Interview with Fr. Roberto Ubertino

Fr. Roberto, front row, holding icon. Photo from stjohnsmission.org.

In case you missed it, Timm's interview with Fr. Roberto Ubertino is now available on Ancient Faith Radio. In Part 1, Fr. Roberto speaks about the theological background of the second liturgy. In Part 2, he shares examples of ways that parishes can participate in the second liturgy. Fr. Roberto is the Founder and Director of St. John the Compassionate Mission in Toronto, and the Good Neighbours Drop-in, an Orthodox community outreach in Scarborough, Ontario.

Here's an excerpt from Part 1:

​"The model of life that we have is proving to be quite effective, because it’s very simple. I’m learning myself by living it. The intuition of living out the liturgy after the Liturgy actually works. It’s quite exciting to see it play out. 

"We are called in the Liturgy to go forth in peace in the name of the Lord.... You continue this Liturgy wherever you go. The very nature of the Church is to manifest this new reality of the Kingdom of God that is present among us. To simply see the Liturgy as divorced from humanity, from the concrete lives of the people around which the Church celebrates the divine mysteries, seems to me to make the Liturgy, [as] St. Maximos the Confessor would say, into an idol.  

"It is the sense that the Church has an intimate life and it also has an exterior life. It has a call to intimacy with God, but it also has a call to go out of itself. Only in that dynamic tension, both within and outside itself, can then the Liturgy be truly a Liturgy that gives glory to God. Otherwise, we make it into an idol, a beautiful idol, a moving idol, but it’s still something that we don’t often pay attention to. In the same writings of St. Maximos the Confessor, he speaks about how, in a profound and very strong phrase, the poor man is God. He speaks about how God suffers until the end of time in those who suffer.  

"St. John Chrysostom uses another way of describing it: there are these two altars—the altar of the Lord; there are always people who want to serve there. But he then speaks about the liturgy in the marketplace, the altar of the brother, the altar of the poor, and at that altar the Lord finds very few people who are willing to serve there. In order to truly have the table of the poor, the table of the brother, you also need to have an intention in relation to the table of the Lord. And the same, the table of the Lord, when we sit at the Lord’s table, it draws us to also to the table of the poor, and it draws us to the liturgy of the marketplace. When you live those two, you really live the fullness of the faith in action.

"So we have actually built the mission in that way, where we have the two tables, and they are both cared for, liturgically both looked after in each appropriate way. Where we serve the meals, where we sit around and talk and share and welcome the stranger, there is as much care in making sure that place is dignified and conveys a meaning to who we are as images of God. There is as much care in that as there is in setting up for the Liturgy and taking care of the sanctuary. That’s concretely how it’s lived. That’s how the two realities of both living the Liturgy and the liturgy after the Liturgy come together. It’s really simple and it works."