Recently, I became engaged. Weddings, famously, are very expensive — When I was a younger man, I keenly remember recoiling at hearing about their costs. For one day, I would think, they are an astonishingly quick way to burn several thousand dollars. From my self-centered, utilitarian mindset, I scoffed at the absurdity of not allocating those financial resources towards longer-term investments: A new car, a down payment for a house, paying off student loans, or even just placing it in a money market account to accrue interest. After all, from a secular mindset, isn’t just about the marriage license and the tax benefits anyway?
Of course, what is lacking in that mindset is that it is looking at marriage from something akin to an empirical perspective. I was seeing it not as a participation in a world beyond me, but rather in how it affects the world of me. What does a sacramental worldview suggest instead? There looms more deeply within this a question about means and ends. What is my marriage for? What is the festival nature of the wedding oriented towards? Why is celebrating core to who we are? Josef Pieper and Joseph Ratzinger both offer insights in their writings on these deeper questions. They each contribute towards a vision of festivity as being central to seeing our fuller human identity, and reclaiming this vision of festivity is crucial for developing a more thorough and complete sacramental worldview. Sacraments, because they are celebrated rather than merely done, are an ongoing process of communal formation that is an end in it of itself. In a world littered with optimizing means towards ends, we have lost the ability to rest in the formative world of celebrations that are for their own sake.
Reclaiming an authentic sacramental worldview requires reclaiming a fuller understanding of what we mean by “sacred”. If sacraments are “sacred” – as its etymology suggests – how is their nature distinct from non-sacred phenomena? Josef Pieper considers how the reason why we celebrate sacraments as opposed to completing them. He argues that “sacred action” requires “celebration” because there is a coordinated process of the physical signs of the celebrant (vestments, vessels, gestures, etc.) playing out alongside the “’contemplative’ coaction of the congregation” (Pieper, In Search of the Sacred, 26-7)”. The term “coaction” here is vital. Coaction aptly describes a sacramental worldview because it reflects the harmonious agreement of multiple realities jointly acting alongside one another. Just as sacraments are physical signs of a deeper reality, so too are the physical gestures and actions of the liturgy signs of the deeper reality of the participants’ personal contemplation. There is not a battle between two competing realities for one to engulf the other, nor a strict replacement of the “more important” spiritual reality over the physical, but rather a coaction of physical signs acting alongside spiritual realities.
This coactive description of physical signs and working with deeper spiritual realities is profoundly difficult for the modern person to consider, as the chief source of truth today is what is deducible only from physical realities. If information cannot derive purely from physical phenomena in a measurable and replicable manner, how can we verify its authenticity?
Joseph Ratzinger adds an additional element by showing how the sacramental worldview clashes with the modern fixation on maximizing utility and functionality. For the modern man, a sacramental worldview is “too religious for him” because it is religious to the point beyond utility. For the modern man, religion is like a lucky rabbit’s foot or a divine grace dispensary — when physical solutions fail to deliver, begrudgingly seek a divine solution! The modern man lacks “any practical reason” to explore deeper realities beyond unless it benefits him personally and imminently. It is not just that he sees them as ancient superstitions from a primitive time destined to extinguish, but even if true, he does not see how it would do him any practical good.
But human beings routinely act upon deeper realities that they intuit beyond the physical. He considers the four primeval sacraments – birth, death, meals, and sex. Although they can be described in plain physical ways, human beings universally understand and act as if their truest reality is much deeper than physical matter moving around in response to physical and chemical forces. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be at the height and depth of human experience. In the primeval sacraments we recognize our “existence in receptivity” (Ratzinger, Theology of the Liturgy, 157). In them, we find ourselves receptive to the forces of world outside of ourselves. For instance, with meals, we depend not only on the earth to provide the nutrition necessary for life, on physical and biological mechanisms to function properly and predictably in order to sustain our lives, but also on the existence of a community larger than us in order to penetrate our hearts and give our existence a meaning beyond mere survival. We know in our hearts that a meal isn’t a meal just by the act of ingesting food, but when it is done in communion with others The necessity of a community to complete a meal is an example of how we understand intuitively that “things are more than things…they are signs whose meaning extends beyond their immediate sensorial power” (158).
In the act of festivity, we find a realm of human experience where the point is empirically unseeable. Nevertheless, for as long as human beings have existed, we have gathered for reasons beyond the functional. In our modern minds, we have forgotten this, since everything has been reduced to the functional, but our bodies still know this deeper truth intuitively. For my upcoming wedding, for instance, there is an understanding amongst everyone involved that despite the cost, there is the pure joy of creating a space of celebration for sake of itself. It is a rare and serenely sweet opportunity: In a world filled with natural suffering, human limitations, and original sin, perhaps the deeper point of festivity is intentionally connecting with concurrent spiritual realities in an act of hope. If our coactive physical acts successfully unites with spiritual realities, then the fallenness of our physical world can be sanctified. Here, we reclaim what we mean by sacrament because we see the physical sanctified by the spiritual. It is not replaced, but rather made more itself, and through our festivities, we come to know more deeply what it means to be ourselves.
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Cover art: “Wedding Procession In The Orel Region”, by Vladimir Egorovic Makovsky (1846-1920)