Communion Spoon (Lavida)

In the temple, Isaiah saw a seraph fly to him "having a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with the tongs from off the altar," and lay it on his mouth: "Lo, this hath touched thy lips; and thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin purged" (Isaiah 6:6-7). The Church has always heard in that scene a foreshadowing of Holy Communion — the fire of God touching human lips not to destroy but to cleanse. The prayers before communion return to the image again and again, calling the Gifts a coal and a fire, and asking that they burn away sins rather than the sinner.

So when a small spoon eventually became the ordinary way of giving communion to the faithful, it inherited the vision's vocabulary: it is called the lavida, the tongs. Byzantine commentators had already used the word of the clergy's hands conveying the holy Gifts; the name settled on the spoon as the spoon took over the task. Every communicant who approaches the chalice steps, whether they know it or not, into Isaiah's place.

For centuries, everyone received the way Orthodox clergy still do at the altar: the consecrated Body placed in the hands, the chalice raised to the lips. As late as 692, the Council in Trullo directed the communicant to draw near "arranging his hands in the form of a cross" — echoing St. Cyril of Jerusalem, who in the fourth century had taught catechumens to make of their hands a throne to receive the King.

The spoon spread gradually through the Byzantine world; historians generally place its adoption for the laity between about the ninth and twelfth centuries. The reasons handed down are practical and reverent at once: fragments of the Holy Gifts could be dropped, some took the Body home instead of consuming it, and communing infants and the sick was difficult. A later legend credits the invention to St. John Chrysostom, but the dates do not support it, and the story is best taken as the tradition's way of blessing the change. The older manner was never condemned — it survives untouched in the clergy's communion at every Liturgy, so that both ancient and later practice live on side by side in the same service.

At "With the fear of God, and faith, and love, draw near," the communicant approaches — in many parishes with arms crossed over the chest — gives his or her baptismal name, and opens the mouth well; the priest places the Body and Blood together from the spoon, and an acolyte holds the communion cloth beneath. There is nothing to bite and nothing to do skillfully; the whole posture is that of being fed. Afterward come the zapivka — a sip of wine and warm water with a piece of bread, taken so that nothing of the Gifts remains in the mouth — and often antidoron, the blessed bread.

That all receive from one spoon and one cup sometimes startles newcomers. The Church's practice here is of a piece with its faith: the Gifts are the Body and Blood of Christ, the coal of Isaiah's vision, and the tradition has never regarded them as a source of harm. At the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts the choir sings the psalm the whole rite embodies: "O taste and see that the Lord is good" (Psalm 34:8). One loaf, one cup, one spoon — the family of God fed from one table.