Living a Sacramental Life

In Hunting Magic Eels I talk a lot about materiality and sacramentality. In a world where God is increasingly regulated to the invisible realm, and therefore deemed imaginary, we can take a cue from the Catholic sacramental tradition, where material reminders of spiritual realities are used to capture and direct our attention. 

A helpful reflection in this regard is Rowan Williams' essay "The Nature of a Sacrament," in which he suggests that humans make sense of the world by making signs. We create things and re-create things. We renew and transform things. And through this sign-making we come to understand ourselves and our world. This is how we "make meaning."

Importantly, much of this sign-making is embodied and incarnational in nature as we organize and transform the material "stuff" of the world. Williams writes:

[B]eing human, being bodily, and being a user of 'signs' are inseparable. We reflect on ourselves and 'answer' our individual and social past by doing things and making things, re-ordering what the past and present world has given us into a new statement of meaning, self-interpretation and world-interpretation.

In the Christian imagination Jesus was the preeminent sign-maker:

Jesus of Nazareth...It is clear that the tradition of his deeds and words is heavily influenced by the sense that he was a sign-maker of a disturbingly revolutionary kind.

In Jesus's life and actions--in the way he used the "stuff" of material existence, including his physical body--he created signs, signs that directed our attention to God, the one he called Father. More, Jesus was--in his material existence--a sign and sacrament:

Jesus, baptized, tempted, forgiving and healing, offering himself as a means of a new covenant, is himself 'sacrament': it is his identity that is set before us as a sign...the life of Jesus is a sign of God, showing how a human biography formed by God looks.

The nature of sacrament, then, is about sign-making--organizing, transforming and renewing material existence in a way that points toward God. And what is important for Williams here isn't just a focus on holy, sacramental objects, but also engaging in sacramental action:

[T]he primary concern should be for sacramental actions rather than an attempt to focus on 'sacralized' objects.

Sacramental action is a form of sign-making that organizes and re-organizes the material world in a way that brings renewal, refreshment and transformation. The sign-making is "Christian" insofar as it seeks to remember and replicate the sign-making of Jesus of Nazareth, shaping and re-shaping material existence in the manner in which he shaped and re-shaped material existence.

And by material existence, as I describe in Hunting Magic Eels, I mean bread, wine, oil and water. Light, movement, and color. Smells and sound. Standing, kneeling, and dancing. Singing, praying, and preaching. Gathering, listening, and sending. Washing, embracing, touching. Making, re-making, and repairing. Celebrating, commemorating, remembering. Serving, caring, and nursing. Protesting and resisting.

These are material signs and sacramental actions--ways we shape and re-shape our world and bodies--that help us "make sense" as we refresh and renew material existence, over and over, to the glory of God.