Context:

This past Sunday the spiritual formation community I lead gathered. Our theme was “In the Chapel of Eggs: Prayer and Daily Living.” Yesterday I sent H&H members a brief reflection on fixed-hour prayer that is most visibly seen in the intentional rhythm and routine of monastic life in which daily life revolves around, is guided and enlivened by set times of prayer that call the monks to re-member themselves to God. I suggested a modified version of this for people who live beyond the walls of monasteries.

This morning I sent H&H participants a follow-up reflection offering another approach as an entry way to practicing everyday spirituality. I offer it here for you as well.

Sacramentality: Finding God in All Things

The second way of understanding everyday spirituality is by viewing it through a sacramental lens. A sacrament we recall is “an outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible grace” or reality.

The late Catholic theologian Richard McBrien says: ‘A sacramental perspective is one that “sees” the divine in the human, the infinite in the finite, the spiritual in the material, the transcendent in the immanent, the eternal in the historical.” Sacramentality is a consciousness rooted in the very nature of sacrament that is enacted and extended into human living. It is a sacred mentality, an awareness, perspective, and spiritual intuition of divine presence in and through the earthly, visible, sensible world. Ignatius of Loyola adhered to this when he taught his companions to “find God in all things.”

No accident or haphazard discovery, it is important to realize that “find” implies being on the look out for. It is a conscious and contemplative way of seeing and participating in life on earth, in beholding “the divinity of what just is” (J. Finley via T. Merton), in recognizing that “the world is charged with the grandeur of God,” (G.M. Hopkins) and that “Earth’s crammed with heaven,/ And every common bush afire with God” (E.B. Browning). A sacramental understanding of life is rooted in the conviction that matter matters and in the experience that the material world is a carrier and a means of grace, a conduit through which we connect with the Holy One.

This second way of understanding reality and entering into daily living is not in conflict with the first—the rhythm and routine of fixed-hour prayer. They can work in tandem. The difference appears when the person’s daily schedule is less conducive or not possible to be shaped and guided by more lengthy times of fixed-hour prayer, for example, due to work, commuting, family responsibilities, and other mitigating circumstances. However, it is possible to blend the two and still abide by brief pauses at set times during the day to re-member oneself to God.

A classic example of the sacramental view of everyday spirituality is found in Brother Lawrence’s famous little book The Practice of the Presence of God. An unassuming 17^th century Carmelite monk in Paris, Brother Lawrence worked for years in his community’s kitchen. More than most, he understood poet Anne Sexton’s phrase three and a half centuries later about finding joy “in the chapel of eggs” since the kitchen became his sanctuary for communing with God, and his daily tasks and responsibilities became not obstacles but opportunities to practice the sacrament of the present moment. Gerald May offers two or three ponder-worthy chapters to Brother Lawrence’s method of prayer in his book The Awakened Heart which I recommend.

St. Benedict in his Rule alludes to the sacramental view of all reality both when he teaches “All guests who present themselves are to be welcomed as Christ” (Ch. 53) and when he counsels “regard all tools and goods of the monastery as sacred vessels of the altar, aware that nothing is to be neglected” (Ch. 31). Such reverent behavior is rooted in seeing the seemingly trivial or insignificant from a divine perspective and the human person as a symbol of God and a tabernacle of God’s presence.

Last Sunday we listened to Peter Mayer’s song “Holy Now.” It is important to catch the shift of perspective and consciousness when he sings “everything is holy now.” Life, in all its intricacy, has always been holy since the presence of everything and each thing, everyone and each one, is infused with Spirit and traceable to the Divine Source.

Last night on the Evening News there was a story about a young school boy who asked his mother if she would pack two lunches. When she asked her son, “How come?” he told her of his friend who only ate a fruit cup each day because his mother had lost her job and they didn’t have enough money for a real lunch. The young boy’s shift in consciousness because he was able to “pass over” into the perspective of his hungry friend and then back to his own good fortune set in motion a sequence of actions that awakened school officials to the issue of students coming to school hungry and without lunches. Were not the contents of this second sack lunch as holy as the bread and wine of Sunday’s Eucharist? Was not this simple act of kindness and compassion on the part of the grade schooler the very essence of the fourfold movement of Eucharist – receive, bless, break, and share? Was not the presence of Christ’s body consumed and shared together in the cafeteria by two young friends?

Andre Dubus got it right in his essay “Sacraments” when he wrote that making sandwiches for his daughters when done with love is a sacrament. To consecrate something – whether bread and wine at Sunday Eucharist or a sack lunch for one’s daughters or the malnourished friend of one’s son– is not so much to make the profane holy but rather to dedicate something or some action for a holy purpose with love. If God can draw straight with crooked lines, and I believe the Divine Artist can, then God can take the smallest thing – a pot or pan, a morsel of bread, a sip of wine, a brown bag full of kindness, a tool used gratefully and reverently – and the simplest gesture done in love — a phone call or a visit to a sick or lonely friend, a hopeful word to someone on the ledge of despair, a greeting to a stranger – and make it holy communion that enlivens and heals.

As Dubus suggests, each day presents not 2, not 7, but 7 x 70 times worth of sacramental moments, sacred opportunities to encounter the Holy who comes into our day not as grandiose experiences when the heavens open and the celestial choir resounds but rather, disguised as small, seemingly throwaway, inconsequential moments and encounters that hiddenly enlarge the human heart and connect us one to another.

For those with eyes to see, let us see. For those with ears to hear, tongues with which to taste, noses with which to smell, let us hear and savor and smell. For those with bodies to touch with and feelings to feel with, let us touch with deep sympathy and be touched with love and feel deeply – that everything is holy when seen with the eyes of God which is our privilege, our vocation, and dare I say it, our salvation.