Confession and Communion: Guidelines or Laws?

One question that is often asked of pastors by new converts is “How often should I go to confession?”  Closely allied to this query is the one which asks, “Do I need to go to confession each time before receiving Holy Communion?”  These are good questions, and because they deal with the human heart, the answers are not simple.  It is not like answering a query about the posted speed limit by saying, “It’s forty miles per hour and if you exceed the limit you’re breaking the law and will get a speeding ticket”.  Despite the approach and views of the Pharisees with their love of laws and legalism, the matter of salvation and the healing of the heart defies such simple answers. All real pastors know this.

         First of all, a word about the history of the sacrament of confession.  In the early church, the faithful did not go to confession.  Confession was reserved for the penitent unfaithful—that is, for someone who had been excommunicated for a major sin (such as adultery or violence) and who had repented and sought readmission to the sacramental communion of the Church.  Such a penitent person would confess to the leader of the local community (in those days, the bishop) who would then pray for him, absolving him of his sins and readmit him to Eucharistic communion.  Those who had never been excommunicated (i.e. the vast majority) never needed such readmission because they had never been expelled.

         Thus we read in the 2023 document of the OCA entitled Essential Orthodox Christian Beliefs: A Manual for Adult Instruction that “In the early church, this responsibility to restore the penitent devolved on the pastoral leadership, and especially upon the congregation’s main pastor, the bishop. [Here] we see the bishop’s responsibility to decide who is in the church and who is out. If a person had been expelled from the church for grave sin, it was the bishop who allowed him back in upon repentance and prayed for his forgiveness.  Later, however, this rite of forgiveness for the excommunicated became fused with another private spiritual exercise, one which became especially popular among monks…It proved to be spiritually valuable, and not just for monks. Nowadays everyone in the church uses the sacrament of Confession like this.”              

Time marches on and the practice of regularly confessing one’s sins became one of the Church’s spiritual disciplines, a practice like fasting that was a part of the Church’s arsenal for fighting sin and growing spiritually.  The OCA Manual goes on to ask, “How many times throughout the year should we go to confession?” and it answers that “Different churches have different guidelines, but ultimately each person should consult with his or her spiritual father for appropriate frequency.”                                               T

There is, therefore, no set-in-stone one-size-fits-all law.  The Manual recognizes the complexities of the process of spiritual growth and the necessity for individual pastoral guidance.  As the Manual stated, different churches have different guidelines.  In the 2023 OCA Guidelines for Clergy we read that “The priest, as the confessor for the flock entrusted to his care, determines the frequency with which his spiritual children confess their sins, with monthly confession as the norm”.                                                                       

Please note that this is a norm, not a law.  That is why the guidelines used in various jurisdictions stress the individual pastoral element first. In the words of one parish (St. Michael’s Antiochian parish in Texas), the question “How often should I go to confession?” is answered by saying, “There is no single answer.  Your spiritual father will help you figure out what’s right for you. That’s not a cop-out.  It’s how Orthodoxy works.  We don’t hand you a rule-book that says, ‘Confess every six weeks’.  We give you a spiritual hospital and a physician who knows your condition.”  

         That is indeed how Orthodoxy works.  And it is important too to recognize the importance of communing.  In the early church, what was later called “non-communicating attendance” was unthinkable because weekly communing was the way that one maintained one’s connection with Christ.  The Eucharist was not then considered one of the “means of grace” for individual sanctification so much as the means whereby one remained a part of Christ’s Body.  It was a corporate act more than an individual one.            

The Fathers understood reception of the Eucharist to be the essential norm—and not just once a week! In his commentary on the Lord’s Prayer, St. Cyprian of Carthage (d. 258) wrote about the petition “Give us this day our daily bread”. “These words”, he said, “may be taken either spiritually or literally because in the divine plan, both readings are helpful for our salvation… We call this ‘our bread’ because Christ is the bread of those who partake of His Body. And we ask that this bread be given us daily, lest we who live in Christ and receive the Eucharist every day as the food of salvation be separated from His Body by some grave sin that keeps us from communion and so deprives us of our heavenly bread.”  

For St. Cyprian, only grave sin should keep the Christian from communing.  And for him, daily Communion was the ideal.

         After the habit of non-communicating attendance at the Liturgy began to spread, such pastors as St. John Chrysostom lamented the habit.  In a sermon on the Epistle to the Ephesians John thundered at his congregation as follows:

         “Look, I entreat you! A royal table is set before you, angels minister at the table, the King Himself is there and do you stand gaping? Are your garments defiled and yet you make no account of it? Or are you clean?—then fall down and partake…You have sung hymns with the rest; you have declared yourself to be of the number of those who are worthy by not departing with those who are unworthy [i.e. the catechumens]. Why stay and yet not partake of the table? ‘I am unworthy’ you will say.  Then are you also unworthy of the participation you had in the prayers? …So that I may not be the means of increasing your condemnation, I entreat you not to forbear coming”.   

The importance of communing was doubtless why such pastors as the late Metropolitan Anthony Bloom was reluctant to refuse Communion to any penitent Orthodox who approached the Chalice.  In a 1984 talk as part of a panel discussion on confession, he said, “I know of no canon that forbids a Christian who is not under ban to come and receive Communion, which means that unless you have committed a sin that is incompatible with Communion and with the oneness of life with Christ, either because you have acted against Him or against your neighbour or against yourself, there is no rule to prevent you from having Communion. This is why I do not feel I have any right, if a person has no formal reason to be debarred, to debar a person from Communion”.  Norms and guidelines are one thing; turning them into a law and on that basis refusing an Orthodox person Holy Communion is something else entirely.

         In this the late Metropolitan speaks with the same voice and spirit as another Russian pastor, that of Fr. Artemy Vladimirov, a priest in Moscow.  In speaking about confession, he mentioned the well-intentioned but ultimately false and unhelpful zeal of some confessors who felt “like the archangel with a burning sword guarding the entrance to paradise”.  Fr. Artemy said that for those zealots, “if one of the descendants of Adam and Eve even dares to approach [the Chalice], [the priest] immediately raises his sword to annihilate them.  Or I sometimes see a young priest,” continued Fr. Artemy, “standing near the cross and gospel like a guard dog: ‘Who dares to approach Holy Communion?’… For him the one aim is not to permit [their approach], as if he were a judge in a Dickens novel, or a KGB officer”.  The final advice that Fr. Artemy would give to such a priest? It was this: “Be afraid of not permitting someone to partake of Holy Communion!”  Like the late Metropolitan, Fr. Artemy knew the difference between a guideline and a law.  (See here for more.)     

         At the end of the day, in all things pastoral the priest, as a good shepherd, must imitate the Chief Shepherd of all.  He must not lord it over them or use his authority as the flaming sword mentioned by Fr. Artemy, but be an example of humility, using discernment to give to each member of his flock what he or she needs (1 Peter 5:1-4).  If the priest wears his cassock as if it were a judge’s robe or a policeman’s uniform, on the Last Day he will discover the wisdom contained in the Epistle of St. James who wrote, “Let not many of you become teachers, my brethren, knowing that as such we shall incur greater condemnation” (James 3:1).