Lenten Programme 2019: Thinking Sacramentally I
“All men are seeking for thee”
Lent is the season of our striving to strive for the things of God that belong to the good of our humanity. The conjunction of this Ember Wednesday with the commemoration of St. Gregory the Great, one of the founding giants of the medieval Church and of western Europe, is perhaps instructive and at least intriguing. The Ember seasons belong really to the development of western Christianity to which Gregory was a major contributing figure; one has only to think of the formative power of what came to be known as Gregorian Chant in the liturgy of the western Church. The Ember seasons belong as well to a recognition of the order and life of the Church as the body of Christ and to a certain sensibility about the natural world in relation to our spiritual lives; in short, to a sacramental understanding. The Ember seasons not only recall us to Pentecost as the birth of the Christian Church; they also recall us to our lives as embodied within the patterns of nature’s year.
Our Lenten programme this year seeks to explore the sacramental imagery that the Christian Church found in the Scriptures, particularly the Jewish Scriptures or what Christians have commonly called the Old Testament. A sacramental understanding has very much to do with the relation between Word and Sacrament and with the way in which the things of the world belong and contribute to our life of faith and to the forms of our participation in the life of God in Christ. The sacraments are, after all, “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace”, as the Catechism teaches. In a way, they are a critical feature of all religions. Something invisible and spiritual is made known through what is external and visible.
It is a feature of Judaism that the world reveals the glory of the Lord. A sacramental understanding necessarily connects us to creation. To speak of creation is to speak about a relation to a Creator who by definition is not created. That connection between God and the world and between God and our humanity as created beings is essential to our thinking sacramentally. The sacraments of Baptism and Holy Communion recall us to creation as the means of our participation in the life of God. The things of the world become the vehicles and vessels of our spiritual life. As Paul wonderfully puts it in Romans, the invisible things of God are made known through the visible things of creation. At once, the scriptural ground for what will be known as natural law, it also belongs to a sacramental understanding. The sacraments are not an add-on, a holy extra, as it were, but rather essential to the nature of the Christian religion and to its doctrine and patterns of thinking.