When I was an evangelical pastor I talked to my church board about increasing the frequency of communion; after all, both John Wesley and John Calvin encouraged weekly communion, so this is not necessarily a "Catholic thing." One of the arguments I used followed from this quote by Robert Weber: "Sometimes students or other persons struggling with a painful experience in their lives will come to me for counsel. I always say to them, 'I'm not a counselor and I don't have the tools necessary to help you with this problem. But I can suggest one thing -- flee to the Eucharist. Get to the table of the Lord just as fast as you can, because it is there that God can and does touch his people in a healing way.' In all the years that I have been giving this advice, not a single person has come back and told me it is not true. On the contrary, many have affirmed that God through the Eucharist reached into their pain and touched them with his healing presence" (Ancient-Future Faith, p. 111).
The problem is, how does one "flee to the Eucharist" in a church that only celebrates communion four times a year? It's simply impossible to follow Weber's advice in most Protestant churches. The reason given for quarterly celebration, one that was voiced by some church board members, is that frequent communion tends to become mundane, that restricting it to four times yearly helps keep it more special. My observation has been just the opposite. Those I know who receive the Eucharist more often tend to value it more than those who only celebrate occasionally.
Two scriptural phrases are especially pertinent in this context. Paul says to the Corinthians, "as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes" (1 Cor. 11:26). The Eucharist is a visual proclamation of the Lord's death. It's not something to be reserved for special occasions but something to be done regularly, as regularly as the Lord's death is proclaimed in words. The visual, physical proclamation follows necessarily from the preaching of the Word. "There is preaching in the full sense only where it is accompanied and explained by the sacraments" (Karl Barth, Homiletics, p. 58).
There are also the words of Jesus Himself: "Take, eat; this is my body.... Drink of it, all of you; for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins" (Matthew 26:26-28). Contrary to most Protestant churches, the early Church took these words literally. Ignatius of Antioch, writing in the early second century, refers to the Eucharist as "the medicine of immortality, the antidote we take in order not to die but to live forever in Jesus Christ" ("Letter to the Ephesians," 20). In another letter he speaks of heretics, saying they "abstain from the Eucharist and prayer, because they refuse to acknowledge that the Eucharist is the flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ, which suffered for our sins and which the Father by his goodness raised up" ("Letter to the Smyrnaeans, 6.2). St. Ignatius, who was taught by the apostles, reflects the consistent teaching of the early Church. The memorialist view, which sees communion as a purely symbolic act, came along many centuries later.
Why do we experience healing in the Eucharist? Not because it's an indispensable memory aid. In the bread and wine we truly receive the body and blood of Christ. St. Leo the Great, writing in the fifth century, said: "For the effect of our sharing in the body and blood of Christ is to change us into what we receive. As we have died with him, and have been buried and raised to life with him, so we bear him within us, both in body and in spirit, in everything we do" (St. Leo the Great, quoted in The Liturgy of the Hours, vol. 2, p. 661). Henri Nouwen, fifteen centuries later, says something similar: "the Eucharist is the sacrament of love, given to us as the means of finding that descending way of Jesus in our hearts. Jesus himself says, ‘I am the living bread which has come down from heaven. Anyone who eats this bread will live forever.’ You see here how the descending way of Jesus can become your way too. Whenever you eat the bread of heaven you not only become more profoundly united with Jesus, but you also learn gradually to walk his descending way with him. Jesus wants to give himself to us so much that he has become food for us, and whenever we eat this food the longing is aroused in us also go give ourselves away to others. The self-surrendering love which we encounter in the Eucharist is the source of true Christian community.... Whenever we eat the body of Jesus and drink his blood, we participate in his descending way and so become a community in which competitiveness and rivalry have made way for the love of God" (Letters to Marc, pp. 48-49). Communion is an opportunity to reflect on the sacrifice of Christ, yes, but it is much more than that. In the Eucharist we receive the body and blood of Christ into our bodies and become one with Him in a way that goes beyond our comprehension.
For most of the past six years I've worshiped in churches that have communion in every service, and rather than becoming mundane the Eucharist has become more important to me; it's now difficult to imagine receiving it only a few times a year. In the liturgy, we enter the Lord's presence by confessing our sins, then we hear the Word read and preached; we respond to the Word, as Christians have done for two thousand years, by receiving the body and blood of Christ. And after we receive the Eucharist, our pastor pronounces this blessing: "Now may this precious body and blood of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ strengthen and preserve you in the one true faith unto life everlasting. Go in His peace, you are loved with an everlasting love in Christ."
