CHAPTER 6: TEMPORARY SOLUTION FOR A PERMANENT PROBLEM 193 Lukas Visscher, the theologian of Geneva, he was a very good friend of us, he came several times, who has been a moderator of Faith and Order for a long time and so on, when he came here, he did not uh, take the Communion, and he told us: ‘I am sorry, I am deeply grateful to you, to your offer, but until the day the reciprocity will not be possible, I can’t take the Communion.’ And it’s, again, it’s true. It’s another way to face seriously the wound that remains. So, you can say, prophetically, in a special situation etcetera, I can go to the uh, to a Roman Catholic Mass, because they let me go, they ask me to go, they invite me to take part, but I know that this can be um, problematic for some of my brothers in the confession, or in any case, it’s not, it’s just a local solution of a bigger problem, and this remains. But when… when I see people that I know, how much it costs to go to them, to receive the Communion in this sense, I think that they are happy in any way, but what interior work they had to do with us for joining this time, is for me a joy, and not only a joy, a sort of pushing to go on and to face the difficulties, the doubts, the problems, the wounds of the, of sharing the Communion.447 The practice of Eucharistic hospitality, thus, does not erase the experience of pain caused by division. The monastics welcome and appreciate this experience because it fuels their desire for unity. This echoes, of course, one of the main arguments of critics of Eucharistic hospitality: the pain experienced through separation at the altar is a vital stimulus for ecumenical commitment. Taizé and Bose show that the practices of abstinence and Eucharistic sharing do not have to be mutually exclusive to be fruitful. If a community in which Eucharistic hospitality is practiced remains open to the wider ecumenical process, the result is both the unifying and comforting experience of sharing the Eucharist and the painful experience of the state of division the church continues to find itself in. The monastics experience both as valid and effective impulses for ecumenical commitment. BF touches on an important point when he introduces the notion of reciprocity. The lack of reciprocity is a clear marker of imperfect communion. In the contexts of Taizé and Bose, this reciprocity has not been realized, at least not in a structural way. The Catholics indicate that they would consider receiving Communion in other traditions occasionally – or have actually done so in the past – but that this is not part of the established communal reality. 447 BF-1,22c.
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