Beautiful Sacraments

The Irish Spirit – Issue No. 12

They celebrate the divine presence already in our hearts

From the book Treasured and Transformed by Daniel O’Leary

It is common, unfortunately, for preachers to talk about the sacraments in terms of offering grace to graceless people. This presumes, to a greater or lesser extent, that those who do not belong to the sacramental life of the church are without grace. There is a hollow ring to that supposition. It carries no echo, except that of sadness or self-doubt, within people’s spirit. In such a proclamation there is no good news. And this, in turn, contributes to the phenomenon of the faithful departing from our communities. These are the people who have given up on formal religion but who long for an authentic spirituality. They have given up because they see no relevance between their lives and their religious practices, between nature and grace. Instead of finding inspiration, strength and empowerment, they experience confusion and irrelevance.

Grace does not designate a ‘supernatural’ area standing above and beyond created nature: it refers, instead, to that significant ground of all being which circumscribes and supports the horizon and depth of everyday experience. The liturgy is rich with expressions of this truth. The Eucharistic Prayers and the Prefaces, the form of our sacramental celebrations, the prayers of the Roman Ritual, all point to the universal presence of God in and around everything, as the fountain, source and sustainer of creation, ‘of all life and holiness’.

Grace is the innate capacity each one possesses to relate, forgive, encounter suffering, create, invent, imagine, endure, explore – indeed to do anything which is a positive option for love and growth. Grace is the context and potential transformation bound up in every moment of being and becoming, in every desire and achievement of authentic self-realisation. While we are obliged to believe in the absolute giftedness of grace, we can affirm too, with equal force, in the words of the brilliant theologian, Piet Fransen, that ‘grace sets our deepest humanity free, precisely because it restores our most authentic humanity to us and by this means, humanises us to an eminent degree … Properly speaking, we do not receive grace; we do not possess it as something foreign to us, or as something entering into us from the outside; for we are our grace. As Caesar wisely observes in Thornton Wilder’s Ides of March: “I seem to have known all my life, but have refused to acknowledge, that all love is one, and that the very mind with which I ask these questions is awakened, sustained and instructed only by love”.

Sacraments of what happens

Whether we use the word ‘sacrament’ in terms of Jesus Christ, of the Church or of the individual rites that vary between traditions, we are talking about celebrations of ordinary and extraordinary life, about validating the authenticity of human experience and about the individual and communal need for purification, discernment and transformation in the vicissitudes of our fragile existence. The first step towards a deeper understanding of sacraments is to see them in the context of a world already permeated and filled with God’s presence.

The art is to enable people to become what they already are. The phrase ‘Receive who you are’ accompanied the offering of the holy bread at the Communion of the Mass in the early years of Christianity. You are the Body of Christ. Grace is orientated to our humanity in its fullness. God’s basic gift to people is the lives they live and the good earth from which they make their living.

Instead of superficially perceiving those ‘outside the church’ as somehow unfinished or incomplete, or even nameless or neutral, or worse still, as blind and lost, perhaps, following the sensitivity of Jesus to all that his Father has created, our church will, one day, find its very meaning and mission in proclaiming the essential holiness of all people, the sacred heart of all creation. Is God diminished when God’s family is sanctified? Does the church lose when the world grows more truly healthy? Is not the very work of the Spirit to reveal the innate worthiness and beauty of matter? Is it not only in the arena of the life of the world that sin and evil can be encountered and transcended?

The Vatican Council’s document The Church in the Modern World makes it clear that in the past we overemphasised the notion of two distinct worlds, one sacred and one profane. Gregory Baum, a peritus at the Council, expresses, in Man Becoming, his special insight in this way: ‘The radical distinction between the sacred and the profane has been overcome in the person of Christ. In Christ it is revealed that the locus of the divine is the human. In him it is made manifest that God speaks in and through the words and gestures of people. The Christian way of worship, therefore, can no longer consist in sacred rites by which people are severed from the ordinary circumstances of their lives. Christian liturgy is, rather, the celebration of the deepest dimension of human life, which is God’s self-communication to people. Liturgy unites people more closely to their daily lives. Worship remembers and celebrates the marvellous things God works in the lives of people, purifies and intensifies these gifts, makes people more sensitive to the Word and Spirit present in their secular lives. The sacraments of Christ enable people to celebrate the deepest dimension of their lives, namely, God’s gift of God’s self, in a way that renders the dimension more powerful.’

I never cease to be amazed at such glimpses into the meaning of revelation. And whenever we share it with others, the reaction is similar. After talks, workshops and presentations about such an understanding of the mystery of incarnation, invariably there will be those who say something like, ‘What you have said is not new. We have always known it in our hearts. We have never doubted the sacredness of our lives, of our childbearing and our daily work, of our struggles to survive and grow, of our efforts to forgive and start again. Our hearts have always told us that these are holy tasks. All that’s new is that now we have heard it said.’ What a deep transformation it would trigger off around the Christian world were this good news to be proclaimed wherever the people are gathered around the table of the Lord.

