How frequently should I receive Holy Communion?

The wise St Augustine of Hippo wrote in one of his Epistles: “One person, honoring it [Holy Communion], dares not receive it daily, and the other person, honoring it, dares not forgo a single day.”

This statement presupposes that the Holy Communion is available daily in the place where one lives.

[We may note in passing that before the Middle Ages the normal practice, even in Benedictine monasticism, was to celebrate the Eucharist only on Sundays and feast days, with communion being made on other days from the reserved sacrament. And we recall that in Orthodoxy daily Celebration is rare and unusual. Thus Patristic Christianity did not require Daily Celebration of the Eucharist but only in the large city churches the availability daily of Holy Communion.]

But back to the frequency of celebration & reception. The words of the French Benedictine Adalbert de Vogue are worth pondering at length:

“In itself the daily repetition of an act enhances it no more than does its renewal once a week. Frequency is not without ambiguity. To introduce a Rite into the daily routine is both to pay homage to it and to make it commonplace (to mark its importance and to weaken its impact). Inversely, spacing out the sacred celebration may seem either a sign of less interest – it is not worth spending time on every day – or a token of high esteem: the action is too sublime to be regarded, it should be reserved for solemn occasions.”

The points made here apply not only to the question of the frequency of the Celebration of the Eucharist and the reception of Holy Communion, but also to the relation of the Daily Office to the Eucharist.

The Church of God is to offer both Daily Prayer (“pray without ceasing”) and the regular Eucharist (“do this in remembrance of me”) to the Father through the Son and with the Holy Spirit. Both are necessary but while one is absolutely necessary DAILY the other is not necessary but may be in some situations advisable daily. And one may rightly add that it is impossible for a local church to give full honor to the Eucharist unless there is committed involvement in Daily Prayer, Morning and Evening.

In recent decades a major loss in parish spirituality has been the demise of the daily offering of morning and evening prayer by a quorum of the people on behalf of the whole people. And in the same period the Eucharist, while it has been more frequently celebrated, that celebration has generally been with less spiritual preparation, solemnity and reverence.

St Augustine tells the Lord of his mother in the fourth century who omitted “on no day the oblation at Thy altar, coming to thy church twice a day, morning and evening, without any intermission, not for idle stories and useless chit-chat, but to hear Thee in Thy discourses, and that thou mightest hear her in her prayers.”

Not many parishes today can sustain a Daily Eucharist at which there is a reasonable attendance of people who are spiritually prepared, but all parishes should seek to make provision for Daily Prayer even if novel ways [e.g., a telephone hook up] have to be found to unite a quorum of parishioners daily in the prayer services, morning and evening.

The Rev’d Dr Peter Toon
August 9, 2001