A fundamental belief of Christianity is that God created us for union with Him.  This union is what He intended and effected from the moment man was created into this harmonious state in the Garden of Eden.  All that God has done for us since the moment of the fall, when that harmony was violently ruptured by sin, has been designed to lead us back into this union.  Throughout salvation history, God has continued to approach us, make Himself and His Will more fully known to us, all so that we might return back to Him.[1]  The Church and its sacraments were instituted by Christ as the means by which we can be returned to Him, to be united with Him even while we remain in the midst of the broken and fallen world in which we live.  

The Catechism teaches us that sacraments are “efficacious signs of grace, instituted by Christ and entrusted to the Church, by which divine life is dispensed to us.”[2] The foundational Sacrament, the ultimate sign of God’s grace which dispensed divine life to man, is the body of Jesus Christ.[3]  Before the Incarnation, could man have even conceived of such a possibility?  That God would take on the nature of a human, one with whom man could share a meal, a deep conversation, an embrace, grief and despair, must have been unimaginable. And yet, through the mystery of the Incarnation, the inconceivable became reality.  In Jesus, we received the supreme visible manifestation of the love of the Blessed Trinity for men.[4] Through that same body, crucified and glorified, salvific grace was given to humanity.  Before Jesus ascended back to the Father, He instituted the Church and its sacraments so that His material, human body sacrificed for our redemption could continue to be physically accessible to us even after He had ascended back to the Father and continue to sanctify us.[5]

By offering His one unique bodily sacrifice upon Calvary for our salvation, Jesus became the High Priest for us all. In His risen and glorified body, seated at the right hand of the Father, He continues to act as our High Priest, but now enables us to share in the heavenly liturgy with Him “in spirit and in truth.”[6] He continues to offer His once-for-all perfect self-offering in worship to and glorification of the Father.  This ongoing offering not only reflects the harmonious union of love that is our Triune God, but also serves as an open invitation to us to share in His sacrifice, join His worship, and enter more fully into this perfect union of love. While all seven of the Church’s sacraments invite us into this union, the invitation is perhaps most evident in the Eucharist. 

Just as the mystery of the Incarnation was inconceivable before Jesus made it a reality, so too the mystery of the Eucharist, whereby the True Presence of Christ is provided as nourishment for the faithful under the appearance of bread and wine, can only be known through God’s Revelation.  Through the Eucharist, Jesus’ body and blood, now restored and glorified, continue to serve as the instrument of His redemptive love.[7]  The Eucharist is the means by which Jesus fulfills his promise to feed His People with his very Body and Blood under the appearance of staples found at almost every celebratory meal- bread and wine- in order to provide us with spiritual nourishment that unites us to Him.  If we believe in Jesus, in His salvation and His teaching, then we also believe in His Word and His Promises. And He taught us:

I am the living bread which came down from heaven; if any one eats of this bread, he will live for ever; and the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh…  For my flesh is food indeed and my blood is drink indeed.  He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him. John 6:50-51, 55-56.

Through the Eucharist, Christ transforms man’s daily bread.[8]  While continuing to act as High Priest, He also serves as the Victim in sacramental form, that we might be fed by the very Body that was offered for us.[9]

Through the sacrifice of the Mass, the perfect offering of Christ at Calvary is sacramentally made present and offered to God the Father through Christ, with the ordained priest acting in subordination to Christ, designating the Victim as a sacrificial sign of the community’s self-offering.[10]  Through Christ’s offer and the priest’s designation, we, the visible Church, as members of Christ’s Mystical Body, are invited to offer our personal worship, our praise, prayer, reparation and thanksgiving, and thereby enter into this unique sacrifice.[11]

