People often ask me what caused me to leave my life as a protestant minister and join the Catholic Church. It’s not an easy question to answer. I struggled with the decision for years overcoming a series of theological, ecclesiological and vocational issues. Most people aren’t interested in the theological play by play they want me to boil down all the issues into a single cogent motivating factor. After reflecting on my journey with countless people one thing has risen to the surface, sacramentality.
By sacramentality I mean the living out of the mystery of Christ and his Church in our divinely charged world, through the privileged experiences of God’s holy exchange with the cosmos, which we call the sacraments. In other words it’s the notion that things matter, and that matter in not just a thing. This is what God shows us in Jesus, and continues to show us through the sacramental life of the Church.
Sacramentality is a worldview and it captivated me. The more I thought about Jesus as God coming to us in the intimacy of flesh and blood the more I began to see matter as more than just the stuff of the universe, but as as a way to encounter the very life of God.
I believe we can all benefit from having a worldview of sacramentality, with eyes open to the presence of God among us even as we long for God. This world is the place where the incarnate God is encountered, not simply was, and God is encountered most materially and positively in the sacramental life of the Church. In Jesus God didn’t simply choose to meet people in matter once, but continues to offer himself in a grace so tangible you receive it in in your hand, have it signed on your head, and have it drip down your face.
In the Sacramentality of the Church we encounter divine life, not in the ultra-personal ephemeral inspiration so common in popular American religion, but in the community of flesh in blood offering their embodied life as a whole to be sanctified and joined with the divine life in Christ. This is Grace so real you can taste it and so material you can cast it away. This is the kind of Grace we see in Jesus, present, vulnerable, and incarnate. It is the vision God has given us of himself.
I recognized in the sacramental life of the Church that the story of God continued to unfold in God’s own people in a sustained incarnational reality. I came to believe that Sacraments unlock the living God and I needed to join the living church that participated in that life. It is how I have begun to grow to see the world through my participation in the sacramentality of the Catholic Church.
For more on Sacramentality check out Kevin Irwin’s Models of the Eucharist and Alexander Schnemann’s For the Life of the World.
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