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Church is by the Holy Spirit’. It is the Holy Spirit who reveals the
eschatological nature of the sacrament in its fullness. We saw in the Orthodox
the full and complete role assigned to the Holy Spirit, which went far beyond
being the active agent behind the ‘consecratory formula’. Indeed, when we
consider that ‘through his coming of the “last and great day of Pentecost”, the
Holy Spirit transforms this last day into the first day of the new creation and
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manifests the Church as the gift and presence of this first and “eighth” day’,
we cannot but begin to appreciate the importance of the Holy Spirit. And our
liturgy needs to appropriately reflect this. We can perhaps consider how the
liturgy points to the activity of the Holy Spirit in making Christ present
throughout the whole Eucharist. Part of this may include the ways the
assembly is transformed into the Body of Christ through the Spirit.
Interestingly, Catholic theologian, Thomas Rausch, writes on how the liturgy
can make the Eucharistic presence of Christ more apparent throughout the
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whole liturgy, and yet, strangely does not mention the Holy Spirit here. It is
also interesting that in his concluding comments on how we can try to recover
‘the eschatological imagination’ in our liturgies, he again makes no reference to
the Holy Spirit. 28
A brief look at the Anglican Eucharistic rite is instructive on this point.
Beginning with the greeting, the president may choose to invoke the persons
of the Trinity, proclaiming the worship to be offered in the name of the Father,
Son and Holy Spirit. Then follows the ancient exchange, ‘The Lord be with you
/ and also with you’. This exchange is interesting and also features at the
beginning of the Eucharistic prayer – the Sursum Corda. Gooder and Perham
highlight that it is commonly agreed among scholars that the Lord here is the
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Holy Spirit. In this way, the Lord, the Holy Spirit as the giver of life is
immediately affirmed, especially in the translation, ‘and with your spirit’, which
the new Roman Missal favours. Here, the link which Paul makes in Romans
between the Holy Spirit and our spirits is explicit. Therefore, we can say that
the Holy Spirit as the giver of all life is acknowledged from the beginning of
the liturgy. The Collect for Purity follows and there too we find an invocation
to the Holy Spirit, which, some argue, is a calling down of the Holy Spirit upon

25 Schmemann, The Eucharist, p. 36.
26 Schmemann, The Eucharist, p. 36.
27 Rausch, Eschatology, Liturgy, and Christology, p. 135.
28 Rausch, Eschatology, Liturgy, and Christology, pp. 158-161.
29 Gooder and Perham, Echoing the Word, p. 35.

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