By acknowledging that the divine mystery revealed on the cross is made present on the altar, and by desiring to share in the Mass, we are able to adopt the sacramental Victim through the hands of the priest as an expression of our own worship, as a symbol of our own interior union with Christ. In this sense, we are permitted the incredible gift of being able to offer Christ’s own sacrifice of Himself with Him.[12] By joining in the sacrificial offering, we are also able to share in the gifts merited by Christ through His perfect offering on Calvary, and thereby be individually sanctified.[13]  Through this act of worship, we receive the graces to make a personal response to God’s invitation to union with Him in our own lives, allowing His grace to transform us to enter more fully in union with Him.[14] As Fr. O’Neill explains:

From this body flows the Holy Spirit sent by the Father and the Son into Christians, drawing them into the life of the Blessed Trinity by grace. [15]

When received worthily, with the desire to grow in union with Him, the Eucharist grants us the grace to love. According to St. Thomas Aquinas, it is this love flowing from the physical body of Christ in the Eucharist which unites His mystical body of the visible Church.[16]   Empowered by His grace to love, we leave the Mass better equipped to be obedient to the Church’s call to “go forth and serve the Lord with your lives.” More perfectly united to Him, we can more effectively bring forth into the world His love as well as the grace to conquer sin.[17]

As we learn to respond to the love we receive in the Eucharist by sharing it, we advance towards final union with God.[18] As we dispose ourselves to greater intimacy with Him and deepen our desire to grow in personal relationship with Him, God grants us the grace to unite our will to His and thereby grow in likeness to Him.[19]  

Through the sanctifying grace received through ongoing reception of these sacraments, we can learn to offer our own lives as Jesus did, without reservation in obedience to God’s will.  Not by our own merit, but relying entirely upon the grace of God, we can be transformed and sanctified, so that we might offer ourselves and our entire lives back to Him, thereby fully uniting ourselves to Him in accordance with His Plan of Salvation.

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[1] It is this pattern of exitus– reditus recognized by St. Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologica.

[2] CCC 1131.

[3] O’Neill, Colman E. Meeting Christ in the Sacraments. Mercier Press, 1966, p.163.

[4] Id, p.163, citing Jn 3:16, “God so loved the world as to give his only-begotten son.”

[5] Id, p.16-19

[6] Id, p.19, citing Jn. 4:23.

[7] Id, p.163.

[8] Id, p. 166

[9] Id, p. 198.

[10] Id, pp.212-213.

[11] O’Neill, pp.192, 194, 198, 213.

[12] Id, pp.195, 211, 215.

[13] Id, pp. 169, 199, 209.

[14] Id, pp. 195,207.

[15] Id, p. 163.

[16] Id, p.173.

[17] Id, p.167, 195.

[18] Id, p.188.

[19] Id, p.188-189.

It is hard to understand how anyone could behold the profound beauty of an incredible sunset, a beautiful waterfall, a sunrise over a pond with the dew glistening upon it and not be struck by the depth of God’s love for us. Hopefully we are also filled with gratitude and wonder when we ponder the people that God has breathed into existence who give our lives meaning and fill our lives with love.  Certainly, our natural order, God’s creation, contains a multitude of remarkable signs of God’s existence and His goodness. When focusing on the goodness that exists within the natural order, we might even be tempted to conclude that all of the world in which we live is graced, such that the sacraments don’t really matter.  However, such a belief would reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of the relationship between the created order and the supernatural order and the role of the sacraments in transforming us, His creatures, so that we might be elevated towards the divine order- to be fully restored to God.[1]

While there is much in this created world that is good, each of us entered into this world as fallen creatures.  Although we were created in God’s image and likeness, the rupture caused by sin left us in a fallen state. In this state of brokenness, we remain restless until we rest in God.[2] How do we account for this inherent longing within each of us to share in God’s divine life?  Some might suggest that it indicates we were born with the seedling of the divine within us, simply waiting for us to nurture it so that we can be transformed.  But in reality, this longing is just the opposite.  It is an awareness of what is lacking within us- an awareness that we do not inherently possess what we need to achieve our greatest hope and desire- union with God.

