“So if I’m following you, then the one-on-one, personal relationship, the direct interaction that is so important, is found mainly during the time of the Eucharist? If that is right (or close) then it would seem limiting to me because the real communication only happens at a specific place during specific times.”
You missed my point. We become a participant in or a part of the Body of Christ through the Eucharist and that almost always occurs within the community called the ecclesia. Being a “participant” in the Body of Christ, being a member of The Church, does not cease when the Divine Liturgy ends or when, as some sarcastic person here on FR once commented in a thoroughly Western way, the Bread and Wine are absorbed into the body.
This participation can, by an openness to God’s “grace” lead to a “dying to the self” so that the Christian exists only within the love of God, a situation where the eye of the soul sees no longer “as through a glass darkly” but rather is so focused on God that the Christian can clearly “see” and become one with the uncreated energies of God in the form of the Divine Light which the apostles experienced at Mount Tabor. We consider this to be beyond any “personal relationship with God”. A very holy Archmandrite, now asleep in Christ, a man who to my way of thinking is very much a saint, wrote:
“The moment will come when heart and mind are so suffused by the vision of the infinite holiness and humility of the God-Christ that our whole being will rise in a surge of love for God.”
Or, as our God bearing Father, +Gregory Palamas taught:
“We unite ourselves to Him, in so far as this is possible, by participating in the godlike virtues and by entering into communion with Him through prayer and praise. Because the virtues are similitudes of God, to participate in them puts us in a fit state to receive the Deity, yet it does not actually unite us to Him. But prayer through its sacral and hieratic power actualizes our ascent to and union with the Deity, for it is a bond between noetic creatures and their Creator.”
“The moment will come when heart and mind are so suffused by the vision of the infinite holiness and humility of the God-Christ that our whole being will rise in a surge of love for God.”
Beautiful Post! Thank You for capturing such and awesome understanding of Our Eucharistic Lord!
Thanks for the explanation, it is a very different approach.