PURITY AND DANGER: EUCHARISTIC SAFETY IN A TIME OF PANDEMIC

Photo by KEEM IBARRA on Unsplash

As many Episcopal parishes begin to regather for worship, or at least to outline plans for doing so, dioceses have compiled a tremendous amount of guidance and direction for how services might proceed safely. Having read through every single published diocesan plan, many of which are meticulously detailed, I will admit to being impressed by the effort that has gone into trying to make the eucharist as safe as possible. Dioceses stress that “safety must be our first concern,” that “health and safety must remain the primary goal,” and that “our highest priority is to create a safe space where we can joyfully gather together in worship.” Painstakingly diagramed measures for physical distancing, directions for frequent hand sanitizing, and heroically elaborate methods for distributing communion to minimize any risk of physical contact or contagion are set forth in exhaustive detail, to assure anxious parishioners that, with sufficient attention to the rules, this potentially risky activity can be done quite safely. 

In many ways, reading through all of these procedures for “reduced-risk eucharists” honestly feels very much like reading safe(r) sex curricula written by the anxious parents of teenagers. They express concern that in our eagerness to be reunited, we might allow ourselves to overlook the appropriate protocols. They stress that “the safest form of worship is that in which one participates virtually.” They propose elaborate systems, often involving various kinds of plastic barriers, for how to receive the desired eucharist without the danger of any physical contact. They frequently stress a preference that we would continue to abstain, but provide strategies for how to proceed as safely as possible if we are unwilling to do so. 

I have only one problem with all of this: there is nothing remotely safe about the eucharist. There never was.  

Let me hasten to add that I am not proposing that we all simply throw caution to the winds, storming the doors of our churches with reckless abandon and ignoring sensible precautions. Courage must always be tempered with prudence, and a global pandemic undeniably necessitates both prudence and patience in great measure. Nevertheless, I worry somewhat about the message that we are communicating, both through our words and symbolically in our actions, when we take something that is actually quite profoundly dangerous and try to offer assurances that we have successfully made it safe. 

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I realize that it may be shocking to some Episcopalians to hear the eucharist described as “profoundly dangerous,” so I want to approach that claim from three rather different angles, considering three different types of eucharistic danger. 

The bible and Christian tradition are filled with warnings about what might be called liturgical presumption, cautioning us that holy things are often dangerous, not merely consoling. When Aaron’s sons Nadab and Abihu offered alien fire before the Lord, they were promptly burned to a crisp (Leviticus 10). When Uzzah reached out a well-intentioned hand to steady the Ark of the Covenant, God immediately struck him dead (2 Samuel 6). When the Israelites gathered around Mount Sinai, God warned Moses that any person or animal that touched the mountain must be put to death (Exodus 19). Nor is this purely an emphasis of the Hebrew Bible. In 1 Corinthians 11: 28-30, Paul warns that those who partake of the eucharist without discerning the body of the Lord eat and drink judgment upon themselves, and that this is why some of them have died. In the memorable words of William Cavanaugh in his book Torture and Eucharist, “Paul is not speaking metaphorically; the eucharist can kill you” (p.236).  

There are many warnings from ancient and medieval church history about the consequences of approaching the eucharist presumptuously. My colleague Dr. Sonja Anderson has looked at the letters of the third-century bishop Cyprian, where he describes a series of episodes in which lapsed Christians attempted to consume the eucharist only to have it choke them, induce vomiting, set itself on fire, or disintegrate into ash. A millennium later, the thirteenth-century Cistercian monk Caesarius of Heisterbach narrates numerous similar episodes, including an unrepentant priest who has the eucharist turn into a burning coal in his mouth, a thieving monk who choked to death on the host, a usurer who had the eucharist turn into a counterfeit coin in his mouth, and a contentious bishop who had the host plucked from his hands by an angel at the elevation, and who only received it back again after he meekly apologized to his clergy. Numerous ancient and medieval writers give similar kinds of accounts. 

One does not actually need to read these stories literally to take their message to heart. The eucharist is not merely a cozy encounter with God’s love, much less a comforting celebration of our human community. It is also a potentially terrifying encounter with holiness, undertaken by those of us who know very well that we are far from holy.  