Throughout our lives, we learn that this longing cannot be satisfied by anything we can do, that we are incapable on our own of constructing the pathway to share in God’s divine life.  In response to this reality, some of us may try to make ourselves feel like gods by seeking power, money and prestige.  Others may seek to influence the created world by seeking justice and dignity for all of God’s people so that this world might more closely reflect the divine order to which we desperately want to belong. Even if our efforts are entirely honorable and selfless, the truth remains that our efforts alone cannot transform us into God or transform our created world into the supernatural order of God. 

Just as we were not born in a state of grace, we also cannot manufacture for ourselves the grace we need for our salvation. That saving and redeeming grace could only be granted to us by God out of his gratuitous love for us. As St. Paul reminds us:

For by grace you have been saved through faith; and this is not by our own doing, it is the gift of God- not because of works, lest any many should boast.

Eph. 3:8

Unlike anything we might do to elevate ourselves or the world around us, grace raises us much higher above the level of our own essence and infinitely surpasses the necessities of any possible nature.[4]  After all scientific experimentation has been exhausted and all human understanding and knowledge has been attained, this supernatural order will still lie just beyond.[5] As Henri de Lubac and Maurice Blondel beautifully expressed:

One cannot move from man to God “by walking forward on the same level, so to speak”; the abyss between them can be bridged only “by the marvellous invention of divine charity.”[6]

And God has revealed to us that His divine charity knows no limits.  Despite our sinfulness, God loved us too much to leave us stranded in this natural world, separated from Him by an abyss we could not overcome. Instead, through the Incarnation, He united the natural world with the supernatural, that we might not only be saved, but redeemed.  It is in the divine charity revealed through Jesus’ life, death and resurrection that we learn that our loving God continues to offer us, His sinful creatures, grace, mercy, and salvation.

Although we may think of the divine life as being entirely distinct and far distant from our mortal life, when we seek and receive God’s grace, an intimate union with this spiritual otherness of the divine order can occur within each of us.[7]  God’s divine charity unites itself to man, not merely elevating him, but penetrating him in order to divinize him as he is transformed into a new man, a sharer in the divine nature.  Through the influx of God’s Spirit within us, our creaturely being is made divine.[8]  This God-given grace penetrates the substance of the soul and renders it, as a soul, capable of sharing God’s divine life.[9] Through this profoundly beautiful mystery, God’s gratuitous love coupled with our willingness to welcome and receive this love, empowers us to truly become children of God.[10]

Even though the perfect harmony of Christian synthesis will not be fully realized within the natural world in which we live, uniting our wills with God’s through His grace will bear fruit in this world and, most importantly, prepare us for our ultimate destiny which transcends this created order.  God’s grace is irreconcilable to sin, for grace calls us to share in His divine life and sin is our refusal to do so.  Accordingly, grace calls us to a “total upheaval”, to a “conversion” (of the “heart”, i.e, of all one’s being.)  Grace reaches into the depths of our sinful conscience so that we might be convicted of our guilt and repent. Through grace, God can heal us and liberate us from our sin, transform us in the depths of our being. We can be “converted”, and our hearts can be changed.[11]  It is through this conversion that we move towards the ultimate end for which we were all created, union with Him.[12]

The essential, irreplaceable mission of the Church is to remind us constantly of our divine supernatural vocation and to communicate to us through her sacred ministry and her sacraments the graces needed to instill and nurture the divine life within.[13] This is the very purpose for which she was created. It is through the Church’s sacraments that this grace is outpoured, that we experience the liberation from sin and the joy of knowing God and being known by Him.  Through Reconciliation, we as God’s children are able to turn to Him and receive His pardon, be healed from and freed of the burden of sin and united instead to grace.[14]  Through the Eucharist we receive the grace of full communion with Him and are empowered to live more closely in union with Him. It is through the sacraments that we are transformed through His grace, are sanctified and made holy, empowered to live this reality of sharing in His divine life to which we all are called.

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[1]  Lubac, Henri de. A Brief Catechesis on Nature and Grace. Ignatius Press, 1984, p.20.

[2] St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, 1, 1.5.

