The meaning of Communion

Now we can come to these words of St. Paul and ask ourselves their real meaning. For, as we have seen, neither the early Church nor the Fathers understood them to mean that the alternative to “eating and drinking unworthily” consists in abstaining from Communion, that reverence for the Sacrament and fear of its profanation ought to result in refusing the Divine Gifts. Such obviously was not the thought of St. Paul himself, for it is indeed in his Epistles, in his exhortations, that we find the first formulation of the apparent paradox which in reality constitutes the basis of Christian “ethics” and the source of Christian spirituality.

“Know you not,” writes St. Paul to the Corinthians, “that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit which is in you, which you have of God, and you are not your own? For you are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God’s” (I Cor. 6:19-20). These words are a real summary of St. Paul’s constant appeal to Christians: we must live according to what has “happened” to us in Christ; yet we can live thus only because it has happened to us, because salvation, redemption, reconciliation, and “buying with a price” have already been given to us and we are “not our own.” We can and must work at our salvation because we have been saved, yet it is only because we are saved that we can work at our salvation. We must always and at all times become and be that which - in Christ - we already are: “you are Christ’s and Christ is God’s” (I Cor. 3:22).

This teaching of St. Paul is of crucial importance for the Christian life in general and for the sacramental life in particular. It reveals the essential tension on which this life is based, from which it stems, and which cannot be removed, for this would mean the abandonment and a radical mutilation of the Christian faith itself: the tension in each one of us between the “old man, which is corrupt through the lusts of the flesh,” and “the new man, renewed after the image of Him who created him” through baptismal death and resurrection;” between the gift of the new life, and the effort to appropriate it and truly make it one’s own life; between the grace “given not by measure” (John 3:34), and the always deficient measure of my spiritual life.

But then the first and essential fruit of all Christian life and spirituality, so manifest in the Saints, is the feeling and the awareness not of any “worthiness,” but of unworthiness. The closer one is to God the more conscious he becomes of the ontological unworthiness of all creatures before God, of the totally free gift of God. Such genuine spirituality is absolutely incompatible with any idea of “merit,” of anything that could make us, in itself and by itself, “worthy” of that gift. For, as St. Paul writes: “. . .while we were yet helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. Why one will hardly die for a righteous man .... But God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us...” (Rom. 5:6-8). To “measure” that gift with our merits and worthiness is the beginning of that spiritual pride which is the very essence of sin.

This tension has its focus and also its source in the sacramental life. It is here, while approaching the Divine Gifts, that we become aware again and again of the divine “net” into which we have been caught and from which, in human reasoning and logic, there is no escape. For if, because of my “unworthiness,” I abstain from approaching, I reject and refuse the divine gift of love, reconciliation, and life. I excommunicate myself, for “except you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood you have no life in you” (John 6:53). If, however, I “eat and drink unworthily” I eat and drink my damnation. I am condemned if I do not receive and I am condemned if I do, for who has ever been “worthy” to be touched by the Divine Fire and not be consumed?

Once more from this divine trap there is no escape by means of human reasoning when we apply to the Divine Mysteries our human criteria, measures, and rationalisations. There is something spiritually frightening in the ease and good conscience with which bishops, priests, and laymen alike, but perhaps especially those who pretend to be well versed in “spirituality,” accept and defend as traditional and self-evident the contemporary sacramental situation: the one in which a member of the Church is considered to be “in good standing” if for fifty one weeks he has not approached the Chalice because of his “unworthiness” but then, during the fifty second, after having complied with a few rules, gone through a four minute confession and received absolution, he suddenly becomes “worthy” in order to return, immediately after Communion, to his “unworthiness.” It was frightening because this situation so obviously rejects that which constitutes the real meaning and also the cross of Christian life and which is revealed to us in the Eucharist: the impossibility to accommodate Christianity to our measures and levels; the impossibility to accept it except on God’s, and not our, terms.

