Fr. Ziad Antoun Preface

Preface

Tauditho is the Aramaic term for thanksgiving that reminds us of the Lord Jesus who offered himself as a thanksgiving sacrifice to the Father. As created human beings, we can never thank or worship God appropriately. We are in dire need of a mediator to intercede for us before God. Our Mediator, Jesus Christ, gained us forgiveness and reopened the gates of the heavenly Jerusalem, our original home.  Jesus Christ, God himself, is our High Priest and Way of salvation, who offered himself as a perfect unique sacrifice on the altar of the cross. After the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, the Church continued to offer thanksgiving for the salvation of the human race in the Holy Mass. Mass is a celebration of thanksgiving, a memorial, and revival of what Jesus did on the cross. It is the divine sacrifice of Jesus offered to the Father on our behalf. Eucharist, which derives from the Greek meaning ‘thanksgiving’, is traditionally the name for Mass. In our Maronite Syriac tradition, Mass is called Qoddas, which means the sanctifier, the prayer that sanctifies those who participate in it by making them one with God and each other.

So central is thanksgiving in the tradition of Catholic prayer that its name, Eucharist, describes the most divine and Catholic prayer of the Church, the Mass. However, thanksgiving prayers are not limited to the communal celebration of Mass; rather it can take the form of other communal devotions, like our Tauditho prayer. Tauditho is a thanksgiving prayer, a memorial of God’s salvation. Tauditho is meant to be a communal prayer, specifically for the Maronite Catholics in the United States of America.

Tauditho is in no way a substitute for the Holy Eucharist. It helps the participating community to better understand the meaning of the Qoddas. Like Qoddas, Tauditho is a gathering together of those baptized in the name of Jesus around his Word of Life, the truth. We share passages from the Old and New Testaments and from the history of the Church, particularly the Maronite Catholic Church. Also, like Qoddas, Tauditho prayer is a gathering around a meal that symbolizes the unity of those who share in it. The Lebanese proverb “Bread and salt unify us” underscores the importance of sharing bread as a unity-maker, and as the Latin term for company “con panis: bread with” indicates the symbolic relationship between sharing bread/food together and becoming one company, or one community.

Fr. Ziad Antoun

Superior of the Community of Our Lady of Dormition, OMM, Ann Arbor, MI