Pastoral: You’re talking to a group of parents on the sacraments of the Church. Many of them have been through Catholic school for years. They think they know everything about the sacraments. In fact, many think they’re just pleasant rites of passage. Tell them a story about what the sacraments really are based on your reading of Bouyer’s Cosmos.
There is this challenge for us as individuals to see something that we have “seen and known” for nearly the entirety of our lives in a new and exciting way. Yes, we have been taught and experienced the sacraments since we can remember, and they are foundational to the Catholic faith. Yet, I would ask, can you see the sacraments before you in your everyday life every single day or even every hour? That is exactly what the sacraments are to those who continually desire to have “eyes to see and ears to hear”. There is a breadth and depth that unfortunately many never are able to see or experience. This is precisely the journey that writers like Louis Bouyer bid us to come alongside to see and experience so as not to miss out on the fullness of their measure.
I would ask the question then; do you see the sacraments as a tangible sign of the invisible grace of God? In each of the seven sacraments, there is a tangible and clear sign that reveals the redeeming grace that would be otherwise beyond our grasp of our five senses. One can clearly see this in the bread and wine that is consecrated or the oil that is used in baptism. As humans we can perceive more than just water in baptism, we can see our story, our connection to God through rituals, through the liturgy, through the sacraments. We can receive God’s communication to us in this manner because of our ability to connect, perceive, and think about the world. This is exactly what having a sacramental worldview looks like with the “proper lenses” on. A sacramental worldview is just this, when we view the entire world (and for that matter the entire cosmos) as sacrament. It is my ambition for each person here to see that the sacraments are truly points in time where the unseen grace of God is not only made able to be seen but palpable and their continual workings in and through each of our lives.
Louis Bouyer makes the observation that the knowledge of the world is essentially traditional because it is either a subjective experience searching out what is true for one personally or gaining that “truth” from some other source that very well may be subjective as well. Bouyer sees the individual and the communal human experience as a type of “quest” in a partaking with what is truth. This truth has many of times been passed down from person to person whether that be through language and culture or through other modes of human dissemination throughout history. This “string of consciousness” which is the mechanism in and of itself, ends up being the sum total of human history which has been communicated organically in each of our traditions and culture. This mysterious mechanism is the vehicle that connects our personal lived experiences and illuminates much of our lives. Perhaps then one here can see that our liturgical lives follow a comparable arc where the string of tradition comes into our lives and draws each of us into a knowledge that albeit may be beyond us yet is able to perfect each of us from within. This is why we refer the sacraments as a mystery.
This is why Bouyer wants all of us to see that the physical world, like the nature that we see around us, is much more than only the material aspect of the cosmos. It is sacramental in its own way. In fact, he goes further and states, “its material aspect is but the envelope, the external clothing of a wholly spiritual world, without which the existence of matter becomes incomprehensible, for the essence of the cosmos then falls back into nothingness” (Bouyer, Cosmos: The World and the Glory of God, pg. 195). He goes on to show us that there are everyday mysteries that confound us when we allow ourselves to stop and be confounded! Think about the highly mysterious presence of the animal, plant, insect etc. world that surrounds us and how their world can be just as mysterious (perhaps in some instances more so) as the angelic world that is around us. This is not to say that perhaps every leaf or blade of grass is truly the transubstantiated body of Christ, but it does cry to us to wake up and be able to see God in all things in the cosmos! Once each of us are able to put on these sacramental-colored lenses on, we will be able to see the world itself as sacramental. Bouyer brilliantly reminds us (without flirting with pantheism) that everything that consists of the cosmos (everything!) is within God as it all came from Him! And here is the kicker, utilizing this gift is where we will then be able to see this fallen world for what it truly is and that is a tactile sign of the unseen realm and the redeeming grace of God. May we be able to see that even the dirt is a window to seeing God and all of his beauty and creative essence. Even when you scoop up a handful of dirt or pick a daffodil or hold an ant in your hand (or almost anything you can think of right now), you are in essence holding God’s boundlessness and infiniteness in your hands at that moment! This is the beauty of being able to see and experience the sacraments EVERYWHERE around us.
In closing, I hope that each of you are able to see the sacraments in, if not a new light, perhaps brighter light than before. I love how Bouyer makes the point that as with Jacob’s Ladder in the book of Genesis, it was not that the angelic activity or the invisible realm all of a sudden “invaded” the visible realm; but that we can see that it always was there from the start and is only just “behind” the visible realm. This is how Bouyer wanted us to see the sacraments in and throughout the cosmos and I believe it is just how God designed it to be. My hope that in some way, this very brief address at the very least whetted each of your appetites to seek brighter “eyes to see” and clearer “ears to hear” as this is my prayer. Louis Bouyer opens this door to us that is too often overlooked or hidden and bids us to come to see and experience the cosmos in such a beautiful, sacramental way that I believe it would be a near tragedy to miss out on this wonderful revelation. I just want to close with a final quote from Bouyer that I think not only beautifully but also masterfully culminates what the end “goal” for us as part of His mystical body to look forward to. He states, “When this mystical body-in which is found the extension of Christ’s physical body in the Eucharistic body-reaches its cosmic fullness, when the last of the elect have been absorbed and conformed to it, then Christ will have reached maturity in all his members, and his own Parousia, the event toward which this entire growth had been straining, will finally take place” (Bouyer, Cosmos: The World and the Glory of God, pg. 230).
AMEN!