Lumen Fidei: The Crystallized Love of God

In paragraph 40 of Lumen Fidei, Pope Francis repeats something that cannot be too often said: that Christian faith is not simply assent to a doctrine, but rather knowledge of and trust in the Living God.

Faith, in fact, needs a setting in which it can be witnessed to and communicated, a means which is suitable and proportionate to what is communicated. For transmitting a purely doctrinal content, an idea might suffice, or perhaps a book, or the repetition of a spoken message. But what is communicated in the Church, what is handed down in her living Tradition, is the new light born of an encounter with the true God, a light which touches us at the core of our being and engages our minds, wills and emotions, opening us to relationships lived in communion.

You don’t truly get to know a person by reading a book; you get to know them by speaking with them and spending time with them, by interacting with them. And before you can do that, you have to be introduced to them—and when the person is a Person, you might need to learn some special protocols. And so Christ gave us the Church and the sacraments:

There is a special means for passing down this fullness, a means capable of engaging the entire person, body and spirit, interior life and relationships with others. It is the sacraments, celebrated in the Church’s liturgy. The sacraments communicate an incarnate memory, linked to the times and places of our lives, linked to all our senses; in them the whole person is engaged as a member of a living subject and part of a network of communitarian relationships.

Through the sacraments we not only learn to know God, we learn to know His people, the mystical Body of Christ that is the Church; and not just with our minds, but with our whole beings.

And then, through learning to see God in the sacraments, we begin to acquire the sacramental view of life: a sense of the sacred in everything.

While the sacraments are indeed sacraments of faith, it can also be said that faith itself possesses a sacramental structure. The awakening of faith is linked to the dawning of a new sacramental sense in our lives as human beings and as Christians, in which visible and material realities are seen to point beyond themselves to the mystery of the eternal.

For the world we see around us constitutes nothing less than the crystallized love of God.