Sacraments

(“The Seven Rivers of Life”)

“Peace Be to You”

Grace:

Because the subject of Grace is so very important it might be well to continue it a bit here and then to tell you how that grace is communicated to us.

Grace divides the world actually into two kinds of humanity.

The once born and the twice born.

1. The once born are those who are born only of their parents.
2. The twice born are those who are born of their parents and also born of God.

• One group of men are what might be called “natural.”
• The other, in addition to having nature, also share in a mysterious way in the Divine life of God and in his Thoughts and in his Love.

Grace is so very sensitive that it is possible for us to reject it many times even during the day.

 

Incidents about Grace – Man making a choice:

Let me therefore tell you two incidents about Grace.

On one occasion, I went down from Belgium to Paris to preach a sermon in a church in Paris on the first Sunday of February.  I stayed in a tiny little hotel near the Opera Comique.   And in a small side room there was an Englishman playing a piano.  I listened to him for a while and then complimented him and invited him to dinner.  He said, “I have never eaten with a priest before.”  And I said, “Well we are just like anyone else if you stick me with a pin, I will bleed too.”  In the course of the dinner he said, “I have a problem I would like to present to you.  I have never met”, he said, “in my life, one good man or one good woman.”  I thanked him for the compliment and then he went on to tell me that just a year from this coming 12^th of February, over at that table there, indicating a table in the corner, he saw a woman trying to break a lump of sugar into a cup of coffee.  He went over to her, broke the lump, she then told him how cruel her husband was, and he said, “Come and live with me.”  He said, “I am now tired of her.  I get tired of them all after about a year.  And I wrapped up all of her clothes this morning and left them with the concierge and told her to leave.  But she left me this note.  And the note read that, “If you do not continue living with me I will commit suicide by throwing myself into the Seine.”  “Now this is my problem,” he continued.  “May I allow her to continue living with me to prevent her from committing suicide?”  And I said, “No you may never to evil that good may come from it, but in any case, what is more important, she will not commit suicide.”  It got to be late and he said, “Where are you going?” I said, “I am going up to Montmartre.”  He said, “I was just beginning to think that you were good and now your going up to that hellhole of Paris.”  I said, “There is something else on the hill of Montmartre besides dives and dens.  There is a beautiful basilica, The Sacred Heart, where there are hundreds of men every night in prayer and in perpetual adoration of our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament.  Come with me.”

We went up together and he said, “How long will you stay?”  I said, “I intend to stay all night, but I will leave when you want to go.”  He stayed all night.  And I suppose there were about 800 to 1000 men spending the night there in prayer.  When we left the next morning, after I had read Mass, he said, “This is the first time in my life I ever came in contact with goodness.”  He asked me to stay in Paris for a few days of teaching.  I arranged to meet him that night.

At the appointed hour, he came into the courtyard with another woman, not the woman involved in the story.  And he said, “the three of us will go out to dinner.”

I said, “No, tonight I want to see you.”  Then I called him aside and I said, “Now, you received a great grace yesterday. You got the first dim contact with goodness and love and holiness and tonight you have to make a choice.  Either you are going out with this woman or your going out with me. Which will it be?”  He walked up and down the courtyard for a few minutes and then came back to me and he said, “Well Father, I think that I will go out with her.”  And that is the end of the story.

 

• Now these impulses of Grace that he received could have developed him into a saint but it was like the story of our Lord looking over Jerusalem.

“I would. Thou wouldst not.”  (Matthew 23:37)

 

Incidents about grace:

Now let us take another incident.  I used to do a great deal of parochial work in St. Patrick’s Church, Soho Square, London, England.  I opened the church door one cold Epiphany morning in the month of January and a limp figure fell in.  It was a young woman about 23, 24 years of age and I said, “How did you happen to be here?”  And she said, “I did not know where I was father.” And I said, “Oh father?”  And she said, “Yes I used to be a Catholic but not anymore.”  And I said, “Why are you here? You seem to be a little intoxicated.  What are you running away from?”  She said, “From men, each of whom thinks that I love him. And I did not know that I was here.”  I asked her, her name, and when she told me, I pointed to a billboard on the other side of the street and I said, “Is that your picture over there on that billboard?”  “Yes” she said, “I am the leading lady in that musical comedy.”  Since she was very cold I made a cup of coffee for her and told her to come back before matinee.  She said, “I will on one condition. That you do not ask me to go to confession.”  I said, “Very well I promise you not to ask you to go to confession.”  She said, “I want you to promise me very faithfully that you will not ask me to go to confession.”  I said, “I promise you faithfully not to ask you to go confession.”

