Why do you refrain from communion when you visit churches?

It is a fair thing to ask, and even a pointed one, because refraining in a room full of people receiving can look like a judgment on them. Sergio names that risk himself and takes pains to answer it, so the question deserves a straight reply.

And you are right to expect a real reason, not a posture. A man who goes to three or four churches in a month, to listen and learn the rooms, and then declines the cup every time, owes an account of why. He gives one.

You may also sense that this is personal before it is polemical, that he is describing his own conscience, not writing everyone else's. That instinct is correct, and it matters for how the answer lands.

Here is what it is not, so the frame is clear: it is not a rebuke of the person beside him. In his own words, he refrains 'never with a raised eyebrow at the people beside me who are receiving with full hearts.' He is not making a point; he is not shopping for a congregation; he is not staging a protest at the rail.

What it is: a thing he cannot unsee. Once he saw the cup as a covenant cut once and finished, and saw the schedule and the mediating office as a machine laid over it, he could not in conscience take the cup as that machine administers it, from the front of a room, on a cadence the institution set, as a seal being reapplied. He refrains from the machinery, not from the covenant, which he holds is already his and cannot be given or withheld by anyone. The refraining is a quiet act of integrity, not a verdict on the faithful. Grieve it with him, the piece asks, not win it.

Do not take it from me. Read the opening of the essay in his own voice, and read Jeremiah 31:34, 'they shall all know Me,' then ask whether his reason is contempt for the table or reverence for what the cup already accomplished.