Sacraments celebrate our lives

And so we understand the individual sacraments as privileged moments of ultimate meaning, as windows of deep disclosure, as holy X-rays that reveal the true condition of a person’s or a community’s inner, spiritual health. Leaving aside an often misleading or even damaging and dualistic catechesis about the sacraments, what they basically do is to take the earthly realities of our human existence – birth, reconciliation, sickness, love, the need to worship, commitment, death – and to the eyes of faith they show forth the deeper meaning hidden within, the silent activity of the Spirit, gradually sanctifying and redeeming every aspect of daily life until the time when God will be ‘all in all’. In his famous Christ the Sacrament, Schillebeeckx reminds us that whatever is lived out in an everyday manner outside the sacraments, grows to its full maturity within them. The anonymity of everyday living is removed by the telling power of Christ’s symbolic action in and through his Church. Therefore, the sacraments cannot be isolated from the organic unity of whole, human, persevering Christian life.

To be sacramentally literate, according to spiritual writer Fr Hugh Lavery, we would move beyond the constraints of time, space, numbers and immediacy. While always relying on the tangible elements of the earth for their matter and form, the essence of sacrament, whether as applied to the Saviour, to the Church, or to baptism or Eucharist, is to point away from itself, as Jesus did, to move out into a wider field of reality, to embrace within its symbolism that which could otherwise never be brought home.

Where reconciliation is concerned, for instance, there is the vital need to remember that we are all, always, forgiven for everything by virtue of the one and only sacrifice of Jesus Christ in his Passover. If anything is ‘left over’ to complete the mystery, as St Paul implies, it is that we forgive each other, always and everywhere, as we solemnly pray in the ‘Our Father’ before receiving Holy Communion at Mass. The sacrament of reconciliation is not about begging for ‘another’ divine forgiveness, a ‘second’ type of atonement between Church and penitent, between God and sinner. Nor is it a holier, more divine reconciliation, above and beyond human forgiveness. Not everyone is aware of this, namely the true significance and necessity of the communal celebration of this sacrament.

What is celebrated is the forgiving presence of the indwelling Blessed Trinity in each human being. This is first expressed and shared in whatever ways are appropriate to the people concerned. It may be within a community, a family, a friendship or within one human heart. What is important to believe is that wherever and whenever it happens, there, and only there, is the event of grace, the power of the Spirit, the infinite and complete energy of God. Nothing else is needed. At that moment the Godhead is fully fleshed, the incarnation continues, the once-for-all paschal mystery is made present, the Holy Spirit is audible and tangible. There is no need for a two-tier hierarchy of forgiveness – one human, one divine. And yet, throughout Christian countries, Churches, parishes and schools, our liturgical preaching and sacramental catechesis often convey a confusing double-decker kind of approach to grace and nature, to the human and the divine.

Again, the sacraments do not confer a grace that was absent. Sacraments proclaim and enable us to own a love that is already present to us. A sacrament celebrates the Lord’s giving, certainly. But his giving is not confined to the sacrament. What we need to focus on within the sacrament is our taking the love of God home with us, with a fresh awareness of that love. And that new awareness is the substance of the grace of the sacrament. Before reading another informative summary from Kiesling’s Paradigms of Sacramentality, it will help to know that a ‘paradigm’ is an example which holds within it the essence of meaning, against which concepts can be examined and understood – a kind of fine example, a sure model.

A final note on sacramentality

Kiesling writes, ‘Baptism as incorporation into the Christian community is a paradigm of the sacramentality of all entrance into human community – family, city, nation, labour union, political party, school, bridge club. Confirmation is a model of all commitment to worthy human associations, causes and ideals. Penance is paradigmatic of all human reconciliation, whether between members of families or of other communities, between proponents of opposing ideas of government.

‘Further, anointing the sick is paradigmatic of the sacramentality of all care of the bodily and mentally ill, the economically and culturally deprived, the downtrodden, the rejected. Ordination is paradigmatic of the sacramentality of all human responsibility for the welfare of others, especially their common welfare, of all human leadership and government, whether in the narrow circle of the family or the wide circle of international life. The Eucharist is paradigmatic of the sacramentality of all self-sacrifice for others and for the causes of justice, love, freedom and truth. It is paradigmatic of the sacramentality of every meal which people share and of all human sharing, whether economic, cultural or spiritual. Marriage is paradigmatic of the sacramentality of every human encounter, every human friendship, every human love. It is paradigmatic too of the banalities of daily social life of every kind. The Word of God (in the sense of the Bible, the oral traditions behind it, and the words of God’s spokespeople behind them) may be added to this list as paradigmatic of the sacramentality of all human speech and communication.’

Unless we are aware of the sacramental nature of all reality and of the fact that our whole Christian life is worship, we cannot fully appreciate the constantly revealing mystery of the Incarnation, of the church and of the individual sacraments. What has been said up to now is that the world and all it contains is created out of the extravagant and unconditional love we call God. The breathtaking mystery of creation, past and present, is an incredibly beautiful sign of compassion, communicated to people, and reflecting the wisdom and loveliness of God. This, in itself, already makes the world holy and sacred. And then, this presence of the Spirit and the Word which were there from the beginning, as St John (and the sacraments) reminds us, is fleshed in Jesus Christ, consecrating again from within, a nature and an earthly reality that was sorely in need of salvation. ‘Make ready for Christ,’ shouts Thomas Merton, ‘whose smile, like lightning, sets free the song of everlasting glory that now sleeps, in your paper flesh, like dynamite.’