Seeds of Glory Celebrating our Humanity
From its very beginning nearly fourteen billion years ago, creation was already permeated and filled with God’s compassionate presence. There never was a time or space in the history of evolution when God was absent from the world. In the person of Christ this tremendous love story has been finally revealed. The healing wholeness has been accomplished. The human is now the home of the divine. What was begun in creation is completed in Incarnation. The long-awaited moment has brought a stunning vision to human awareness. The search for God is no longer a dualistic journey outwards; it is the recognition of what is already throbbing within us. That is what we celebrate in the sacraments. But the immediacy of the eternal God keeps slipping our mind. It is divine power that energises our daily lives. Grace is life fully lived.
Moral theologian Fr Sean Fagan explains in ‘Sacraments and the Spiritual Life,’ that Francis of Assisi, with his eyes of faith, had no difficulty with this kind of vision. For him the sun and the moon, fire and water, animals and humans, all spoke of God. As Christians, this insight is offered to all of us. The smallest particle of creation is a theophany, a revelation of God – the acorn, the grain of sand, the shrill siren of a passing train. All too often our act of seeing stops at appearances, failing to explore the love and meaning at the core. We need eyes to read the wind, the stars, people’s faces as they pass by, in such a way as to go below the surface. But there are moments which stand out from all others, moments which come like a gift, moments when, ‘the focus shifts and a single leaf becomes a universe, a rock speaks prophecies and a smile transforms a relationship.’
We call such moments sacred, because in them we glimpse something of the sacredness of life, the wonder of God. Following on from this, Fr Fagan writes: ‘What needs to be emphasised is that our sacramental celebration becomes more meaningful when it is seen as a high point, a peak moment, a special occasion in a life that is already sacramental in its own right. The sacraments are of a piece with the rest of life and reality, not eruptions from a different world. In this sense it is more helpful to approach them from the context of life as a whole. They are moments of insight, bringing home to us, each in its own way, the deeper meaning of our life and destiny. The sacraments declare forth what is otherwise hidden in the world, in the routine of every day. They bring into focus and draw our attention to what we tend to ignore and lose sight of when we are busy about many things.’
In time and space, in ordinary signs and symbols, the scattered fragments of our lives are gathered up and for a moment given meaning in the light of Christ. John Macquarrie writes, ‘In the word and sacraments, the divine presence is focused so as to communicate itself to us with a directness and intensity like that of the Incarnation itself.’
People are sometimes a little anxious at this kind of teaching. Forgetting what happened in the Incarnation, they fear that such theology is ‘too human.’ They have the uneasy feeling that God is somehow diminished when creation is raised to such a holy state. Are parents jealous when their children are honoured? We are so unfamiliar with unconditional love. Most of us have experienced only conditional acceptance. We are gently challenged by the Incarnation to trust in the extravagance of the divine heart. At all times this beautiful world is encompassed by God’s love.
Treasured and Transformed.