Imagine you’re at a cafe or restaurant and you order a bottle of wine. The waiter brings over the wine and grabs a glass from the nearby table that has just been vacated by someone and hands it to you. It is obvious the glass has been used and you immediately tell the waiter you want a clean one, he pulls out a napkin from his hip pocket and cleans it and says, ‘it’s clean now’.
‘No, it isn’t,’ you insist, wanting a washed clean glass not one that someone you don’t know has drunk from.
The following morning you go to church and join a queue of many dozens of people, some are babies held by parents, others are elderly, some of those in the line look sickly, while others cough and/or sneeze.
All of you are there to have Holy Communion (Κοινωνία) while sharing the same one spoon by placing it in your mouth. Some might use their tongue to lick the spoon as it’s in their mouth.
But you don’t care because you know the wine used in the Holy Communion represents the blood of Jesus and it has been blessed by the priest. As a result no germs will be transmitted from person to person as God doesn’t allow it and so you believe.
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Of course no one in their right mind would accept a dirty glass from a nearby table to drink from unless it had been thoroughly washed and yet in this age of viruses and nasty infections we blindly accept certain religious practises that should be brought in line with the 21st century.
One of the biggest diseases of our times, the coronavirus is spreading fast around the world and the Greek Orthodox Church seems to think it can act as an antidote to it as long as its followers maintain faith and belief in God.
Now we have a good enough reason to stop Holy Communion, and hopefully ban it as an outdated practice and more importantly view it as risky behaviour.
Do we really want our babies, parents, grandparents or ourselves to be put at great risk just because we are sharing a spoon? What happens if one of the faithful gets an infection then goes out into the community possibly infecting others? Surely the church has a duty of care and moral obligation to ensure it is keeping it’s congregation and wider public, safe and healthy from its dubious activities such as that of Holy Communion.
Con Vaitsas
Ashbury NSW
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