[3] Eph 3:8.

[4] Id, p. 26,

[5] Id, p. 31.

[6] Id, p. 32, citing Maurice Blondel [Bernard de Sailly], in Annales de philosophie Chretienne (July, 1907), 346-47.

[7] Id, p.49.

[8] Id, pp.41-42.

[9] Id, p.46, citing Fr. Louis Bouyer, Introduction a la vie spirituelle (Desclee, 1960), 154-55.

[10] Id, pp. 50, 56.

[11] Id, p. 164, citing Yves de Montcheuil, Le Royaume et ses exigences (Editions de l’Epi, 1957), 47-49.

[12] Id, pp.88-90, 137.

[13] Id, p.110-111.

[14] Id, p. 122.

You entered the Church tonight as one person and now, having been baptized, confirmed and received Holy Eucharist, you sit before me as an entirely new creation. More than simply gaining entry into the Church as a community of faith, you have been initiated into the life of Christ so fully that you have become members of His Body. It is my hope that, by better understanding the new creation you have become and the gifts you have received, you can fully utilize them in the new life that awaits.

Until the moment of your baptism, you have been engaged in a mighty struggle against the devil, striving to escape his power.[1] Tonight, through your sincere and heartfelt conversion and the graces of God, the devil has been renounced and thoroughly defeated.[2] The ancient pact that Adam entered into with the devil has been broken.[3]  You have been freed by Christ, the New Adam, from the dominion of Satan, and have been reintroduced into the Paradise of union with God for which you were initially created.[4]

Although full entry into this Paradise has not yet been achieved, you have been fortified by God to strengthen you until it comes to fruition. You have been anointed by holy oil that has not only purified you from sin but has also “put to flight all the invisible powers of the Evil One”.[5]  This does not mean that your days of temptation are behind you, but rather that you have been healed in body, soul and spirit, freed from every trace of sin so that you may have the strength to triumph over the attacks you inevitably will face.[6]   

Through the Baptismal waters, you have been grafted into Christ’s death by participation.[7] Water consecrated by the Holy Spirit has been poured upon you three times, each immersion symbolizing one of the three days Jesus immersed Himself in darkness in His descent into hell to defeat the devil before He rose again.[8]  Through the gift of the Holy Spirit, you have been allowed to go down into the waters dead in sin,  and emerge to life in justice.[9] You were buried with Christ so that you might rise with Him.[10]

As St. Paul explained:

Are you not aware that we who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?  Through baptism into his death we were buried with him, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might live a new life.”[11]

After emerging from the consecrated waters, you were sealed by a sign of the cross on your forehead, called the sphragis, forever marking you as belonging to God. The sphragis has imprinted in your soul the image, the likeness of God, according to which man was created from the beginning.[12] Your soul has been restored at this moment to what God had intended it to be. You have been clothed by the garment of salvation, that your soul may be pure and your body incorruptible, covered in the supernatural grace of God, returned to the blessed state Adam and Eve experienced before the fall.[13] Having been configured to Christ, you are now empowered to live a life that leads to the future glory Christ has promised.  You have been illuminated by the Light of Christ, and tasked with bringing it to the world.[14]

You have also now been fortified to serve valiantly in God’s army.[15] Just as Christ arose victorious from His descent into hell, you too are now armed with the grace of God to prevail in the holy contests you will undertake under the direction of Christ.[16]  

Through the sphragis you have also been marked with a sign of God’s pledge of protection and salvation.[17] Just as the cross defeated Satan, the cross by which you have been sealed is a constant reminder to these evil forces of their defeat, a sign designed to send them fleeing.[18] It is a seal of God’s new covenant in Christ, an irrevocable promise by God to bestow His blessings of grace upon His people.[19]

