“Do I really need the sacraments? After all, can’t I encounter God on my own without the rites of the Church?”
Yes! You absolutely can encounter God on your own, and I hope you do! It is one of our parish’s great desires that your individual prayer life is growing and deepening, particularly at this time when you are responding to God’s call to enter the Church. We take Jesus’ words seriously, and in Matt 25:31-46 he tells us that He is the hungry, the poor, the naked, the imprisoned in our world, and when we help them, we help him; when we encounter them, we encounter Jesus. When we behold the endlessness of the sea or beauty of sparkling snow, we experience something of God’s beautiful, eternally creative heart.
BUT (you knew that was coming) there are other deep ways to encounter God that give more fullness to our lives with Him. Some of the most direct and distinct of these are in the sacraments. Sacraments, according to the CCC 1131, are “efficacious signs of grace, instituted by Christ and entrusted to the Church, by which divine life is dispensed to us.” This sounds dense to me so let’s break it down. Many Catholic school children grow up learning that sacraments are “visible signs of God’s invisible grace.” These “efficacious signs” affect what they signify, bringing it into being. In sacraments, the “thing” signified and brought about on God’s terms (God is in charge here, not our words or actions!) is God’s undeserved grace through an outpouring of the Holy Spirit. These sacraments were founded by Jesus Christ, who gave them over to the Church to take care of until He comes again. In other words, a sacrament is a special moment of God’s grace, set apart, directed by Him, that is experienced in a time and way that others across the world and across the centuries have done so.
The special moments of God’s grace found in the sacraments demand a specific time and space (and often actions) that are set apart. This may counter one’s sensibilities in a world where God truly is everywhere, but can’t God be everywhere and specially, more intensely in certain places at once? (Pieper 23-4) Aren’t there times when you have experienced God in a way that is“distinct from the ordinary, and therefore possessing a special and unique dignity?” (Pieper 13). Human beings naturally demarcate, and therefore approach distinctly, time (New Year’s Eve is treated differently than other evenings) and places (graveyards are treated differently than parks) (Pieper 10-12). Without these times and places set apart, there is a one-dimensional leveling of all things. All times and places are impoverished. Pieper says it is “utterly inhumane” (48). My husband’s family is not very traditional and does not celebrate birthdays distinctly. While my husband does not mind this and never has, he cannot remember any of his birthdays because nothing about the day (or celebration of the day) stood out.
Human beings not only set apart certain times, places, and actions, but we also, as more than biological beings, naturally endow them with meaning. We naturally look for the “more” in life and the world, having an innate sense that there is something that extends beyond ourselves, “that things are more than things” (Ratzinger 156-158; Pieper 33). These events, in providing a sense of “more” and therefore of the divine, are called “creation sacraments.” They exist across times and cultures; they are bound to our being as humans, whether we have faith in God or not (Ratzinger 154). In other words, it is in our spiritual DNA to find specific actions and times to contain “more.”
Our God is a God who seeks us, who pursues us, who constantly reaches out to us. As the God who created us, He knows all about how we are made, and therefore He knows how to best relate to and affect change in us as human beings. This is why we have the liturgy. This is why we have the sacraments. “Someone who goes to church and receives the sacraments does this, if he understands the whole situation correctly, not because he thinks the spiritual God needs material means in order to touch a man’s spirit. He does this, on the contrary, because he knows that he, being a man, can encounter God only in a human way; but in a human way means: in the form of fraternal solidarity, corporeality, and historicity.” (167)
As human beings, we need others. We were not meant to be alone. As Ratzinger tells us, “Man is not founded on himself; rather he is founded through a twofold “with”: communion with things, communion with people; man can exist only in the plural, so to speak” (157). Knowing this, God seeks communion with us through others and through the material world. So while we can encounter God on our own, we miss something essential if we stop there; it isn’t just about me and Jesus. We are part of the communion of saints, encountering God together and growing in union with God and others, and living in hope of communal salvation. Our individual experiences, while important and unique, are made fuller in sharing them with others. As Christopher McCandless (of Into the Wild fame) famously concluded, “Happiness is only real when it is shared.” This is how we were created.
Human beings are embodied beings, existing in and with the material world. Our experiences are mediated through our senses. The fullest, deepest experiences we have are often remembered through those senses – we remember the smell of the tree, the sound of the jingle bells on the door handle, the taste of the cookies, the bodily experience of anticipation when we remember Christmas. Because of this, God reaches out to us in a special way through the material world and the experiences of our body, particularly when we are with others. Pieper explains that the set apart nature of certain time, space, actions, and things are what make them “sacred” (from the Latin sanctus, meaning “fenced off, circumscribed”) (13). According to Pieper, if there exists any aspect of this life that more intensely involves the divine, it is sacred action. Sacred action is celebrated, physical, visible – embodied (26). It is also the basis of the sacraments: “[in] a certain special and specific situation the ‘symbols’ expressed through observable actions and audible word not only mean something but also, by being acted out, transform this same meaning into objective reality: cleansing, forgiveness, nourishment … coming exclusively from God’s power” (Pieper 28).
As embodied beings, our experiences unfold over time, taking place in history. We encounter God, who is eternal, in time. It is not that God needs time to express Himself, but that we can only experience God in time. This is also true of our historical context; I can only experience something or someone, including God, as a white female living in a stably governed United States of America at the turn of the millennium with the laws, values, triumphs, and grave sins that spring and will spring from its history. In the sacraments, God places us into a new context; Ratzinger explains, “To receive the Christian sacraments means to enter into the history proceeding from Christ with the belief that this is the saving history that opens up a man to the historical context that truly allows him to live and leads him into his true uniqueness – into the unity with God that is his eternal future” (163).
Our God is a God who shows up; He is present everywhere and yet is intensively in certain times and places, including the liturgy and the sacraments. If we really, truly believed that God is present to pour out His grace through these, would we ask if we “needed” them? How would you respond if you knew for certain that God was going to be a specific place at a certain time next Saturday? What would you do? Would you ask if you “needed” to be there? Yet this is the reality of our situation: God is there, at every liturgy and every sacrament, in fraternity, corporeality, and history to bring us into communion with Him. When we truly believe this, we will no longer have to ask the question.