QA241 QUESTION: Could you please explain the meaning of the sacrament of holy communion. Is it a ritual or is it more?
ANSWER: It can be more and it can be a ritual. Every ritual had originally a deep meaning, but most of the rituals as practiced in the current, existing religions have lost contact with the meaning, and are, most of the time, performed in a perfunctory way, as an empty ritual.
Ritual in itself can be connected to the truth of the higher self. And all these rituals can have that. But rituals must change through the ages. What was a meaningful ritual at one period becomes empty because it has been repeated and repeated without the feeling and the thought and the understanding.
Also, as the ages and the development and the conditions of mankind change, so must the rituals change, and so must the expressions of religions change. In the holding to the ritual, that in itself can be a life-defeating process. So the same inner content of the ritual reappears in a new age, in a different outer form.
But the imbibing of the Christ consciousness, which is this ritual of communion – the Christ feelings and the Christ life in the body – is an all-pervading, ever-existing spiritual reality that goes throughout the ages and that is expressed in your time in new ways. So new and meaningful rituals must arise now, and do arise.