As your Baptism configured you to Christ dead and risen again, your Confirmation configured you to Christ anointed by the Holy Spirit, the source of spiritual joy.[20]  The Holy Spirit has now been perfected within you, His gifts poured out upon you and your spiritual life strengthened.[21] You are now not only equipped and called to serve the Lord with the Spirit of Wisdom and understanding, counsel and fortitude, knowledge and piety and holy fear,  but your soul has been made docile to the movement of the Holy Spirit within you.[22]  The perfumed chrism by which you were anointed carries within it the very essence of Christ. Your vocation, as His Church, is to allow the “sweet perfume of Christ” to emanate from you until it fills the whole world.[23]

Just as you have now become part of Christ’s Body called to reflect His Love and Presence into the earthly world, you have also been invited to participate in the heavenly liturgy of the Mass.  As Jesus perpetually offers His entire Being to the Father for the salvation of all in communion with the angels and saints, we unite our voices with those of the angels and join in the official worship of creation- the worship for which we were created.  This worship centers upon the priestly action of Christ in His Passion and Resurrection[24] and enables us to receive His True Presence in the Eucharist. It enables your body to become His temple. As God provided daily nourishment for the Israelites in the desert with manna sent forth from heaven, God now calls you to receive your daily bread as the True Bread of Life in the Eucharist for your daily nourishment.[25] As you continue to participate in the sacramental life of Jesus in the Sacraments, the Eucharist will continue to bear fruit within you, providing spiritual joy and wisdom, an understanding of the things of God.[26]

As Christ died, descended into hell, was resurrected and ascended into heaven, so too have you now died with Him, descended into the baptismal waters in a state of sin and emerged in a state of grace. You have now been anointed by the Holy Spirit with all of the gifts to enable you to continue to seek union with Him in eternal life. A life in the Church is a life rooted in the celebration of its sacraments, all of which enable us to participate in the life in Christ now so that we might be blessed to share eternal life with Him when He comes again.

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[1] Danielou, p.21.

[2] Id, p.34.

[3] Id, p. 27.

[4] Id, p.33.

[5] Id, p.40.

[6] Id, pp.40-41.

[7] The Old Testament reveals how God has historically used waters as instruments of creative forces of good and destructive forces of evil.  As seen in the parting of the Red Sea during the Exodus and the Deluge by which only the faithful servants of Noah and his family were saved, God used the sacrament of water to deliver a spiritual people from a spiritual tyrant to cause them to go from the world to the kingdom of God. Id, p.89.  So has He done the same for you in Baptism.

[8] Id, p.41, 44.

[9] Jean Danielou, S. .. The Bible and the Liturgy. 1st ed., University of Notre Dame Press, 1956., pp41-42.

[10] Id, p.44.

[11] Romans 6:3-4 and Danielou, p.45.

[12] Id, p.57.

[13] Id, p.49-51.

[14] Id, p.93.

[15] Id, p.58.

[16] Id, p.41.

[17] Id, pp. 56-57.

[18] Id, p.61.

[19] Id, pp.67-68.

[20] Id, p.118.

[21] Id, p. 119-120, 126.

[22] Id, pp.119-120.

[23] Id, p.125.

[24] Id, pp. 135,155.

[25] Id, pp. 148-149.

[26] Id, p. 184.

The Sacraments: a Rite of Passage or Something More?

While reception of the sacraments can certainly mark the progression of our faith, if they are seen merely as a pleasant rite of passage, we miss their inherent beauty and purpose. The sacraments enable us to worship God in a way that transcends our everyday actions.  They invite us to offer praise and thanksgiving to God for all of the gifts He has bestowed upon us and then make our own offering of all of these gifts back to Him. By choosing to worship God in this way, to offer all that we have and all that we are back to Him, responding to His love with love, we help restore the world to the paradise God originally created and has always planned for us.  We move one step closer to eternal life in union with Him.

Yearning for God’s vision

No matter how many blessings God has poured into our lives, we all have had moments when we have wondered, “Is this as good as it gets?” As we face the challenges of this world, we yearn for a life involving less strife and sorrow, more harmony; less chaos, more peace; fewer demands and division, more love and union.

