Based on our reading of the entire book, show how one specific sacrament is an invitation to deeper union with Christ. 

As a person battling a chronic illness for nearly seven years, I am quite familiar with different ways in which people seek healing from God through the Church, having participated in many of them. While these experiences all called for presenting myself before God for healing, which is an act of humble surrender, the anointing of the sick was radically different; it not only involved an inward plea for any kind of healing God willed, but it also involved an invitation to deeper union with Christ.

All of the Church’s sacraments call forth greater co-mingling with Christ. It is through this union that we can fulfill our calling, our very reason for being, to return to God to share in His divine life. While we were made for this reditus, or return to God, the Fall dims our image of the Trinity, impedes our ability to follow God’s will, and bars our entrance into the heavenly sanctuary. We are simply not fit to share in God’s life. Like the villains in Raiders of the Lost Ark and the ghosts in CS Lewis’ The Great Divorce, we could not withstand it in our sinful state. To do so, “[we] must be brought back into the presence of God, filled with HIs life, conformed to the heavenly Pattern” (9). This is exactly what Jesus Christ does for us: he leads human beings back into correct relationship with God by impressing the pattern of submission to divine will on us and paying the penalty for our sins through His life and particularly through his suffering and death. In being united with Christ (who unites God and humanity in his very self) through the gift of God’s grace, we are able to take up these gifts from Christ and return to the Blessed Trinity and share in the divine life. While Jesus ascended to heaven nearly 2000 years ago, His body remains in a new form, a new extension, in the Church. It is here, in the Church, that “we must seek for and unite ourselves to Christ our Savior” (293). Not only do the members of the Church constitute the body of Christ, which is both God and human, but the Church is also “in intimate contact with the life-giving humanity of the risen Christ” (294) which has become the instrument through which the grace-giving Spirit is sent to individuals on earth, particularly in the sacraments. The sacraments are Christ’s chosen way “for giving the effect of the dispositions of his human will” (56) and “by which [people] of succeeding ages are incorporated into the unique mystery of Christ, into his supreme act of worship” (59). Christ chose the sacraments to unite people to himself – to lead humans back into the presence of God, filling them with His life, and conforming them to the heavenly pattern of submission to divine will, which makes their lives an offering back to God, a reditus, an act of worship. 

While many sacraments are celebrated in joy, the anointing of the sick is not one of them. The sacrament itself remains a mystery or misunderstood by many Catholics who think of it as “the sacrament of the dying.” Although it is not surrounded by celebration, the anointing of the sick can usher in peace, hope, and strengthened faith, which are worth praise. As with any sacrament, it invites one to be united more deeply with Christ. And as with all sacraments, “its purpose is to promote Christian life at the same time as healing the wounds of sin” (283), a healing that leads to a more profound intimacy with God. Here “healing” takes on a more poignant role as we ask Jesus Christ, who healed the sick during his earthly life, to heal us. This is why the material used for the sacrament is consecrated oil, oil having been a medicinal substance in the past. The shape of the sacramental ritual performed determines the fashion in which Christ presents himself. The rite of the anointing of the sick allows for many variations within its celebration (including where to actually anoint a body) based on the specific circumstances of the sick person, responding pastorally to the individual just as Christ varied his own healings from words from far away as with the centurion’s servant to rubbing mud and spit in the blind man’s eyes. However, it is important to remember that the anointing invites one to deeper life with Christ primarily through healing the wounds of sin; restoring bodily health by sacrament is relegated to a secondary place. 

Still, O’Neill reminds us that “physical sickness is itself an effect of sin” (283), acknowledging that illness and death are real and wrong. Jesus did not want to die, he sent his disciples to heal bodily illness, and the resurrection of his body shows that both body and spirit matter. In sacramental anointing, the Church recognizes the difficulty borne by the sick and dying; however, it also recognizes that baptism has incorporated us to the body of Christ, which suffered despite grace, and suffering like Christ can be “a period of preparation during which the Christian becomes like Christ” (274), which allows him or her to be more united with him. While according to O’Neill, “Suffering and death are a punishment that must be borne by the human race; and this is the primary sense that they have for the Christian” (277), the second sense is for the person’s growth in reliance on God; sometimes “Divine Providence uses shock tactics, leaving an individual with only one source of happiness” (279). 