What are these terms? Nowhere do we find them better expressed than in the words which the priest pronounces while elevating the Holy Bread and which in the early Church were the very words of invitation to Communion: “Holy Things for the Holy!” With these words and also with the congregation’s answer to them “One is Holy, One is the Lord Jesus Christ. . .” all human reasoning indeed comes to an end. The Holy Things, the Body and Blood of Christ, are for those alone who are holy. Yet no one is holy, save the One Holy Lord Jesus Christ. And thus, on the level of miserable human “worthiness,” the door is closed; there is nothing we can offer and which would make us “worthy” of this Holy Gift. Nothing indeed except precisely the Holiness of Christ Himself which He in His infinite love and mercy has imparted to us, making us “a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation” (I Pet. 2:9). It is His Holiness and not ours which makes us holy and thus “worthy” of approaching and receiving the Holy Gifts. For as Nicholas Cabasilas says in commenting on these words: “No one has holiness by himself and it is not the effect of human virtue, but all those who possess it have it from Him and by Him. It is as if several mirrors were placed beneath the sun: they are all bright and all issue rays, while in reality there is but one sun which brightens all of them . . . .”

Such then is the essential “paradox” of the sacramental life. It would be an error, however, to limit it to Sacraments alone. The sin of profanation, of which St. Paul speaks when he mentions “eating and drinking unworthily,” embraces the whole of life because the whole of life, the whole man, body and spirit, were sanctified by Christ and made holy, and being holy “are not our own.” The only question addressed to man is whether he is willing and ready to accept, in humility and obedience, this holiness so freely and lovingly given to him first of all as the cross on which he is to crucify the old man with his lust and his corruption, as that which judges him all the time, and then as the grace and power to fight constantly for the growth of the new man in him, of that new and holy life of which he has been made a partaker.

We partake of Holy Communion only because we have been made holy by Christ and in Christ; and we partake of it in order to become holy, i.e., to fulfill the gift of holiness in our life. It is when one does not realise this that one “eats and drinks unworthily” when, in other terms, one receives Communion thinking of one’s self as “worthy” through one’s own, and not Christ’s, holiness; or when one receives it without relating it to the whole of life as its judgment, but also as the power of its transformation, as forgiveness, but also as the inescapable entrance into the “narrow path” of effort and struggle.

To make us realize this, not only with our mind but with our entire being, to lead us into that repentance which alone opens to us the doors of the Kingdom, is the real meaning and content of our preparation for Holy Communion.

In our present situation, shaped in many ways by the practice of “infrequent” communion, the preparation for it means primarily the fulfillment by the communicant-to-be of certain disciplinary and spiritual prescriptions and rules: abstention from otherwise permitted acts and activities, reading of certain canons and prayers (Rule for Those Preparing Themselves for Communion printed in our prayer books), abstention from food during the morning before Communion, etc. But before we come to this preparation in the narrow sense of the word, we must, in the light of what has been said above, try to recover the idea of preparation in its wider and deeper meaning.

Ideally, of course, the whole life of a Christian is and should be preparation for Communion, just as it is and should be the spiritual fruit of Communion. “Unto Thee we commit our whole life and hope, O Lord...” we read in the liturgical prayer before Communion. All of our life is judged and measured by our membership in the Church and therefore by our participation in the Body and Blood of Christ. All of it is to be filled with and transformed by the grace of that participation. The worst consequence of our present practice is that it “cuts off” preparation for Communion from life itself, and by doing this makes our real life even more profane, more unrelated to the faith we profess. But Christ did not come to us so that we may set apart a small segment of our life for our “religious obligations.” He claimed the whole of man and the totality of his life. He left with us the Sacrament of Communion with Himself so that it may sanctify and purify our whole existence and relate all aspects of our life to Him. A Christian thus is one who lives between: between the coming of Christ in the flesh and His return in glory to judge the quick and the dead; between Eucharist and Eucharist - the Sacrament of remembrance and the Sacrament of hope and anticipation. In the early Church it was precisely the rhythm of that participation in the Eucharist - the living in the remembrance of the one and in the expectation of the next - which truly shaped Christian spirituality and gave it its true content: the participation, while living in this world, in the new life of the world to come and the transformation of the “old” by the “new.”