Our tendency is to push such thoughts aside and focus on the demands the material world is placing upon us.  But, instead of dismissing that deep longing for more- for that peaceful, joyful state, perhaps we should recognize it for what it is, God’s unrelenting call to us, from the very source of our being, instilled by our Creator when He thought us into existence from all eternity.  It is the Spirit within us calling us to seek the purpose for which we and the entire Cosmos were created.  It is His constant reminder that the material world in which we live is merely “an envelope, the external clothing of a wholly spiritual world.”[1]  This material world will soon be renewed, transformed as immersion into Christ’s Body.  The wholly spiritual world- the paradise God initially created in a state of perfect harmony- will be restored.  And God is calling us to be part of it.  Jesus instituted the Church, his mystical Body on Earth, and its sacraments to lead us there.

God’s Unwavering Plan from the Beginning

In order to fully understand the purpose of the sacraments, we have to reflect on why we, or the entire Cosmos for that matter, were created. We sometimes forget that there was a time when all that existed was God. The Father, Son and Holy Spirit, three Persons in One God, existed in this perfect relationship of union and love. God needed nothing and stood to gain nothing by creating us or our world. He who has always been perfect could not grow in perfection. It was purely out of love that God thought every part of the Cosmos into existence because, in His goodness, He wanted us to share in His divine life.

For all eternity, long before God breathed life into the first man, God’s Plan for our salvation was one which called man to actively participate with Him. By design, He created a world in which we would be required to exercise our free will to enter into this joint venture of the salvation of the world with Him.[2]

Before the material world was formed, God created a spiritual world filled with angelic creatures to share in His love, fully knowing that some of these angels would seek to glorify themselves and thereby disrupt the perfect harmony He had created.[3]

God loved man into existence with the power to restore the original harmony intended for the Cosmos.  All man had to do, when tempted by the fallen angel, was to return God’s benevolent love with love through obedience to His will.[4] Instead, man believed the serpent’s lie that man himself could be like a god and disobeyed God in an effort to do so.[5]  Having chosen to separate himself from God, man was cast out of paradise and into a world of sin and death.  

God then continued to reveal to man through Word and deed that He would ultimately restore His elect to Him. Through many trials, man recognized the need for God to redeem him. Thus, “when the meditation of wise men and inspired scribes had finally destroyed all human hopes of a merely human victory,”[6] when man realized that it could not defeat sin and death on his own, God sent prophets to foreshadow the coming of the One who could.  

After the groundwork had been laid for man to receive God in the flesh, God sent his faithful angel Gabriel to the Blessed Virgin. He asked her to surrender her entire life in service to God, to become His Mother, the vessel through whom God could become man.  Her humble response demonstrates what Creation was created for, how man was intended to live in the world, to surrender our lives to Him and declare “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be done to me according to your word.”[7] Through the humble assent of one of God’s creatures, God became man for us and our salvation.   

Through the Incarnation of God in His Son, God reveals Himself to be not only a loving Father, but also a Son who loves without reservation, and Spirit through whom the fullness of love is revealed.[8]  Through Jesus, we begin to know God as this perfect reciprocity in a community of love – love so plentiful and abundant that it is not merely shared among the three Persons of God, but calls us to be drawn into it. Through Jesus, we learn what it means to be created in God’s image.  We realize that we can only become His image when we, too, enter into relationships with others in a community of love.[9]  We learn that “it is generous love, rather than greed, that makes one divine.”[10]

Becoming the Body of Christ in the Church and its Sacraments

Through Jesus, the Spirit of love that God the Father pours out upon the Son is given to us.  We are redeemed and adopted as God’s sons and daughters.[11] Jesus draws all men to Himself as He ascends toward the Father.[12] And as He ascends, God leaves us with this holy community of the Church, His Mystical Body on Earth, and the Sacraments so that we might fully receive Him and be united with Him even while remaining in this material world.