Whether or not one agrees with O’Neill’s assessment of suffering, God can use anything, including that which He did not cause, for good and to invite one to rely more on Him, conforming to Christ. However, suffering can cause depression that makes it difficult to be Christ-like, exhausts the virtues, and can call up a tendency to revolt against the will of God. This is where the anointing of the sick intervenes. According to St. Thomas and the Council of Trent, the sacrament absolves any sin (if any remains), removes the after-effect of sin (particularly trouble seeing suffering as a means to conform to Christ, temptation to despair, and trouble performing virtue), and lightens the spirit of the person by strengthening his or her resolve and stirring up love for God. It better enables one to join his or her suffering with Christ, growing in union with him. As a sacrament of the Church, anointing allows one to incorporate suffering into the life of the Church, and “union with God, while utterly personal, is at the same time achieved only as a member of a community” (297). In taking on pain, the Church is more Christ-like and a more perfect sacrament in the world.    

By now it should be clear that the anointing of the sick is not reserved for the dying. However, anointing at death (often referred to as Viaticum), matters in a particular way. It is an act of worship, offering oneself back to God during one’s final moments, by accepting suffering and death in conformity with Christ’s disposition of submission to God’s will. Even facing death,in the ending of earthly life, the anointed is in loving union with Christ who said, “And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age” (Matt 28:20b).

You’re in a meeting with someone, who says that the sacraments are just part of a generally graced world. The world is full of grace and so are the sacraments. How would you respond to this person based on what you read in de Lubac? 

While I would love to hear more about what it means to you that “the world is full of grace and so are the sacraments,” and why you might think this, I am going to assume that you are saying that the sacraments and the world – or creation – are similar expressions or experiences of God’s grace.

Any creation can profoundly communicate about its creator; I am glad that when you look at the world you can see the fingerprints of God. However, I think we need to be careful when we use the term “grace.” It can have multiple meanings and refer to quite different things. Do you think that grace is any gift from God? Anything that is infused by God’s presence? That which communicates God? Goodness in general? Theologian Henri DeLubac continuously counters the idea that the whole world is sacramental and contains God’s glory along with the implications this has on human nature, a view called intrinsicism. DeLubac did not think anyone could glance out their window and see grace. Whether because he lived through the atrocities of two World Wars or because he particularly experienced the great gulf between human nature and God’s love, he did not believe that one could simply look at nature to see grace because the whole world is not already graced. Furthermore, there must be a renewal or supernatural change brought about in one to see grace in nature. As he states in describing the term Sacramentum mundi, “ The whole of creation is one grand book which would suffice to reveal to man the divine wisdom, if sin had not darkened his vision. This theme was dear to St. Bonaventure, among others. When one’s vision is purified, the divine significance of creation reappears” (213).

Creatures were created to behold the face of God (or for the “supernatural” in DeLubac’s terms). They naturally, by God’s gratuitous grace, are ordered toward this end, but only as the experience of a lack that can only be filled by God. God gave us the restlessness in our hearts that says “there must be more to life than this.” While we are made to see God and have the capacity for it, we are broken and in need of grace. Since God and humanity exist in such separate orders, with human nature and human destiny in “infinite disproportion” (32), we cannot walk further on the same road and reach God; God must elevate us to the level of His presence. This “elevating” by God is not something extra added to human life; it is something more intimate and profound – an adoption, assimilation, incorporation through penetration that lifts one up to divinization. If the sacraments are just another part of a grace-filled world, we are missing a fundamental part of our vocation – the grace of sharing in divine life that can come from inner transformation.

