(continued from Bishop Sheen)
This book on the sacraments is written because men live in a world that
has become entirely too serious. Gold is gold, nuclear warfare is
nuclear warfare, dust is dust, money is money. No significance or
meaning is seen in the things that make a sound to the ear, or a sight
to the eye. In a world without a divine sense of humor, architecture
loses decoration and people lose courtesy in their relationships with
one another.
When civilization was permeated with a happier philosophy, when things
were seen as signs of outward expression of the unseen, architecture
was enhanced with a thousand decorations: a pelican feeding her young
from her own veins symbolized the sacrifice of Christ; the gargoyle
peering from behind a pillar in a cathedral reminded us that
temptations are to be found even in the most holy places. Our Lord, on
the occasion of His planned entrance into Jerusalem, said that if men
withheld their praise of Him, “the very stones would cry out,” which
they did as, later, they burst into Gothic Cathedrals.
Now the stones are silent, for modern man no longer believes in another
world; they have no story to tell, no meaning to convey, no truth to
illustrate. When faith in the spiritual is lost, architecture has
nothing to symbolize; similarly when men lose the conviction of the
immortal soul, there is a decline in the respect for the human. Man
without a soul is a thing; something to be used, not something to be
reverenced. He becomes “functional” like a building, or a monkey
wrench, or a wheel. The courtesies, the amenities, the urbanities, the
gentility that one mortal ought to have for another are neglected once
man is no longer seen as bearing within himself the Divine Image.
Courtesy is not a condescension of a superior to an inferior, or a
patronizing interest in another’s affairs; it is the homage of the
heart to the sacredness of human worth. Courtesy is born of holiness,
as ornamentation is born of the sense of the holy. Let us see if
ornamentation returns to architecture, if courtesy also returns to
human manners; for by one and the same stroke, men will have lost their
dull seriousness, and will begin to live in a sacramental universe with
a divine sense of humor.
Life is a vertical dimension expressed in the soaring spire, or in the
leaping fountain, both of which suggest that earth, history, and nature
must be left behind to seek union with the Eternal. Opposite to this is
an error which substitutes the horizontal for the vertical, the
prostrate form of death for the upright stature of life. It is the
disease of secularity and of naturalism. It insists on the ultimacy of
the seen and the temporal, and the meaninglessness of the spiritual and
the invisible.
Two errors can mar our understanding of the natural world: one is to
cut off entirely from Almighty God; the other is to confound it
substantially with Him. In the first instance, we have the clock
without the clock maker, the painting without the artist, the verse
without the poet. In the second instance, we have the forger and the
forged rolled into one, the melting and the fusing of the murderer and
the victim, the boiling of the cook and his dinner. Atheism cuts off
creation from its Creator; pantheism identifies nature with God. The
true notion is that the material universe is a sign or an indication of
what God is. We look at the purity of the snowflake and we see
something of the goodness of God. The world is full of poetry: it is
sin which turns it into prose."
What exactly does that mean? We receive the Eucharist, but we are Eucharist. We are sacrament rather than we receive the sacrament. And if we have to “celebrate,” then we’re really in trouble, “we celebrate Eucharist.” :banghead: I’ve even heard “Eucharist as a verb.” I don’t know what the past tense would be, but I’ve read and been told to approach the Eucharist as a verb. Words are loaded and changing the words like that changes the meaning and changes our point of reference, hence, our theology regarding the subject. Notice how such a shift in language puts us at the center of the universe. We are not the Sacraments: Instead they are given to us by our Creator.