In practical terms this preparation consists, first of all, in the awareness not only of “Christian principles” in general, but precisely of Communion itself - both of the one that I have already received and which, by making me a partaker of the Body and Blood of Christ, judges my life, challenges me with the inescapable call to be what I have become, and of the one that I shall receive, in the life and holiness and approaching light of which time itself and all the details of my life acquire an importance, a spiritual significance which from a purely human and “secular” point of view they would not have. A venerable priest, when asked how one can live a Christian life in the world, answered: “Simply by remembering that tomorrow (or after tomorrow, or in a few days) I shall receive Holy Communion...”.

One of the simplest ways to generate the beginning of that awareness is to include prayers before and after Communion into our daily rule of prayer. Usually we read the prayers of preparation just before Communion and the prayers of thanksgiving just after, and having read them, we simply return to our “profane” life. But what prevents us from reading one or several prayers of thanksgiving during the first days of the week after the Sunday Eucharist, and the prayers of preparation during the second part of the week, thus introducing the awareness of the Sacrament into our daily life, referring the whole of our life to the Holy Gifts received and about to be received? This of course is only one step. Much more is needed and, above all, a real rediscovery - through preaching, teaching, and counseling of the Eucharist itself as the Sacrament of the Church and therefore the very source of all Christian life.

The second level of preparation is centered on that self examination of which St. Paul speaks: “. . .let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of that bread and drink of that cup” (I Cor. 11:28). The goal of that preparation consisting of fasting, special prayers (the Rule for Those Preparing Themselves for Communion), spiritual concentration, silence, etc., is, as we have seen already, not to make a man consider himself “worthy,” but to make him aware precisely of his unworthiness and to lead him to true repentance. Repentance is all this: man seeing his sinfulness and weakness, realising his state of separation from God, experiencing sorrow and pain because of that state, desiring forgiveness and reconciliation, rejecting the evil and opting for a return to God, and finally desiring Communion for the “healing of soul and body.”

This repentance begins however not with preoccupation with one’s self but with the contemplation of the holiness of Christ’s gift, of the heavenly reality to which one is called. It is only because and inasmuch as we see the “bridal chamber adorned” that we can realise that we are deprived of the garment needed to enter therein. It is only because Christ has come to us that we can truly repent, i.e., see ourselves as unworthy of His love and of His holiness and thus desire to return to Him. Without this true repentance, this inner and radical “change of mind,” communion for us will be for “damnation” and not “healing.” Yet it is the very fruit of repentance that, by making us realise our total unworthiness, it takes us to Christ as the only salvation, healing, and redemption. By revealing to us our unworthiness, repentance fills us with that desire, that humility, that obedience which alone, in the eyes of God, makes us “worthy.” Read the prayers before Communion. They all contain that one cry:

Finally, the third and the highest level of preparation is reached when we desire to receive Communion simply because we love Christ and long to be united to Him who “with desire has desired” to be united to us. Beyond the need and the desire for forgiveness, reconciliation, and healing there is, there must be, simply this: our love for Christ whom we love “because He first loved us” (I John 4:19). Ultimately it is this love and nothing else that makes it possible for us to cross the abyss separating the creature from the Creator, the sinful from the Holy One, this world from the Kingdom of God. It is this love which alone truly transcends and therefore abolishes as an irrelevant dead end all our humam—all too human—digressions about “worthiness” and “unworthiness,” brushes away our fears and inhibitions, makes us surrender to the Divine Love. “There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear. Because fear has torment. He that fears is not made perfect in love. . .” (I John 4:18). It is this love which inspired the beautiful prayer of St. Symeon the New Theologian:

Such is then the goal of all preparation, all repentance, all efforts and prayers: that we may love Christ and “with boldness and without condemnation” partake of the Sacrament in which Christ’s love is given to us.

SOURCE : Great Lent, Journey to Pascha – Alexander Schmemann