This week, I’m featuring short excerpts from my book, A Well-Built Faith, focusing on the 4 pillars of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Here’s a brief look at the second pillar: the Sacraments.
To be sacramental is to express beyond words. Catholics are sacramental because human beings are sacramental. Humans express love in a variety of ways beyond words. We do not feel that our love is fully expressed unless we can reach out to another person and touch them in some way. We are bodily creatures who experience the spiritual world in bodily – physical – ways. And so, as Catholics, we experience God and express ourselves to God using the physical. We use our bodies (standing, kneeling, bowing, lifting hands, signing ourselves) and we use physical objects (water, oil, bread, wine, fire, garments, rosary beads, incense) to encounter God who transcends words. We worship the intangible God using tangible realities.
Joe, this book was a much-thumbed and well-read reference for me during this past year of teaching fifth grade religious education. Our main theme was the Sacraments and I usually turned to A Well-Built Faith before reading the text. Many, many thanks.
Nancy
Nancy, thanks for the kind words…I’m glad that AWBF was/is a good resource for you!
I tell my kids that since Jesus had a body, was physical unlike the Father, he was a kind of Sacrament; through their bodies, people had physical access to God through Jesus’ body.
And that’s why we still have Sacraments: to maintain that physical connection.
Well said, Christian. We can speak of Jesus as the “Sacrament of God”
We can speak of Jesus as the Sacrament of God
I like that; never heard it before.
Wish I could take credit for it but it’s someone else’s idea…I’ll try to track it down.