Hey folks, this week we're beginning a new "unit" of study for adult catechesis. For the next ten weeks we'll be diving into the Sacraments of the Church: what they are, what they do, how they work, etc. etc.
Now, one of the things we're going to see together is that the Sacraments, and their place in the life of the Church is downstream from what it is we actually believe about the 1) nature of the world in which we find ourselves and 2) its relationship to God.
Perhaps the first thing to say is this: The Sacraments force us to return to and be amazed by the simple surprise of finding ourselves alive and in this thing we call "the world."
This is, quite literally, the experience of being human: we find ourselves "in the middle of things" (in media res), "thrown" into a life in a time and place, and from that time and place only do we begin to make sense of where and who we are. It's a startling, and sort of hilarious, thing to remember.
"We open our eyes, we smell, we breathe, we touch, we are touched, by rock, by the satin of a flower petal, by skin. We are amazed, even delighted, we attend on a certain music of things. What is strangely there is strange because it intimates an other--in and through its very own otherness...there is nothing [silly or] contrived about the question of God." - William Desmond
One of the great gifts and mysteries of the Christian faith is its contention that God meets us in this "between" in which we live and suffer and love and die. God, who by definition was not "thrown" into living like we were, makes himself known and knowable through the things he's created.
This knowability is no where more acute, nowhere more vivid, indeed nowhere more mysterious, than in the Incarnation of God in Jesus of Nazareth. Here God's sensibility becomes direct and unmediated, God in the between of our existence, "thrown" into the middle of things like us.
The Incarnation's definite "yes" to the capacity of created material to covey God to that same creation is the theological basis of the sacramental life of the Church.
Another way to put it is that the Sacraments follow the logic of the Incarnation: created material united with God such that God himself is conveyed to those who receive them. Signs and the reality they signify. The medium and the message.
If we can give ourselves to the contemplation of these things without irony and cynicism and fear - if we can open ourselves to the possibility that it all might just be true - we risk (in the best way) learning to actually hear the voice of our beloved, who with joy is ever calling:
"Arise, my darling,
my beautiful one, come with me.
See! The winter is past;
the rains are over and gone.
Flowers appear on the earth;
the season of singing has come...
Arise, come, my darling;
my beautiful one, come with me."
Join us, then, Sunday nights at 7:15 this Fall.
More soon,
Danny+