In most Greek parishes the doors open long before anything a visitor would call the beginning. Orthros, which is Matins, starts between 8:15 and 9:00, and the Liturgy follows at 9:30 or 10:00, with no gap between them and no announcement. Orthros ends with the Great Doxology, and while its last notes are still in the air the priest opens the Royal Doors and begins the Liturgy. Someone arriving at the printed time walks in to find singing well under way and assumes he is late. He is not; he has missed an hour of psalms that was never advertised separately. In Slavic practice Matins is normally served the evening before, as part of the All-Night Vigil.
Meanwhile, out of sight, something else has been going on for twenty minutes. On the north side of the sanctuary, behind the icon screen, stands a small table called the prothesis, and the rite performed there is the Proskomedia, from a Greek word meaning the offering. Almost nobody in the nave sees it. It is the preparation of the bread and wine, and it is not a housekeeping chore but a small liturgy with its own prayers and its own theology. A visitor who does not know it happened will miss the meaning of half of what he does see.
The bread is a prosphoron, a round loaf of leavened wheat bread baked by a member of the parish, usually a woman who has been doing it for decades. Before baking, the dough is pressed with a carved wooden seal whose central square bears four letters in a cross: IC XC above, NI KA below, for Iesous Christos Nika, Jesus Christ conquers. That it is leavened is deliberate, the Byzantines holding that leavened bread signified the risen and living Christ; the quarrel with the Latin unleavened wafer was bitter and belongs to another chapter.
The priest takes up a small knife with a spear-shaped blade, called the spear, and cuts down the four sides of the square seal while saying the words of Isaiah. He lifts the cube of bread out of the loaf: this is the Lamb. He cuts it crosswise underneath so that it can later be broken, sets it on the diskos, the footed gold plate that answers to a Western paten, and pierces its right side with the spear while wine and water are poured into the chalice.
He was led as a sheep to the slaughter, and as a lamb before his shearer is silent, so He opens not His mouth.Isaiah 53:7, Orthodox Study Bible (St. Athanasius Academy Septuagint)
But one of the soldiers pierced His side with a spear, and immediately blood and water came out.John 19:34, NKJV
Then he populates the plate. To the right of the Lamb goes one triangular particle for the Theotokos, with the verse about the queen standing at the king's right hand, Psalm 44:10 [45:9]. To the left go nine particles in three rows of three, one for each rank of the saints; below go particles for the living, beginning with the bishop, then for the departed. This is where the slips of paper come in. Parishioners hand in names beforehand, and the priest reads them and cuts a crumb for each: a dead husband, a son on deployment, a name somebody has been submitting for eleven years.
- The Lamb
- The cube cut from the seal. This alone becomes the Body of Christ.
- First rank
- St. John the Forerunner and Baptist
- Second rank
- The prophets — Moses, Elijah, Daniel and the rest
- Third rank
- The apostles, Peter and Paul at their head
- Fourth rank
- The hierarchs — Basil the Great, Gregory the Theologian, John Chrysostom, Nicholas
- Fifth rank
- The martyrs, Stephen first
- Sixth rank
- The monastic saints — Anthony, Euthymios, Savvas
- Seventh rank
- The unmercenaries, the physician saints who took no fee — Cosmas and Damian
- Eighth rank
- Joachim and Anna, the saint of the day, and all the saints
- Ninth rank
- The author of the Liturgy being served — John Chrysostom, or Basil on the ten days he is used
The order of the nine ranks varies slightly between Greek and Slavic books. Greek practice normally uses one large prosphoron whose seal contains all the commemorative sections; Russian practice uses five separate small loaves, one each for the Lamb, the Theotokos, the nine ranks, the living and the departed.
It matters what those particles are and are not. Orthodox teaching is that the Lamb alone is consecrated. The particles are not; they are not small communions for the absent. What happens to them is this: after everyone has received, the priest scrapes every one of them off the plate into the chalice, into the Blood of Christ, praying that the Lord wash away by His precious Blood the sins of all those commemorated. So the last thing that happens to your grandmother's name, and to the name of the man you are still angry at, is that it is swept into the cup. A visitor never sees it happen.
The priest sets the asterisk over the diskos, two curved metal bands crossed so they arch above the bread without touching it, with the verse about the star that stood over the place where the young Child was; then covers diskos and chalice with veils, and both together with a large veil called the aer. Why quietly, and why early? Partly for a historical reason: in the ancient Church the people brought bread and wine from their houses and the deacons selected what would be used, and this is the elaborated descendant of that sorting, which was never public. But the tradition also reads it theologically. St. Germanus of Constantinople, writing in the eighth century, takes the table of oblation as the cave at Bethlehem and the covered diskos as the manger. The Liturgy proper will be the public ministry. This is the thirty years nobody was watching.
The water mixed into the chalice here is cold, and is a different thing from the hot water called the zeon poured in much later, just before communion. The first recalls the blood and water from the pierced side; the second means something else, explained below.