I genuinely appreciate how many diocesan regathering plans stress the need to respect each individual’s risk tolerance and private discernment about whether or not to receive the eucharist, and the importance that no one should feel judged or ostracized if they consider the risk to be too great. I only wish that it didn’t take a pandemic for us to develop such sensitivity. I long ago learned that if I don’t feel comfortable receiving communion for any reason, I should really avoid going to an Episcopal service at all. Refraining is likely to result in a lecture, or at least many quiet looks of disapproval, as any hesitation is often read as a judgment upon the community in question rather than upon myself. 

The holiness of the eucharist has a kind of magnetic power that has never failed to attract me. But it is definitely not safe.  

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However, let us return firmly to the annals of history, since stories of spontaneously combusting hosts may admittedly be simply too much for some Episcopalians to bear! Even looking historically, we must acknowledge that the eucharist has often be used as an instrument of exclusion and social control, and that devotion to the eucharist has not infrequently spilled over into violence. 

Medieval Christian violence against Jewish communities, for example, was often the result of rumors falsely accusing a Jewish person of having desecrated a host. Increasing eucharistic fervor among Christians coincided with a growing paranoia about potential attacks upon the eucharist by Jews, and such fears often erupted in acts of communal anti-Jewish violence perpetrated by Christians. In many parts of Europe, such rumors of eucharistic desecration led to acts of anti-Jewish violence against whole communities well into the early modern period— and that spilling of innocent blood in order to protect the eucharist from an imaginary threat was surely even more a desecration of the eucharist than any offense against the host could have been. 

To take another example: when the Protestant Reformers restored the eucharistic custom of allowing the laity to receive the consecrated wine as well as the consecrated bread, the chalice itself quickly became a source of division and contention. The rich were unwilling to drink from the same cup as the poor, and so often a system of multiple chalices (with different calibers of wine!) was introduced. Or, in other parts of Europe, people lined up for communion in order of social rank and importance, with the most distinguished people receiving first, and the least important only drinking from the cup at the end, so that the prominent would not need to drink from the chalice after the poor. Unsurprisingly (given human sinfulness), Reformation-era history is thus littered with accounts of brawls that broke out in church services over the precise order in which people were entitled to line up for communion! 

In the American context, fears over the purity and cleanliness of the chalice came together with White racism, and thus in many churches Black parishioners might be required to use a separate chalice, or to receive communion only after White parishioners. Even individual communion cups, now suddenly being looked upon with such favor as a potentially more sanitary alternative to the common cup, cannot be comfortably separated from their racist history. The anxieties about potential contagion that prompted their embrace among White American Protestants in the first place had serious undertones of racism, a liturgical version of segregated drinking fountains. Although not all churches that preferred individual cups did so for racist motives (indeed, some African Methodist Episcopal congregations were among the first to adopt them), their uncomfortable recent history in many parts of American Protestantism might at least give us pause. 

These examples of the eucharist being used to foster exclusion and violence are far from anomalous, but they are sufficient to illustrate the point. Moreover, the violence and exclusion in each case is not something that is purely incidental to the eucharist. It is, rather, bound up together with the very nature of the eucharist. It is what Lauren Winner has described in her book The Dangers of Christian Practice as a kind of “characteristic damage,” the kind of damage that is entangled in the very nature of a thing. 

If the eucharist has too often been weaponized and used to hurt or to divide, perhaps it is because at some level people accurately perceived how very threatening it is to all of the boundaries that we erect between one another. In the eucharist, boundaries dissolve— between the human and the divine, the living and the dead, the past and the present, and all of the myriad ways we devise to try to separate ourselves from one another. If none of that seems just a tiny bit threatening, then perhaps we are not taking it seriously enough. This memorial that we enact is not a safe refuge of comforting nostalgia, but rather what Johann Baptist Metz termed “a dangerous memory.” It has never been safe. 

