Hand? Mouth? What About the Third Way of Receiving Communion?

There are way too many silly debates on how to take Communion. Being a contrarian at heart I like to receive it in a way that the priest does not prefer. Receiving communion is the main point, not the manner, and to be honest most of them don’t care. I do admire Katrina R. Fernandez for taking her stand for communion in the mouth during her grandmother’s funeral. And if some of you think this is impious and I’m in the saying things in the wrong spirit when it comes to the Mysteries then you have Jesus on your side (breaking the Sabbath) and his followers such as St. Paul (Council of Jerusalem) who never disturbed established ecclesiastical norms.

But did you know that beyond these there is a fairly ancient alternative way of receiving the Host?

In Eating Beauty: The Eucharist and the Spiritual Arts of the Middle Ages Ann W. Astell takes our discussion of eating from yesterday to a new plane:

The medieval practice of spiritual Communion confirms the association of sight with the apprehension of beauty. A devout, intent gazing upon the consecrated Host at its elevation during Mass was often regarded as a substitute for the sacramental consumption of the Eucharist. Even to begin to answer the question “why” is, however, already to deconstruct the simple, aesthetic binary that separates looking from eating: the higher senses of sight and hear from the lower bestial senses of touch, taste, and smell. Understood in the context of medieval popular visual theory and piety, to see the Host was to touch it. One could eat it, touch it, taste it, with one’s eyes. Gazing upon the Host in adoration meant a real physical contact with it, a touch, as light rays emanating from the Host beamed into the eye of the adorer; and vice versa, as rays from the from the beholder’s eye extended themselves in a line of vision to the Host. Touch (in Latin, tangere, tactum), the basic sense of contact with the world was held to be the “common term or proportion” of the other senses, Thomas Ryba explains, “making them all a species of Touch.” As a form of touch, “vision was thus the strongest possible access to [the] object of devotion,” Margaret R. Miles asserts. “It was considered a fully satisfactory way of communicating, so that people frequently left the church after the elevation.”

In his The Call and the Response Jean-Louis Chretien explains the primacy of the sense of touch and its roots in the beginnings of Western philosophy:

The most fundamental and universal of all the senses is the sense of touch. Coextensive for Aristotle with animal life, it appears and disappears with it. While touch is separable from the other senses, since it does not require them whereas they require it, the sense of touch is inseparable from life itself: no animal is deprived of touch without also being deprived of life. Every animated body is tactile, from bodies most deeply immersed in stupor to those that display the vigilance of mind at the skin’s surface. The first evidence of soul is the sense of touch. Moreover from the start, the exercise of touch is indistinguishable from the experience of touch, since touch delivers us to the world through a unique act of presence: in order to see one must be visible, yet seeing is not immediately to be seen by what I see. The same holds true of the other senses, whereas to touch is immediately to be touched by what I touch–to experience one’s own tangibility prior to any reflexivity. Whatever I contact by means of touch comes into contact with me.

Why not try this out even with your non-Catholic friends? Isn’t the practice of visual Communion interesting in how it might potentially lead to something like open communion. It seems like most of you probably know about baptism by desire, so why would this seem so unusual? God seems to break through confessional boundaries by the sacraments offered within those confessional boundaries. Granted, all of this presupposes a Catholic medieval ontology. After all, Catholic means universal (after all: extra ecclesiam nulla sallus). The older understanding that precedes the concepts of discrete religions would see those who do not formally belong to Catholicism not as non-believers, but as heretics, meaning, in a way, one of our wayward own.

So, perhaps when you invite your non-Catholic friends to Eucharistic adoration you invite them to participate in the sacraments and simultaneously effect a baptism by desire?

[The discussion started here is continued in the post See and Taste the Lord is Good]

For more interesting theological insights see my TOP10 Theology Books of the Last 10 Years (That I’ve Read).