Wednesday, April 18, 2007 Carvajal: Holy communion traffic By Orlando P. Carvajal Break Point
WHEN Fr. Melo Diola invited me to attend a dilaab advocacy Mass last Friday, I thought I would accept to show my appreciation for what the dilaab movement that he leads is doing to try and make a difference in society. I had no idea what an advocacy Mass was and prepared myself to be surprised.
Surprised indeed I was, not by anything earthshaking but by some small detail when Fr. Melo laid down some rules of order for those who were going to take communion. He asked us to take communion row by row, starting with the last row at the back.
The bigger surprise for me was to see that everybody followed without the help of ushers or marshals, resulting in a most orderly and disciplined traffic at communion.
I felt like I was witnessing some minor miracle of sorts. I know communion is done this way in the US but always with the help of ushers and there were none that Friday. People exercised restraint and patience just by being challenged to behave like Christians, considerate of others, at communion time.
Fr. Melo’s idea was to showcase during communion time how a Christian community shares in a very orderly, considerate and unselfish manner the body and blood of Christ. The way we take communion, he added, should not mirror the chaotic way we do business outside, with utter disregard for rules of order, with no consideration for others completely focused only on one’s need to get ahead of others.
I just had to call Fr. Melo afterwards to compliment him on his novel experiment and to ask him to convince the cardinal to make this a standard way of taking communion because it is the Christian way to conduct ourselves whenever we are not alone. This is one simple way the Church could model a new behavior, by a disciplined, orderly and, therefore, considerate way of taking communion. Not to follow rules of order is to be inconsiderate and to be inconsiderate is to be slightly less than Christian.
I have said this before but the Church should model a truly loving Christian community in order to be a credible voice in our political wilderness. Yet there are big behavioral issues the Church cannot credibly comment on like the lack of transparency and authoritarianism of our civil leaders that underpin their bad governance. The Church cannot castigate our leaders credibly for their lack of transparency and autho-ritarianism because the Church is very authoritarian itself and also lacks transparency in the way it rules over parishes.
But implementing orderly communion traffic rules could be a good modeling start. It is a tiny drop of rain but taken at the flood, to borrow from Shakespeare, it could lead on to some big behavior modification for us Filipinos.
