Before I go any further, let me say, I know the arguments for “closed
communion,” that is, the practice of allowing only Orthodox Christians
who have prepared through confession and fasting and have received the
blessing of a spiritual father to receive the Eucharist.
I am also aware
that how this exactly plays out from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, from
parish to parish, varies widely. Finally, please trust me, if you get
nothing else from reading this, rest assured that I have exactly the
kind of personality that is predisposed to wanting to turn the Eucharist
into an opportunity to sort out the worthy and the unworthy, the good
and the bad. I am all about making participation in a meal the reward
for being “enough.” For believing the right things and doing the right
things. I am insanely comfortable with the idea that not eating, not
partaking, is a way to repentance and to purification. For years,
through most of my teens and into my early twenties (and occasionally my
late twenties and early thirties, and frankly, occasionally now), as I
struggled with an eating disorder that was my best thinking. It was my
big idea. The big idea that consumed my thoughts day and night, that
robbed me of any joy, that only caused me pain. The big idea that could
have killed me. And it is exactly because I know what a terrible idea
it was for me to have that I cannot believe that it was ever God’s idea.
In fact, there is much in the Scripture and the Fathers to suggest that
even Judas got to have the meal, got to come to the table, so different
is God’s idea about who gets to eat from mine. It is by looking at whom
the gospel writers tell us dined with the Lord that I draw my
assumptions as to how God intends to issue invitations to His banquet.
At the same time, nearly every story of pain or rejection I hear that
is related to people’s experience with the Orthodox Church somehow
comes back to the Eucharist. Specifically to being denied the Eucharist.
How could it not? The Eucharist is at the center of Orthodox
liturgical, spiritual, and communal life. It is the means by which we
come to participate in the Gospel’s promise of Christ with us, not in
the often abstract experience of storytelling but in our very bodies.
Whatever you are told, be sure of this: denying people the Eucharist
seldom causes them to repent, seldom draws them closer to the Church or
to God. Instead, the vast majority of the time, the denial of
participation in Holy Communion is the last straw. The final nail in the
coffin of one person’s faith.
And frankly, good on them. They have just been told by a man charged
with their spiritual well-being what my disease told me: you can eat
when you are good enough. When you are better. This sentiment is never
the truth. It is not true when spoken by the obsessive thoughts of my
mind, and it is not true when spoken by a priest or a bishop. The
Eucharist is not a weapon or a reward, because food is not a weapon or a
reward. All food is a gift from God. This is especially true of the
Eucharist, which is food for our souls and bodies. It is Christ freely
offered up as nourishment for all people. I know all the arguments. I
know all about the “fire that consumes the unworthy,” but I offer to you
that this is the language of humanity, not God. And this language
confuses purity for holiness and leaves us all hungry.
Now for those of you who currently have and have alway had a
completely healthy relationship with food (which I am sure is all of
you), let me explain a few things about eating disorders. First, while
it is easy to see them as an outgrowth of a kind of vanity, the fact is
that eating disorders are almost always about a deep sense of
unworthiness and an insatiable desire for control, largely based on the
false premise that gaining that control can do something, anything, to
erase the unworthiness. Bulimia is my mania of choice, and so it went a
little like this: you starve yourself because you do not feel you
deserve to eat. You are not worthy of food; food is for when you are
thinner, smarter, prettier, more successful. When you do not eat, when
you skip breakfast, lunch, and dinner, you are proving that maybe, one
day, you can make yourself good enough to eat like everyone else does.
Of course, hunger is powerful, a base and primitive desire, that can
only be denied for so long. And when you eventually break, when you
eventually lose control, you lose it all. And so you binge. You eat
everything. You do not eat what is good for you. In fact, you skip over
the vegetables entirely and head straight to the brownie mix. You eat
past the point of satisfaction. You eat hoping that you can fill the
shame of not being worthy to eat in the first place. And then it is over
and you feel worse than before. So, you purge. You try to erase what
you have done. To purify yourself. To make yourself empty so that you
can try again to become worthy.
Now, you can imagine how in the grips of this kind of madness a
religious tradition centered around cycles of feasting and fasting may
not be the most helpful thing. And it is not, but we can discuss that
another day. Because, while the rather unhealthy focus many expressions
of Orthodoxy place on the ascetic discipline around food only encouraged
my eating disorder (and maybe it is just me), what I clung to as I
sought to recover was our other teaching about food, the one that is
about abundance, about God coming to us as food, coming to feed us: the
Eucharist. “Taste and See that the Lord is God,” the Psalmist tells us.
He (or she) could have said, “Hear and See” or “ Smell and See.” But no,
“Taste and See”. The closest we might ever get to God on this side of
eternity is by eating and drinking Him. The central act of Christian
worship is a meal, a feast of love. When eating had become for me a
terror-laden battlefield of shame, secrecy, and guilt, a constant
reminder of being unworthy, unloved, rejected, the Eucharist offered
another vision of what it can meant to eat, to be fed. In the Body and
Blood of Christ offered up as a meal, I could begin to see a way in
which food was a gift, not a test. And because I had experienced food as
a weird stand-in for worth, a prize for being good enough, for so long,
I started to think that maybe, just maybe, the Church was wrong for
treating the Eucharist that same way.
I have worshiped alongside people who practice an open communion
table. While I know that in many of these traditions, the theological
conception of the Eucharist is very different from ours (making sure
theologians will have jobs unto the ages of ages), I cannot deny what I
seen there. If the Orthodox practice has served to remind me of what I
experienced in the grasp of an actual mental illness, the communion at
these churches has shown me how healing looks. And it is because I
believe so profoundly that the Orthodox Church, the Church of Christ, is
called to be a hospital for the sick that I am convinced we must change
how we distribute our greatest medicine. The Church cannot be a source
of healing if it behaves like a sickness. For me, it is that simple.
Katherine Kelaidis is a writer and historian whose work focuses on early Medieval Christianity and contemporary Orthodox identity in non-traditionally Orthodox countries.
Public Orthodoxy seeks to promote conversation by providing a forum for diverse perspectives on contemporary issues related to Orthodox Christianity. The positions expressed in this essay are solely the author’s and do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Orthodox Christian Studies Center.