She came back that afternoon before matinee.  I said, “We have a beautiful Rembrandt and Van Dyke in this church would you like to see them?”  As we walked down the middle aisle I gave her a gentle push into the confessional.  I did not ask her to go but she went to confession.  She is now a nun in a convent of Perpetual Adoration in England.

 

And here are two stories of responses to Grace.  In both instances, the human will was free and in one there was a correspondence and the other a rejection.

 

We receive millions of these Graces called Actual Graces:

Everyone receives them.  You need not be a Christian.  Every Moslem,

every Buddhist, every communist in the world receives actual grace.

Here we are speaking of what is called now a Habitual Grace, a more permanent grace that which creates in us a likeness that remains and that brings up this particular problem.

 

How is this grace communicated to us?

How does it get into the soul?

Perhaps you have seen signs on roadways.  They are often painted on rocks which read “Jesus Saves.”  Yes, indeed he does.  The very practical question is how?

We have a span of 20 centuries between the life of our Lord and our days.

Yes, he is God, but how does he pour and infuse this Divine Life and power into our souls?

 

Well he does it by what are called Sacraments.

 

Now here we define the word sacrament in a very broad way.

In Greek, it means “mystery.”

• But a Sacrament is any material or visible thing that is used as a sign or a channel of Spiritual Communication.

 

Lord made this world with a sense of humor:

We will go back about as far as we can to explain mysteries and we might say that the Lord made this world with a sense of humor.  What do we mean by a sense of humor? We mean he made it sacramentally.  We say a person has a sense of humor if he can see through things.  They say a person has not a sense of humor if he cannot see through things.  We say he is too thick.

 

Now God made this world with a sense of humor in the sense that we were always to see Him through things, like the poets do:

 

• We would look out on a mountain and think of the Power of God.
• On the sunset and think of the Beauty of God,
• On a snowflake and dwell on the Purity of God.

 

Notice that we would not be taking this world as seriously as do the materialist to whom a mountain is just a mountain, a sunset is just a sunset and a snowflake is just a snowflake.

 

• The serious-minded people of this world write only in prose.
• But those who have this penetrating glance of perceiving the Eternal through time, the Divine through the human, have what we call the sacramental outlook on the universe.

 

Natural Sacrament:

Now coming up a little bit closer to our own experience there are certain signs and events in our daily life which are a kind of natural sacrament.

• Take for example a word. A word has something audible about it and at the same time something unseen, invisible. If, for example, I tell a joke and if it were a very amusing one you might laugh but if I told it to a horse, a horse would not even give a horse laugh.  Why?  Because you get the meaning, that’s because you have a soul, a reason and an intellect.  A horse lacks that spiritual perceptive power and hence does not get the meaning.
• So, with a handshake. A handshake is something visible, material, fleshy but there is also something spiritual about it, namely the communication of greeting and welcome. Now if I take my right hand and lay it upon my left, as I am doing at this particular second, this is not a handshake.  It has a visible aspect about it most certainly, namely the clasping of hands, but it lacks that invisible element which is the communication of personal warmth.
• A kiss is a kind of sacrament. It is something visible, and at the same time, something invisible, namely the communication of love.

 

This is getting a bit away from the point, but I just cannot resist saying it.  Have you noticed how very much our modern architecture is devoid of all decoration?  What a contrast to the cathedrals where there were all material things, even cows and angels, sometimes little devils, peering around the corners.  The ancient architecture was always using material things as signs of something spiritual.  Today our architecture is flat, nothing but steel and glass almost like a cracker box.  Why? Well because our architects have no spiritual message to convey.  The material is just the material, nothing else; hence no décor, no significance, no meaning, no soul.

I wonder if décor and decoration and so forth in architecture has not passed out of the world at the same time politeness has.  We certainly are not as polite in this century as we were in another century and possibly the reason is because we no longer believe that persons have souls. They are just other animals and thence they are to be treated as means to our ends.

• But when you believe that in addition to a body, there is soul, then you begin to have great respect and reverence for personality.

 

Contact the life of Christ through this Grace

Now after the digression on the relationship between architecture and politeness we come back to the very important point again is how do we ever, ever contact the Life of Christ through this Grace?

 

The basic idea that connects all that we have said with him is this:

***That Christ himself was the Great Sacrifice, because he was the Word made flesh.  He was the God–Man.***

• We would have seen a man, but we would have known that he was the Son of God.

 

Therefore Christ is the Supreme Sacrament of history. 

 

His Human Nature was the sign of His Divinity.  We saw God through his Body.  We see eternity through his Time.  And the Loving God in the form of a man who was like to us in all things save sin.

 

Now our blessed Lord took His Human Nature to Heaven. Once He is Glorified in Heaven, as we said in speaking of the Ascension, He is our Mediator, our Intercessor, our High Priest who can have compassion for us and on us because He passed through our temptations and our sufferings and our trials.

