Sinners Should Not Stay Away from Communion

Yet we ought not to keep ourselves away from the Lord’s Communion because we confess that we are sinners. We should hurry to it more and more eagerly, for the healing of our soul and the cleansing of our spirit, seeking rather a remedy for our wounds with humility of mind and with faith, as men who consider themselves unworthy to receive so great a grace. Otherwise we cannot worthily receive the Communion even once a year, as some do who live in monasteries. They so regard the dignity and holiness and worth of the heavenly sacraments as to think that none but saints and spotless persons should venture to receive them, and not rather that by receiving them we are made saints and pure. And so they fall into greater presumption and arrogance than what they think they are avoiding, because at the time they do receive them, they consider themselves worthy to receive them. But it is much better to receive them every Sunday for the healing of our weaknesses, with that humility of heart by which we believe and confess that we can never touch those holy mysteries worthily, than to be puffed up by a foolish conviction of heart and believe that at the year’s end we are worthy to receive them.

So, in order that we may grasp this and hold it fruitfully, let us all the more earnestly beg the Lord’s mercy to help us carry it out. It is not learned like other human arts, by some explanation in words beforehand, but rather with experience and practice leading the way. And unless it is often considered and hammered out in the conferences of spiritual people, and anxiously sifted by daily experience and trial, it will either fall out of use through carelessness or perish through idle forgetfulness.