On Sacramentality

An interesting reflection:

What was so valuable about my class on the sacraments...was the revelation that earthly life itself is permeated with sacramentality - a truth that, when reflected upon, makes quick work of any latent, Puritan-derived, Manichean tendencies. There was something so positively invigorating about walking out of that classroom and looking at the world with fresh eyes, eyes that could suddenly see a natural order infused by grace. I alluded to this as I wrote a tribute to Dr. Martin in my weekly column in The Troubadour, the student newspaper at Franciscan:

I often leave his class feeling, as T.S. Eliot says in his Portrait of a Lady, “Immeasurably at peace, and find the world to be wonderful and youthful, after all.” Of course, I would never have read Eliot if it weren’t for Martin’s insistence on quoting him liberally at every chance... Martin has reminded us again and again that the faith is “not a syllogism, but a poem.” It is in this that God’s infinite love has become increasingly manifest to me. He created a sacramental order because the world, though fallen, is good and has been found worth redeeming. This is the crux – life is beautiful, and this beauty is pure, unadulterated gift – which should inspire joy, love, poetry. “The world,” Martin once said, “needs steelworkers. But even more, it needs poets.”

The poet, perhaps even more than the philosopher, asks questions about the nature of things. I found that once I was armed with this new understanding of the created world, I had questions of my own. I knew that sacraments were "outward signs of inward grace, instituted by Christ for our sanctification."  I knew that sacraments "effect what they signify." But what do they signify? What is it about the physical matter of a given sacrament that unlocks the key to understanding its spiritual effect? How is the simplest, plainest bread appropriate to become to the Body of Our Lord? How is it that the fermentation of grapes creates a substance suitable to be transformed into His Precious Blood? Why water for baptism? Why incense for reverence? Why oil for annointing? Why is gold appropriate for a chalice (but earthenware is not)? Why is conjugal love - mere sex outside the order of grace - a sacramental act? I came to realize that there is something intrinsic in all of these material, corporeal things that is simply bursting forth with transcendent meaning...

We are bound to the physical world. As technology makes our work, our day-to-day living, more abstract and more removed from the toil of the earth and the fruit of the soil, we can forget the meanings behind those material things which God has imbued with His grace.