Are you saying communion is wrong, or that I shouldn't take it?

You are reading carefully, and the question is the right one to ask, because a piece that says 'and I refrain, every time' sounds at first like a piece that wants you to refrain too. It does not. If the cup has carried you through funerals and hard marriages, that instinct to protect it is exactly right, and nothing here is aimed at it.

And you are right that the cup is holy. It really is His blood, really is the new covenant, really is among the most astonishing things ever placed in human hands. The essay says that in as many words. The reverence you bring to the table is aimed at something real and reaches something real.

You may even feel the tension the piece is after: that the thing you love and the way you have been taught to keep it are not quite the same thing. Hold that. It is honest.

But hear the distinction plainly, because the whole piece turns on it. The critique is never of the cup and never of the person taking it. It is of the machine built around it: the covenant that was cut once and finished, rebuilt into a rite that has to be re-performed on a schedule by a set-apart office-holder. 'The schedule is the problem. The mediating office is the problem. The love inside it was never the problem.' That is the line to hold onto.

So the correction is not 'stop taking communion.' It is 'see what the cup actually is.' A covenant already cut for you, already yours, requiring no one to re-seal it. Sergio refrains for his own reason, a thing he cannot unsee about the machinery, not as a verdict on the faithful person beside him receiving with a full heart.

Do not take it from me. Read the cup's own words, 'this cup is the new covenant in My blood' (Luke 22:20), and ask whether anything there commands you to stop, or simply frees you to see what you are holding.