We say that we offer bread and wine to be transformed into the very Body and Blood of Jesus Christ Himself, but they are not actually gifts from ourselves. Yes, human beings grew the wheat and baked the flour to bring Him the sacred bread, and the earth brought forth the vines that produced the grapes that were crushed into juice. Men fermented the juice to make the wine; yet we are truthful in chanting: “Thine own of Thine own we offer to Thee,” acknowledging that all things in the universe including ourselves are products of God alone. We are the creatures capable of realizing that reality and thanking Him for it all. He made the earth for us. Let us express our appreciation.
Now at this moment we each are offering up as it were on invisible plates or patens our own hearts. It is the place where our life juice of blood meets the Holy Spirit. Our hearts, from which come our emotions, feelings, and God’s gift of life, we are offering back as a present to the Giver of life; however:
A. We cannot lift up our hearts if they are filled with despondency and depression. They are too heavy to hold aloft, and they pull our eyes down from looking upward to Him;
B. We cannot offer our hearts to God when we have committed them to some one or something already. Unless we free our thoughts and cleanse our minds of all distractions and have become like the cherubim fixated on the Lord alone; until we “lay aside all earthly cares,” our hearts belong to whomever or whatever it is that is more important than the Creator of everything including ourselves;
C. We cannot offer what is not ours, and our hearts are not ours if they are not in our control;
D. We know that God is not One Who is willing to share His throne with foreign deities. If He is not alone on the throne of our hearts, He is not there at all.
Besides lifting up our hearts to the Lord, we are following our hearts on the way to the grand meeting of the Lord. As St. Paul described the Second Coming of our loving Lord Jesus Christ, He will come with the angels and saints who have gone before us to the Lord, and we who are on earth “shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so shall we ever be with the Lord” (II Thessalonians 4:17). Mystically at the Divine Liturgy we are already experiencing the end of the world when we shall be taken away from time and space. We are already beyond this lifetime with all that it holds for us. Like the incense, our hearts are wafting upward to greet Christ in the air, to feel His presence and to imbibe His peace.
As we learn to experience His presence in the sacred icons, we are already gazing upon His countenance in anticipation and indeed in spiritual essence. We find our places among the saints in the icons who are now among us invisibly. As we grow in spirituality, we become ever more aware of the angels and saints who sing with us hymns of praise to the Holy Trinity. This happens in proportion to the cleansing of our hearts and our openness to the Holy Spirit within us. It’s the reason why our loving Lord insists that we cannot experience His presence when we have anything yet to be reconciled with another person. We have no real gift to bring Him when our hearts are filled with anger, hatred or thoughts or revenge against somebody who is also loved by the great Lover as much as He loves us.