The Sacramental Life

"Coffee is not a vice; it is a sign that God loves us!"  

A few years ago, I ended up in the emergency room with chest pains. In talking to the young intern, I told him that coffee was my greatest vice -- and he immediately replied with the words above.  I have often looked back with laughter on his remark, but also with reflection on all the "signs" that God loves us.  

Of course, Jesus Christ Himself is THE GREAT SIGN of God's love for the human race.  He was so passionate about being "with us" (Emmanuel) that He took on human form to walk amongst us, to sit at table with us, to get in the boat with us, to heal, to teach, to console and comfort, to ensure that we would never be alone.  He is the great Sacrament of God's love -- not just a sign, but a visible reality of invisible grace.

We live in a world of sacraments -- signs that God loves us and cares for us.  The world itself is a sacrament in this sense: the breeze rippling across the waters; the sun coming up each day, the trees that clean our air and provide shade from the heat of the day.....   As the children of Israel escaped from Egypt and moved across the desert, God provided for them a "pillar of fire by night and a cloud by day"  -- both sacraments or signs of his love, as the fire overcame the chill of the desert at night and the cloud protected them from the blistering sun by day.

And we, too, if we are children of God, are sacraments to one another, providing shelter from the cruel winds of loneliness and isolation; food to the hungry; comfort to the sorrowing; friendship to the forgotten prisoner.  God is extending His passionate love for mankind through the sacrament of our lives.  St. Francis prayed, "Lord, make me a channel of your peace....."    In order for us to be channels of peace, signs of God's love, we must first know His love for us.  Only then can we escape the Egypt of our own slavery to sin and isolation and become signs of God's love to the world.

God said to Abraham: I will bless you and you will be a blessing -- not only to his own family (it always starts there), but to his nation and to all peoples of the world.   Abraham's life is a blessing extended throughout the ages to all faiths and peoples.  But following him is a whole host of those whose lives are blessings -- all the patriarchs of Israel, all the prophets and leaders of the nation, whose passion for peace and justice prepared the way for the Savior.  And after Him, His Spirit fills the earth in all those whose lives have become sacraments, or "signs that God loves us."  

The lives of the saints, the great mystics, philosophers, and theologians; the artists and musicians, the ones who feed the hungry and die as martyrs for righteousness, politicians and lawyers, teachers and parents --- all signs that "God so loved the world that He sent His only begotten Son that those who believe in Him should not perish but have everlasting life."  

The Catholic church embodies a procession of Seven Sacraments -- formal signposts on our journey through life:  Baptism, Confirmation, Reconciliation, Eucharist, Holy Orders, Matrimony, and Sacrament of the Sick.  These formal Sacraments are designed to form us into living sacraments, or channels of God's grace to a hurting world.  These are stops along the way, where we can pause and hear the very words of God to us:  I will bless you and you will be a blessing!  

Abraham heard these words once -- at the beginning of his journey to the Promised Land.  But though the words were said only once,  the blessings continued day by day along the way -- through sin and obedience -- until they were fulfilled.  And we too, hear the words only once, twice, six or seven times throughout our lives -- but the blessings are continuous as we live out the nearness of Jesus Christ in our lives.  If we are truly blessed by the continuous presence and aid of God on our journey, we too will eventually become signs/ sacraments of God's love poured out on a hurting world.

To see and to know

"Our work ought to be a dialogue with reality, and therefore, a conversation with God" (Thomas Merton, The New Man, 47).

Merton goes on to quote St. Augustine, who says:

           What greater or more wonderful spectacle is there, or where can human reason better enter into a dialogue with the nature of things, than when seeds have been planted, shoots laid out, shrubs transplanted, grafts inserted.  It is as though one were questioning each root and seed, asking it what it can do and what it cannot do; whence it derives the power to do it, or why it cannot do it; what help it receives from its own interior power, and what from exterior help and diligence. And in this dialogue we come to understand how neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but God who giveth the increase.  For that work which is applied exteriorly is fruitful only by the action of Him who created and ruled and ordered all from within.

Adam's first "work," after God had created all the beasts and birds of the air, was to observe them and to name them.  Thomas Merton points out that Adam's naming was a kind of "second creation," for "whatever the man called each of them, that would be its name" (Gen. 2:19).  Adam's function, according to Merton, was to observe creation, see it, recognize it and thus give it a new and spiritual existence within himself.  He "repeats....the creative word by which God made each living thing."

In a way, this was the beginning of science.  By his God-given intelligence, Adam was to discover the correspondence between the reality of things as they are in the mind of God (nature) and what man would call the thing.  By his contemplation, Adam "sees" and understands; by his dialog/communion with God, he acquires the wisdom -- the name  -- by which he can communicate his understanding to others.  From Adam's "naming" comes the seed of creative intellectual activity which will flower into poetry, science, philosophy --- thought systems by which men can share their vision of reality, both seen and unseen.

When St. Teresa of Avila wanted to instruct her nuns in contemplation, she remarked that she did not require them to have lofty thoughts, but only to observe -- to "look."  When we observe both inner and outer reality with the eyes of faith, that is, in communion with the Holy Spirit of Wisdom, we begin to "see" things hitherto hidden from our eyes.  And we know things beyond what our senses can tell us.  If we ask the Spirit of God to reveal to us what is going on, He will show us great and hidden things we do not know. And once we can truly "name" or identify spiritual realities, not only do we know what to do with them (Wisdom), but we can communicate what we see to others.

Our world today seems to conspire against the slowness and silence required for genuine observation.  So we cannot always tell what is real and what is false.  I once asked a class of 11th grade students if they had ever felt that God was "right there."  The only positive response I got was from a young man who habitually hunted and fished -- that is, he was alone in the woods and on the sea.  

Maybe, for those who love gardening as I do, that is the secret; our hobby draws us into communion with God by drawing us into communion with nature, that is, with reality, with the essence of things.  We are drawn to observe and to name what we see, and in the naming we find the delight of recognition:  I know you; I know what you are and what you like, what your nature needs to flourish and thrive.  And I have the ability to provide what you need, to "tend the garden" according to my observation and communion with God.

What I say about gardening should also be said about raising children, about teaching, about conducting scientific inquiry, about medicine, about philosophy and the whole hosts of man's occupations on this earth.  It all begins in humility and observation, asking the Holy Spirit to open our eyes that we might see and understand what we are called to do.