THE RITUAL AND REALITY OF COMMUNION

The next eight columns will focus on the part of the liturgy called the communion rite. There are important and dramatic shifts in the way we Catholics go to communion. We remain unaware of these shifts, because an out-dated piety still controls our ritual-body language. Or, is it the opposite, i.e., does our physical movement, posture, and action still reinforce a privatized, worn out piety of individualism at communion? True, some externals have changed. For example, we no longer walk up to receive communion with our hands folded piously and our eyes cast down. We no longer kneel at the altar railing to receive the host from the priest while the choir sings "O Lord I am Not Worthy." But out piety, our feeling, our sensibility towards this important action has not changed because the renewed ritual has never been successively implemented not adequately explained.

For example, the ritual calls for congregational singing as people come to communion. Do you sing, remain silent, or freeload by letting someone else do the job?

It seems that we assume that cognitive explanation will change people. Explain it and peoples' patterns of action and piety will consciously be changed. Not so! We don't work that way usually. We are more than rational. As social creatures, our ritual actions are repeated time and time again until they form a pattern, until they are ingrained in us. So, our public behavior indeed can "speak" louder than our words of explanations. It is not amazing that the renewed communion structure has not been implemented. Receiving communion weekly was only advocated in this century. The reality of almost all the assembly receiving communion is a phenomenon of the last fifty years. Many older Catholics were drilled by the piety of another time, such as "you cannot let the host drop, your hands cannot touch the vessel containing the bread nor the cup, it's a sin to chew the host, etc." The miracle of transubstantiation and the extreme reverence to be expressed for the awesome mystery of the eucharist was translated into the pattern used for receiving holy communion. No wonder some became very scrupulous and stressed out when they prepared to receive! No wonder that an intensely privatized feeling was cultivated! No wonder that it continues in those instances where the same out-dated ritual behavior is taught at first communion!

This piety continues despite a ritual structure that stresses communion as both a personal and communal action, both a personal and social action. It is counter-cultural to put personal and communal, personal and social together. Our culture stresses the private to the exclusion of the communal. Our church does not. Christians recognize that deeply personal moments, such as birthing and baptismal bathing, table sharing and joining in marriage, caring for the sick and burying our beloved dead have a public dimension.

What is the style of communing at the eucharist you participate in? For the next two weeks observe the actions that go on from the sung "Lamb of God" until the last communicant has sat down. Does the communion rite convey piety, passivity, and individuality or the personal, communal, and social? Check it out!