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The last angle from which I want to consider the potential dangers of the eucharist is much more personal, for this is not merely an academic question for me. Rather, the shadow side of the eucharist is something that I have also encountered in my own life.  

Twelve years ago I was accused of being possessed and was forced into an exorcism. The eucharist had always been intensely important in my private devotion before that point. I used to spend hours contentedly curled up in front of the tabernacle praying, and daily mass was the focal point that gave a meaningful orientation to my day. But my accusers claimed that several people had become ill and died because I had been receiving the eucharist while supposedly practicing Satanism, and they also used a consecrated host as part of the exorcism. For years afterwards, spiritual directors would push me on the question of where Christ was during the exorcism, and I could only sputter plaintively, with steadfast Anglo-Catholic stubbornness, that Christ was quite obviously in the bread, and therefore by definition against me in that whole experience rather than on my side. It took years before I could approach the eucharist again simply with awe rather than with terror. 

And I have also known the unexpected horror of showing up at church, only to find that the visiting celebrant was someone who had sexually assaulted me years before. I forced myself to stay rather than giving in to the impulse to flee, and even approached for communion, whispering silently to myself “I am not a Donatist. I am not a Donatist….” and praying only for perfect custody of the eyes so that perhaps I might receive without ever even seeing him. I half expected the floor to open up and swallow us all, in some kind of modern day reenactment of the biblical story of Korah (Numbers 16). I was a tiny bit disappointed that it didn’t. 

Lastly, I once worked for a theologian, editing some of his works about the eucharist. He wrote so eloquently, but terrorized his staff in private, not only with threatening words but with bruises and blows, usually very careful to hide the damage. I was more often a terrified witness than a victim, but on the last day before I quit, I came to consciousness on the office floor, staring up at a painting of the eucharist and wondering whether I was hallucinating that the chalice was bleeding. I realized only belatedly that it was my own blood. I left the country (an American privilege my coworkers did not share), haunted by the realization that a person could write such profound theology so very at odds with their own life. 

This is, of course, a very different kind of danger than the awe that rightly warns one away from liturgical presumption. But given my own history, I cannot help but find it rather grimly ironic that the church would choose this particular moment to suddenly start worrying so much about safety, deciding that even things like private prayer before the reserved sacrament constituted an unconscionable risk.    

One of my spiritual directees once asked me what positive things about the church had led me to remain, and even to love it, in spite of some of this history. I easily rattled off a long list of things that I love about God, the Christian faith, and the traditions of the church… and yet the question haunted me, because while all of that was true, I wasn’t sure if any of it was actually the reason that I remain, as if you could somehow mathematically weigh the positive and the negative and make a rational choice based on which one predominated. 

The uncomfortable truth, I think, is that Christianity is not less attractive because it has a shadow side of danger. It is, rather, far more so. If there were only danger, it would repel, and if there were only comfort it would likely bore. But the holy is located at the boundary of longing and fear. It is good, but it is far from safe. 

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None of this is meant to be a proposal to wantonly court danger in our worship practices. The eucharist surely already possesses enough inherent danger without us needing to add an extra sprinkling of extraneous danger into the mix! It is, however, a suggestion that we stop trying to pretend that anything about our celebration of the eucharist is ever safe.  

Too much emphasis on an elaborate system of Ziploc bags, sealed envelopes, and plastic wrap might be marvelously antiseptic, but it comes with a real risk of symbolically distorting how deeply, transformatively, dangerous the sacramental logic of the eucharist really is. Fear of the proximity of others may linger for many people long after the pandemic fades, and it may not be easy to return again to older practices, which might come to be seen as recklessly infectious. But how can one receive the body of Christ in the eucharist while anxiously fearing contagion from the body of Christ in one’s neighbor? 

Perhaps, though, our newly heightened awareness of physical danger might serve to make us more aware of the spiritual dangers that have always been present. One of my favorite sentences from a diocesan regathering plan is from Rhode Island, which urges: “Communicate the risks of entering the church, and that the church cannot guarantee the safety of those who enter.” This strikes me as a rather timelessly true claim, not one that only applies in a time of pandemic. The eucharist has never come with a guarantee of safety.