There is something fundamentally wrong with us as human beings; we are broken. While it may not be popular to talk about, DeLubac states that “one does not in the least need to be a Christian to understand or even simply to feel and see, despite all the efforts at camouflaging it, that evil is inherent in our human condition” (132). Guilt is universally felt. To not experience guilt is considered a major psychological disorder. This guilt, this feeling of shame or wrongness or incompleteness, comes from a rupture, a breaking away from our relationship with God that divides us against ourselves, and this rupture is called sin. Sin is not simply a social or moral category or “the simple refusal to abide by a law, even a divine law, but a refusal of God’s invitation to share his life” (169). However, grace can mean forgiveness, mercy, and pardon. While people do not like to need mercy, it is offered to us personally by God. In taking on human nature with His divine nature in the incarnation, Jesus Christ bridges humanity and divinity (nature and the supernatural). In living out his self-giving love to the end, He offers redemption by healing our wounded freedom, setting us free from that which enslaves us, to bring about the union of human nature and grace. 

This redemption, this healing that allows for the sharing in divine life that we are called to, is not a simple or sterile elevation, but a turning over and inside-out; it is complete conversion. According to DeLubac, the sinful person is the one who is always gratuitously called to conversion, to divine life, which is given gratuitously along with the pardon of his or her sins. This is the remedy the sacraments offer. In a ruptured relationship and saying “no” to God, the sacraments heal and sanctify. They are effective. They cannot be seen as a mere part of “a generally graced world.” They are so much more, changing hearts, minds, and wills, bringing about a share in God’s divine life through the infusion of God’s outstretched Spirit. 

God calls each of us to radical transformation that only He can bring about; “This salvation, this sharing in the divine life, was offered to man in Christ; and the Church of Christ has received the commission to transmit it to all generations.”(170). The Church’s role, its entire identity and reason for being, is to offer the sacramental life that elevates the human to divine life. This is no small task. It involves an encounter with God that completely differs from any found in the world. While acknowledging the good and revelatory everywhere corrects a dualistic thinking that pits flesh and spirit or God and the world against each other, it also risks flattening the dynamics of grace and divine mystery. As DeLubac reminds us, “Nothing more surely leads one to misinterpret Christianity than the claim to “understand” it” (75-6).

Welcome everybody! Congratulations on completing your full initiation into the Church. You received the Sacraments and now… well, now what? We talk about the Sacraments of Initiation – Baptism, Confirmation, and Eucharist – as an initiation because it is the start, the beginning of a new way of life. 

While you physically received the Sacraments of Initiation at the Easter Vigil, these sacraments are not “finished” – they continue to work in your life. Through these sacraments, which are  “a real participation in the grace of Christ, by a sacramental imitation of His life” (118), namely in His death and resurrection, you received their life-giving fruit. Since God exists in eternity, beyond time, His saving actions and grace exist beyond time; they are always there. To us, who live in history, they reach into the past, present, and future. God continues to act in our world and in us, through consistent characteristic ways, through “types.” Looking at these connections, these types, can deepen our understanding of God’s action in the Old Testament and the New Testament, stretching out into our time through the Sacraments. The prophets proclaim “that the realities of the past of Israel are the expression of eschatological events” that will be analogous or even greater to them (113). These eschatological events are accomplished in Christ. The Sacraments begin “a new creation which [introduces] the Chrisitan even now into the Kingdom of God” (17). As fully initiated members of the Church, you are now living in the Kingdom of God – or at least the part that has begun.

So what does this mean for you now? We’re going to look at each Sacrament you received at the Easter Vigil, identifying how some of the visible signs used have been used by God in the past and therefore how they could therefore affect the rest of your life. In Baptism you were immersed in water. In the Old Testament, the water of the Red Sea was deadly, but God’s victory over death prevailed in Israel’s safe passage – later celebrated as the Passover, marking Israel’s the passing from death to life; this celebration occurs during the Paschal Mystery, when Jesus conquers death with resurrected life. “The relation of Baptism to the death of Christ is especially emphasized by the triple immersion, an allusion to the paschal triduum” (46). Just as God used water to move enslaved Israel from death to life, God used the waters of Baptism to move you from death from sin (in the baptismal water) to the hope of eternal life. Being clothed in white afterwards reinforced your purity and the incorruptibility of your body; your body no longer faces eternal death but will rise. You can now live the rest of your life without the fear and dread of death. For you, death can lose its sting.