Through baptism and faith, Jesus has made us part of himself, conformed us to the mystery of his death and resurrection.[13]  Through the Eucharist, by partaking in the Body and Blood of Christ, we are gathered into one body by the Holy Spirit.  We are assimilated so completely to the temple of Jesus’ body that our bodies also become the “temple of the Spirit.”[14] The many persons within the Church scattered throughout the world become one.  The visible Church on Earth joins in the liturgy, the praise and worship being forever celebrated in Heaven.[15]  We join in communion with the hosts of angels and Saints and together become “the single chorus praising God”[16] that the world was always intended to be.

Through our union in Christ in the Eucharist, we are able to participate in His suffering by offering our individual lives and our sufferings back to the Father through the Son and in the Spirit. And through the graces obtained from the Spirit in the sacraments, we are transformed to become more like our Creator, empowered to love as He loved so that “we may joyfully bear fruit for the salvation of the world.”[17]  Through the Sacraments, the world is returned “to its eschatological destiny as an instrument of divine praise and saving charity.”[18] The Cosmos is returned back to God, to its original glory, to what God has always intended it to become.

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[1] Bouyer, L. (1988). Cosmos : the world and the glory of God. St. Bede’s Publications, p.195.

[2] Bouyer, Louis. Cosmos: The World and the Glory of God, p.190.

[3] Id, p.211.

[4] Id, pp.213, 223.

[5] Id, p.214.

[6] Id, p.228.

[7] Luke 1:38.

[8] P.184 Boyer notes that “(I)t is in the Spirit that the fullness of love shows itself to be the plenitude not only of a mutual love, but also of a shared openness of this reciprocity of love to yet another person.  So it is that the Spirit fulfills the personal unity of the union of the Father and the Son.”

[9] Cosmos, p.185.

[10] Id, p.211.

[11] Id, p.229.

[12] Id, p. 230.

[13] Id, p. 230.

[14] Id, p. 230.

[15] Id, p.202.

[16] Id, p.196.

[17] Prayer After Communion, Feb. 9, 2024.

[18] Id, p.202.

It’s a Sunday morning after a long, busy week of facing a thousand demands that have pulled you in as many directions.  The alarm goes off, beckoning you to get out of our warm, comfy bed to get ready for Mass. Haven’t we all been tempted at some point to turn off the alarm and choose sleep instead?  To listen to that little voice trying to justify our choice by telling ourselves we can just ‘go direct” to God by praying from our nice, warm bed and reading Scripture at home? 

Or maybe this is a struggle you face with your children who resist going to Mass. If God is everywhere, why do I need to go to Mass? Or maybe they challenge the sacraments altogether.  Why do I have to formally confess my sins to a priest rather than just confess them directly to God?  In an increasingly informal world, why does the Church impose the structure and formality surrounding the sacraments? Do we really need these rites?

The sacraments are Christ’s invitation to us.

If you wanted to deepen your relationship with someone and they invited you to join them in an intimate meal in which they poured themselves out to you in a way that nourished you physically and spiritually, is that an invitation you would accept?

Jesus has extended that invitation to us. Throughout salvation history, He has made it clear that He yearns to meet us exactly where we are. God became man. The Divine humbled Himself in the most extraordinary way- by assuming a human nature- all so that man could encounter Him in our humanity and know Him more fully. 

That self-emptying love of Christ and His desire to be fully present to us did not end with His death and Resurrection. Jesus instituted the sacraments as an open invitation to enable all of us to encounter Him and receive His graces while we are still in this world.  As our Creator, God knows that one of the most fundamental ways we connect is through a communal meal. There’s just something about breaking bread that brings people together. In His Wisdom, Jesus instituted the Eucharist as the divine communal meal. By calling us together to receive the Bread of Life, God assembles His People, nourishes and strengthens us with His very Being, and deepens our union with Him and one another.  We are changed for our good and the good of all the world.

The sacraments are set apart from the rest of the world by design.

Some might criticize the Church for not evolving with the times.  The world has gotten informal. The sacraments are anything but. Why hasn’t the Church changed the sacraments to conform to the world’s expectations?  The answer is simply that the sacraments are celebrated in accordance with God’s design and purpose, not the world’s.

