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The explanation of this involves "mystery". I have yet to meet a Protestant, except maybe some Anglicans in the old days and some conservative Lutherans, who have any understanding of what The Church has believed about the Liturgy for the past 2000+ years, which is a shame since at least as to Westerners, it is precisely and exactly what your Latin Rite ancestors believed and probably, I'm told, even Luther believed.

As one of those "Anglicans in the old days", I have to agree with you. But I think the problem is a little "thicker" than you indicate. It centers on the meaning of sacrament. I have the feeling that you probably don't care for Alexander Schmemann, but when I read his For the Life of the World twenty-five years ago, I was struck how familiar his writing seemed to me. In the last pages of that little book, he talks about "Sacrament and Symbol", and how the post-patristic church in the West lost the fullness of the meaning of symbol, and that this was true of many contemporary Orthodox as well.

He illustrates this dissolution of symbol with a brief discussion of the case of Berenger of Tours. The church condemned him because he said the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist are not real because they are symbolical. The Lateran Coucil of 1059 said they were real because they were not symbolical. In both cases the symbol has lost its ability to communicate reality.

Schmemann goes on to say that "the doctrine of transubstantiation, in its Tridentine form, is truly the collapse, or rather the suicide, of sacramental theology." I am of the opinion that unless Christians can recover the earlier understanding of symbol, we will continue to talk past each other.

"I have the feeling that you probably don't care for Alexander Schmemann, but when I read his For the Life of the World twenty-five years ago, I was struck how familiar his writing seemed to me."

Now *where* would you have gotten the idea that old Fr. Alex is someone that guys like K and me don't care for? :-)

Part of his familiarity to you probably came from the fact that Fr. Alexander hung out with Anglicans a lot -- unfortunately, it was not always with the good kind...

That said, the passage you quote is Fr. S in one of his more lucid moments...

"I have the feeling that you probably don't care for Alexander Schmemann,...."

You've got that right. Some time ago, Schmemann was particularly favored by those Orthodox in the West, even a few hierarchs, who seemed compelled to "pass for white". I'll go out on a limb here and opine that that the overwhelming majority of Orthodox Christians, in the West and elsewhere. who have read him aren't at all taken with him anymore.