Baptism includes the sphragis – the signing of the cross on your forehead. This marking echoes the biblical branding of those who were to be protected; Cain bears a sign so no one will kill him, the doorposts and lintels of the Israelites were marked to protect them from the angel of death, the foreheads of the future remnant were stamped to save them slaughter. The sphragis you received protects you likewise. You are branded as God’s, and the Good Shepherd recognizes and protects His sheep. The Church Fathers frequently proclaim that the sphragis “makes the Christian fearful to demons” (59). Now you only need to make the sign of the cross, God’s sign, to repel evil. The sphragis was also used to enlist in the military when someone wanted to serve the king. With your new mark, you are committed to serve the true King; for the rest of your life you are to serve God, to live for Him. Ultimately, this branding with the sign of the cross is the sign of the New Covenant that began in Christ. Like a tattoo, this mark is permanent. The New Covenant is irrevocable. This New Covenant you have with God means that you have an unchangeable “right to the blessing of grace” (68) to which you can always appeal. No matter how far away you may walk in the future, God will always be there waiting for you with open arms.

The anointing with chrism that marked your Confirmation made you a “christo” – a new Christ (Christ means “anointed one”!) by configuring you to Christ who is anointed by the Holy Spirit. You, like Christ, were anointed with oil like a priest or king would have been in the Old Testament. Just as oil was used for healing and strengthening athletes, this oil strengthens your spiritual life, helping to perfect your soul through gifts of the Holy Spirit. You can continue to receive these gifts with an open disposition, or you can close yourself off to their reception and growth. Chrism, you may remember from the Easter Vigil, is not just oil – it is perfumed oil. It has a characteristic scent. This aroma awakens the spiritual senses, allowing one to perceive Christ, and “The perception of the pleasant perfume of God is proportionate to the capacity of those who breathe it” (123). Because of your Confirmation, you can now perceive God better and in new ways.

The Eucharist is saturated with significance and typologies so I will limit myself to one: the meaning of the Eucharist in connection to manna. This comparison is well founded – Jesus himself makes it in John’s Gospel, stating, “Your fathers ate the manna in the desert, but they died…I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever” (John 6:49,51). Therefore, according to St. Ambrose, the bread of the Eucharist “communicates to you the substance of eternal life” (149). Both manna and the Eucharist cannot be procured by human effort. They are both gratuitous gifts of God. They are also given daily unlike the Sacraments of Baptism and Confirmation – Sacraments only given once. Because the Eucharist is repeated over and over and is rooted in the death and resurrection of Christ, “the Eucharist is seen to be the prolongation of the other sacraments” (128); the Passion and Resurrection continue to apply their effects to the soul over one’s life through Communion. The Eucharist, like manna, “is the nourishment of the people of God in their journey toward the land of promise” (161), but “the Chrisitian message is not only that of heavenly salvation, but of salvation already gained” (190). While Judaism provides manna with an eschatological significance, trusting that God will provide miraculous food again in the new eschatological Exodus, the New Testament shows that this eschatological nourishment is here now in the Eucharist. Communion gives us a foretaste of the great heavenly feast; In participating in the Eucharist, we can continue to receive the grace of the Paschal Mystery and begin to taste eternal life.

The entire process of Initiation is a participation in Christ’s death and resurrection, making us new creations that can begin our eternal life now as we participate in the in-breaking of the Kingdom and prepare for that to come by continuing to engage in the sacramental life of the Church. You can carry on the fruits of Initiation on your Christian journey.

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.

After beginning in prayer…

Welcome, parents and guardians. We’re delighted to have you here with us to talk about your child’s upcoming sacraments. Whether this is your first or your eighth time accompanying a child through First Communion or Confirmation, I’m hoping our time together tonight will provide you with new insights to think about and the confidence to prepare spiritually and physically for your child’s sacrament. 