 

Because He is God as well as man, He is going to pour down upon us from Heaven His Truth, His Power, His Grace, His Life — and how will He do it?

• He will not do it through what we might call His bodiness, because that is already glorified in Heaven.
• He will do it through things and also through human natures. He will use certain things in this world as extensions of His Glorified Body.

Extensions of His Glorified Body:

• These things might be water, bread and oil and so forth as channels or vehicles for the communication of His Divine Life.
• Now He Himself instituted these Sacraments, but why did he do it?

Seven rays of the spectrum:

Well, first of all, because his life is so very rich that it has to have various manifestations in life, it is very much like the life of the sun. The sun is so very bright that if we are to understand its inner beauty we have to shoot that sunlight through a prism and so, and when we do, it splits up into the seven rays of the spectrum.

• And so, our blessed Lord, having a Life that is Infinitely Rich, shoots this Divine Life through the prism of the church and its splits up not into the seven rays of the spectrum but into the seven Sacraments of the Church.
• And then another reason why you use Sacraments is because this material world of ours has to be spiritualized.
• God not only redeems man He redeems things. So, we lay hold of material things like water and oil and bread and so forth and we make them serve God.

Body & Soul –

• Too often they have been used for purposes that were not divine. We have a body, too, as well as a soul, and we get all of our spiritual thoughts at least the beginning of them through the senses.

And why therefore, simply because we have a body as well as a soul, should God not use things that appeal to our senses, some material signs which would be to us telltales and revelations of this Grace that he is pouring into our souls?

• For example, it would be wonderful if used water to indicate that our great sin that we inherited from Adam was being washed away.
• Bread would be a very good sign and symbol of nourishmen
• Oil strengthens us in the natural order. It might also be a very good sign too for strengthening our souls.

As once Divinity used humanity:

• So as once divinity used humanity, so now divinity uses humanity and things in order that there might be something trans-historical, trans-cosmic in order that there might be the Divine Life of Christ pouring into our Souls.

That is how the Christ in heaven contacts us in this day in age.

How many sacraments are there? :

Seven.  Why seven?  Because there are seven conditions for leading a physical life and there ought to be seven conditions for leading a spiritual life.  Five of these conditions are individual and two refer to society.

In order to live a physical, natural life;

(1) I must be born;

(2) I must grow to maturity;

(3) I must nourish myself;

(4) I must heal my wounds;

(5) I must drive out traces of disease; and

As a member of society;

(1) There must be a propagation of the human species; and

(2) There must be government.

Seven conditions of leading that Divine Life.  

 

Now over and above this human life there is the Divine Life and there are Seven conditions of leading that Divine Life.

(1)     If I am to live the Christ Life, I must be born to it.  That is the Sacrament of Baptism.

(2)     I must grow to maturity and accept the responsibilities of life. That is the Sacrament of Confirmation.

(3)     I must nourish myself, sustain this Divine Life. That is the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist.

(4)     I must heal the wounds of my soul caused by sin. That is the Sacrament of Penance or Confession.

(5)     I must drive out all the traces of the disease of sin that are found in my senses. That is the Sacrament of the Healing of the Sick; and

(6)     As a member of society there must be a propagation of the Kingdom of God, the growth of the Mystical Body of Christ. That is the Sacrament of Matrimony; and

• Finally, there must be Divine government, there must be Holy Orders for the Sacrament, the Episcopacy, and the Priesthood.

 

Christ confers the Grace:

Now the reception of the grace that is in these sacraments is very effective in our soul because it is Christ that confers the grace.

• But the mere fact, for example, that we turn on a faucet, water comes out. The water does not come out because we subjectively believe that water will come forth and the Divine Life of Christ is poured into our soul by the mere fact that we receive the Sacraments.

 

• Of course, we must not put an obstacle in the way of receiving the sacraments, but it is Christ who Baptizes.
• It is Christ who forgives sins. There are ministers, of course, there are bishops and there are priests, but we lone Christ, our eyes and our hands and our lips is He who gives the Grace.

That incidentally is why, even though you receive the sacrament from an unworthy priest, it would still be a sacrament because the sanctification does not depend upon the priest, because as sunlight comes through a dirty window – the sunlight is not polluted.  A messenger may be very ragged, but he could still bear the message of a king.

 

 

• So, you see the Church, the Mystical body of Christ, takes care of you, in the cradle to the grave. It meets you in all of the events and circumstances of life. And your sanctification does not depend upon our preaching, it depends upon Christ Himself.

 

This is the sweet mystery of life, the Sacraments.

God Love You!