This is an article that every pastor (and everyone else) should think about.
…”I hope that our understanding might suggest practical ways of sustaining identity and spiritual experience longer into the disease.”
For instance, Weaver found that patients almost never have the opportunity to partake of communion once they stop attending worship services.
“It’s amazing the awakening of memory that taking communion can have,” he said. “It offers an upholding sense of community. It also takes on a new meaning—this is the presence of Christ for you. It makes it real and concrete in a manner that those suffering with Alzheimer’s are capable of experiencing.”
Weaver suggests that the church might consider the importance that sacramental worship has for effective pastoral care. “In fact,” he wrote, “the episodes of greatest spiritual assurance for Alzheimer’s patients seem to arise in regular opportunities to relive very familiar practices that witness to the spiritual meaning of a person’s life. I like to think of these experiences as patients’ participation in the rhythms of God’s grace” (Cells to Souls).
While the paedocommunion v. antipaedocommunion debate has begun to stir up new heat lately, I think we need to keep in mind the other end of the spectrum. The current practice of being admitted to the Table once and for all is relatively new in Presbyterian practice. Back in the day of “communion seasons” one had to prove oneself anew every time. I don’t have direct evidence, but if the tradition was maintained from the days of the Westminster Assembly, then senility and feeble-mindedness meant a new excommunication.
Because we now definitively receive people as communing members, this whole line of thought has (thankfully) receded from the Presbyterian mind. But as antipaedocommunionism grows I don’t see how it cannot return. All the arguments against a young child’s ability to discern the code of the elements or to examine himself are equally applicable to those suffering from dementia.
This would be a real tragedy.