Sir Christopher Wren was the famous architect in the 17th century who was commissioned to design St. Paul’s Cathedral in London after the London fires. One day in 1671, Christopher Wren was watching his bricklayers at work. He walked up to one of them and asked, “What are you doing?” The man replied, “I’m a bricklayer – I’m laying bricks.” Wren approached a second man and asked, “What are you doing?” The man replied, “I am feeding my family.” Then Christopher Wren turned to a third man and asked, “What are you doing?” The man replied, “I am building a Cathedral.” All of these men’s answers were true, they were laying bricks and getting paid, and, whether they thought about it or not, they were building a cathedral. It’s easy to view the sacraments as a time of cute pictures and a rite of passage. They are these things. But, if we pay attention, if we look at the bigger picture, we, like the third man, can see that they are so much more and what a big deal this is for our kids.

God, our beautiful, loving, strong creator, has made Himself knowable in and through creation; our entire cosmos is saturated with God. All is gift and the gifts He gives tell us something about Him. The problem is that we have stopped seeing the world this way; we’ve stopped looking for the footprints of God. We often seem unable to see God’s presence around us. Sometimes the way we use science can obscure God [here I am referring to nominalism and empiricism, but I wouldn’t name those in the talk]. Our power to measure and quantify can make us think that the only things worth knowing are what we can measure and quantify. With this we de-sacramentalize the world. We can’t see God. Sometimes we obscure God by thinking of peoples and experiences as so different and contradictory that we can’t make sense of the world as one [here I am referring to mythic knowledge]. Our world becomes disenchanted, unknowable. God’s beautiful unity cannot be seen in this shattered world. Other times we adopt a technocratic paradigm that views all of nature–even other people–merely as things to be manipulated for the sake of comfort and profit. We lose a sense of transcendence and instead worship our own ability to mold and control the world. We lose our ability to know God, to love what God loves, and to see the world as God views it.   

While modern science, fragmentation, and the technocratic paradigm can keep us from seeing God’s grand story, God, knowing this, has been working all over time and place throughout the ages from the beginning, planting seeds to restore our right vision. However, we need to recognize how our de-scramentalized (and disenchanted) ways of seeing the world actually mask God’s work. We need to fight the tide and refocus. Through practices of detaching ourselves, absorbing beauty, and contemplating the cosmos to deepen our relationship with God, we can perceive the larger forgotten narrative of God and therefore of us: the narrative that from the very beginning we were made in love, that we messed up, but that God knew we would mess up and so made restoration and healing part of God’s plan from the very beginning; this restoration involves the entire cosmos and each one of us, beginning now through the sacraments (there it is – I knew you were wondering when we’d get to sacraments!) – this restoration of the cosmos and each one of us begins now through the sacraments because sacraments change our relationship in and with God and others. 

God has shown Himself as love and as Trinity – three persons in one God. God is a community of love because “agape, the love which gives itself without reservation, cannot be alone” (184) – love is an outward action that requires another and is outward looking. God exists in eternity separate from time, so God has always been love, loved us, and given Himself to us in the complete self-emptying kenosis of the Son in a way that breaks into our time and history, since that is the only way we can experience Him. This kenosis in time, the incarnation, suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus, brings about salvation, or the restoration of the world to what it was meant to be, a celebration of praise and thanksgiving to God, and making us more into the persons God created us to be. 

The Son, “Once resurrected, manifested and effectively established in his glorified flesh as the eternal Son, he draws all [people] to himself as he ascends again toward the Father” (230), and he does so through the sacraments. In baptism, we become part of his very life, dying and rising with him. In the Eucharist, believers are assimilated “so completely to the temple of his own body, that their bodies also become even now ‘the Temple of the Spirit’” (230). In the sacraments we become extensions of Christ–his mystical body. And, despite our inability to often see it, we really become this! We now participate in the divine, trinitarian life. The sacraments as a whole, seen in the bigger picture, are part of the larger project of the cosmos being returned to God in anticipation of divine life and the marriage between heaven and earth. Through the sacraments we are helping our children prepare for, we are not just laying bricks, we are not just doing some rite of passage for our family, we are participating in something much bigger, bigger even than building a cathedral – we are becoming members of God’s union building the heavenly city that will come to earth.