The Chalice and the Highchair: The Medieval Spilling Hazard That Starved the Children
The Orthodox Church has spent two thousand years refusing to act as bouncers to the Kingdom's youngest members
When my wife and I brought our newborn baby girl home from the hospital earlier this year, we did not immediately strap her into a highchair, set a plate of roast chicken in front of her, and announce, “I will feed you once you can explain the value of protein and the mechanics of digestion.” We actually just fed her.
We feed her milk so that she can survive. We feed her so she can grow. We feed her because she is already part of the family, and families share life together at the table.
But in the modern West, we have adopted a very different approach when it comes to the table of the Lord. Across the Roman Catholic and Protestant traditions, there is a generally held assumption that religion is largely a mental exercise. Faith risks being reduced to understanding data and giving an intellectual assent. Because of these assumptions, we delay communion until a child reaches a somewhat arbitrary “age of reason,” which varies from group to group.
We end up turning a holy meal into a math problem.
I grew up in a nondenominational evangelical Church with baptistic and dispensational emphases, and we definitely didn’t commune the little kids. But when I started running with Reformed and Presbyterian folks (and even Lutherans), I was forced to face the question of infant baptism, and by implication, infant communion (also known as paedocommunion).
I studied the issue closely, and by the time I joined an Anglican Church, I was already convinced that children belonged at the altar. And significantly, my Anglican parish functionally practiced paedocommunion. If the parents had approached the chalice with a baptized toddler, and he or she looked at the priest and offered a hearty “goo goo ga ga” unto the Lord, we basically accepted that as a credible profession of faith and gave them the Eucharist.
While it was a beautiful pastoral instinct, it was also a workaround; not really something from within the tradition of Anglicanism.
We were trying to hack a modern Protestant framework—to do an ancient Catholic thing in Anglo-Catholic vestments. It wasn’t until I really looked long and hard Eastward that I realized I didn’t need a workaround. The Orthodox Church is the only game in town that has been communing infants since the early Church—without interruption, and without apology.
There is no theological pop quiz at the chalice for the baptized. As I say over and over on this site and in our in-person classes, God’s saving actions are a rescue mission.
Tune in for the rest, or view the original at https://www.simplyorthodox.info/p/the-chalice-and-the-highchair-the
