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.
[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.