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.