What IS 'the Holy Grail'?

From First Things, a very interesting thought.

Fr. Sergius Bulgakov, an émigré from Soviet Russia who became dean of the Russian Orthodox seminary in Paris [speculates, with foundation] ...that the myth of the Grail is nevertheless trying to tell us something. It “expresses precisely the idea that, even though the Lord ascended in His honorable flesh to heaven, the world received His holy relic in the blood and water flowed out of His side.”

The vessel which caught the blood of Christ, Bulgakov proposes, was not a cup. It was that span of weary earth lying at the foot of the cross. “The life of the flesh is in the blood” (Lev. 17:11), and our Lord’s lifeblood soaked into the dry and rocky soil of that graveyard outside the city gates. His blood was hidden there in the ground, and, in Bulgakov’s lovely image, thereby consecrated that ground, all ground, the entirety of material creation.

“The whole world is the chalice of the Holy Grail,” Bulgakov writes. “The Holy Grail is inaccessible to veneration; in its holiness it is hidden in the world from the world. However, it exists in the world as an invisible power. . . . [It] is not offered for communion but abides in the world as the mysterious holiness of the world, as the power of life, as the fire in which the world will be transfigured into a new heaven and new earth.”

Fits with Cdl. Ratzinger's contention that at the moment of Christ's death on the cross, when the veil of the Temple was ripped, that worship became cosmic--not confined to the Temple.