I want to conclude this sequence about communion by explaining what I think about it. This is what works for me. I don't insist it is the answer for anyone else but if you find it helpful ...
To be honest I have no feelings about communion. Not in the sense that many Catholics have a deep emotional response to the mass and communion. I've discussed this with Catholics and I simply do not share their feelings. I was an adult convert to Christianity and Methodism has never had a high church understanding of communion.
This does not mean I would criticise those who feel more about communion than I do. My emotional attachment to the faith is in the Methodist evangelical tradition and in particular the forgiveness of sins.
Karen Armstrong in several books, including The Case for God, which is in the sidebar, makes a distinction between two types of knowledge. These are mythos and logos. Logos is information about the world and how it works. This covers the everyday world, the world where people interact with each other according to rules and regulations.
Mythos is the knowledge that relates to the world of meaning. It points beyond the everyday world to God. Throughout most of history this type of meaning has not been seen as the same as logos meaning. To confuse the mythos, eg the words in the Bible, with the logos, eg science, is a fundamental and frankly immature error.
This understood, the two worlds do interact. Worship is not a celebration of belief, in mythos or logos, it is the lived experience of the mythos and so incomprehensible to the logos. We live out, through our rituals, the world to come. So, communion is 'a foretaste of the heavenly banquet prepared for all humankind'. It is neither an everyday meal nor anything like what we might find in any life to come.
However, this is not about some life to come, it is about the here and now. To say the bread and wine are the body and blood of Jesus Christ is true in church but not in the everyday world. To carry a piece of bread to work, show it to your colleagues and say this is the body of Christ would be nonsense. Why?
Because in the world we are all parts of the Body of Christ. We are the people called by God to live and die for others as part of Christ's body. The bread and wine are a means to an end, they embody the place we all have in the Kingdom of God.
So, when I'm not able to take part in some other tradition's communion, I rejoice there are others, beyond my own tradition, called like me to be part of Christ's body . Beyond the door of whatever church I'm in there is a world where we all live and die together. This will always be more important than the details of what we believe about bread and wine and how we administer it.
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