'We are all in there together'

An Orthodox Catholic priest explained in simple terms the mystery of the Eucharist in response to a question from a parent of child about to receive Holy Communion. He wrote:

So we don’t just say that we want Christ to live metaphorically in our hearts — we receive Him physically in our bodies. God comes to us, God transforms that bread and wine, so that He can truly become a part of us. Literally.

He also went on to write something very beautiful that I had not quite thought of before:

We don’t just say that we are meant to be in communion with God and with one another, but our priests place bits of bread for the Theotokos and the Saints, for the loved ones who have gone before us, into the communion chalice so that we are all in there together when we approach the one holy chalice as a parish community.

Far from imagining that the real change in the bread and wine was some notion invented in the West in the middle ages, St Cyril of Alexandria mirroring many other early Fathers of the Church wrote in 430 A.D.:

Soaked in the divine nature

Source: ChristianB

Today we commemorate St Cyril of Alexandria who lived from 376-444A.D. in what is, today, Egypt.  He was no stranger to controversy and if some accounts are to be believed he did not suffer heretics gladly.   He presided at the Council of Ephesus which affirmed Mary as the Theotokos or God-bearer (or Mother of God).  For one particular overview of some of these controversies refer to here. 

Cyril made an important contribution to theology in helping to deepen the Church’s understanding of both the human and divine nature of Christ. The joining of these two natures is so mystically powerful that Cyril uses images of fire to describe how the divine nature spreads out from the body of the God-man into the human race transforming iron but never destroying it.  Human nature is ‘divinised’ or transformed and transfigured.