Think for a moment about what our human existence has become- how much chaos and noise currently permeate every aspect of our being.  Through the sacraments, Jesus has called us to leave that chaos and enter into a space, a time, and most importantly an action, which is set apart from the rest of the world and is focused entirely on Him.[1]  Anyone who participates in a sacrament should be struck by the reality that they are encountering something that is not of this secular world, but which transcends it. They are encountering the sacred, in which man can find “an experience of being overwhelmed by a power that he can neither summon nor control.”[2]  There is something profound happening, not merely words being spoken by a priest, but a Mass being “celebrated”.[3] And it isn’t celebrated in isolation, but is a social function, a physical event, manifested in visible forms.  We come together to profess that we believe what Jesus revealed in His teaching, His death and Resurrection, that He is the bread of life that comes down from heaven that a man may eat of it and not die. (Jn 6:35, 48, 49.)  “The liturgy expresses in concrete images what for the mind is difficult to grasp.”[4]

In entering into these sacred actions, by separating ourselves from the common routine of everyday life in order to come together to worship God, we accept God’s invitation to transcend the confines of our own ego-centric lives and acknowledge the truth that He is calling us to union with Him in ways that we simply cannot achieve on our own. 

Sacraments Aren’t Just a Pretty Ceremony- They Effect Change

One undeniably beautiful aspect of the Sacraments is that these outward signs direct us towards God and enable us to glimpse the spiritual and eternal.[5]  But they are so much more!  The sacraments aren’t merely religious ceremonies to symbolize God’s love, these signs of God’s grace actually effect change within us. (CCC 1131.)

Through the Sacraments, God dispenses His power and love gratuitously upon us so that they don’t merely point us toward God, but they actually accomplish our sanctification through their effects. Through the celebration of Holy Communion in the Mass, the Bread actually becomes the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of our Lord. We receive nourishment through the Lord’s true body as a result of God’s love that is poured out upon the altar every single time Mass is celebrated. 

When we receive the Sacrament of Reconciliation, we are truly cleansed of our sins, forgiveness is actually obtained, not merely signified.  By participating in the sacraments and receiving these graces, we are not only directed in the Truth of God’s saving Love for us, but they become salvific forces in our lives.[6]

The Danger of Substituting Our Plan of Salvation for God’s

So, if we understand what the sacraments are and what they do, the real question isn’t whether we need the sacraments, but why aren’t we running to them? Why are we trying to meet God according to our own Plan? On our own terms?  If we are being completely honest with ourselves, it is because we all struggle with pride, with embracing the reality that we are not God and cannot dictate when and how we encounter Him. God alone determines how He will manifest Himself to us.[7]  We, the recipients of His love, are fully dependent on that power which is a complete gift to us.  No matter how hard we try, we cannot produce it upon our own authority.[8]  Jesus revealed to us through His historical life and suffering, that He would manifest Himself to us by becoming Bread for us, ever present in the Eucharist.  His Plan of Salvation has been made clear.  Now we need only decide if we want to take our place, play our part, in God’s history with mankind.[9]  When we accept His invitation in the sacraments, we not only encounter Him most fully, but we also are following the path of salvation God Himself designed to lead us to eternal life.

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[1] Pieper, J. (1990). In search of the sacred : contributions to an answer. Ignatius Press, pp.14-15, 22-23.

[2] Benedict XVI, P. (2014). Theology of the liturgy: the sacramental foundation of Christian existence / Joseph Ratzinger ; edited by Michael J. Miller ; translated by John Saward, Kenneth Baker, Henry Taylor, et al. Ignatius Press..

[3] Pieper, p.26.

[4] Pieper, p.27.

[5] Theology of the liturgy, p.158.

[6] Theology of the liturgy. P.164.

[7] Theology of the liturgy. p. 167.

[8] Theology of the liturgy. p. 167.

[9] Theology of the liturgy. p. 168.