"The Words of the Liturgy are the Words by which God Made Heaven and Earth"
Fr. Rafail Noica on St. Sophrony of Essex
In a short article that I wrote but was not published because it was too late—“too late” is my middle name—I named [St. Sophrony] a man of the word…And our church services [at the Monastery in Essex] were centered on the word. When I was a deacon, he would tell me to say the words of the petitions attentively so that someone who was hard of hearing would be able to hear without straining. He said, “Don’t you realize that the words of the Liturgy are the words by which God made the heavens and the earth?” Don’t ask me what this means, because I still don’t understand it. And still, something in my heart completely agreed. But I don’t know why. Maybe one of you will enlighten me at some point.
Did God make the heavens and the earth saying “again and again, in peace let us pray to the Lord,” or “he is worthy” or “it is truly right”? And still, he said it many times, he would often quote “in the beginning was the word” (Jn 1:1), and he was very focused on this word and it was very important to him, because it was very important for St. Paul, who says “who saved you: the Law or the word of salvation?” That is, through the word that he gave—through prayer, because we learned and we received this Tradition from Christ through the Apostles—thus, for Saint Paul, the word was not only life-giving and salvific energy, but also an energy that made the heavens and the earth. God did not create a workshop for Himself with specialized tools to make heaven and earth, He said “let there be” and there was. And Christ, being God and speaking with authority, said: “If you have faith as a mustard seed, you will tell this mountain to be thrown into the ocean and it will be so.” And on the day He cursed the fig tree, He said: “You will tell it to unearth itself and plant itself in the sea, and it will be so.” But there, the biblical commentators say that He was speaking about the old Church [Israel] from whom no one would bear fruit any longer, because the old Law had become a shadow and the new Law of Truth had arrived, because the Law was given through Moses, but grace and truth through Jesus Christ, as St. John also says.
And grace is imparted through words. And why do all the Desert and Philokalic Fathers say that you must live [have experience] before giving a word—a word that you lived? Because [a word] is an energy, and Tradition, the Church’s Tradition, is to be next to someone who has, who bears the Tradition, just as the Apostles bore the Tradition from Christ and spread it further. And you receive the energy of salvation from these people; an energy that is expressed, among other things, in words— only among other things for us, because while we are in the body, our words are one thing, our thoughts are another, our actions another, but all these are one in God; there is no distance between thought, word, and deed.
And everything is energy. Even modern science is discovering that everything is energy. You see how quantum physics is discovering that everything is energy. Quantum physics is discovering that matter doesn’t even exist—this solid [table] that you bang your head on doesn’t exist, but it’s compact energy. And quantum physics is discovering that human thought is an energy that does not perish, that crosses the entire universe. Well, Fr. Sophrony also said this, and the Fathers said this in different ways, beginning with the Apostle Paul until now.
A great Orthodox explanation of "energy". The science is trying to catch up with the fathers!!!