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.
The issue of how we treat those with mental illness or mental developmental problems (retardation) also comes in here. I was glad that Jeff Meyers mentioned this point in The Lord’s Service, which I just finished.
The only chink in your armor is the fact that a saint with dementia would have been definitively admitted to the table via some eccesiastical gate while the child has never been “verfied.” One has a point-in-time verified status while the other does not. Not that I disagree with what you are saying in principle.
You know Mark, I was already sympathetic to very-young-child communion before we had a child with special needs. Since she has come along, I’ve really begun to question how the church has turned Christ’s words upside down. He said we must become like little children. We Presbyterians expect children to become like adults before we will deem them “worthy.”
PCA folk generally won’t be able to properly imagine the communion of persons outside of public worship (whether because of cognitive or physical difficulties) without a minor liturgical reformation regarding bedside rites and the reservation of the Sacrament.
First, The Westminster standards preclude private masses, and the usual practice of inviting the elders and deacons to an off-site service, violates the spirit of that precept.
Secondly, when the Sacrament is re-consecrated in these services (where it is properly consecrated at all), a real disservice is done to the notion of the common table.
Having a number of older folks in my Chicago congregation, I adopted beside liturgies of the Book of Common Prayer and bought a portable communion kit with a pyx to reserve a portion of our Sunday sacrament. I added to the kit some anointing oil and a small stole.
By the time I left Chicago, my home bound folks came to expect that I would bring Holy Communion each time I visited. Fortunately, the RCA isn’t quite so hung-up on these things, and I was able to get away with my “Puseyan” innovations.
Michael+