Sacramentalizing the world

Editor’s Note: This is the third in a series on Catholic culture.

Let us try to imagine a Church filled with Christ, overflowing with His presence and power. Not too difficult, is it? Is that not the customary, immemorial even, way of referring to the Bride and Body of Christ? And does she not accordingly see herself situated along a continuum stretching from time into eternity, a sheer uninterrupted line of horizon betwixt Earth and Heaven? And from within the one, she beckons us to enter the other, plunging headlong into an abyss of sheerest mystery, whose depths defy our best efforts to plumb. Such has been her self-understanding from the beginning. “A vast transport company carrying passengers to Paradise,” is how Georges Bernanos put it in an essay written near the end of his life. 

That said, how then does she go about doing this? How, exactly, does the Church propose to bring Christ to the world, demonstrating His presence among men in order that she might then transport them home to Heaven? Assume we have all been confirmed in faith, our hearts annealed in the hope and the love of Jesus Christ. In what way are we expected to give witness to this treasure that we possess? How, exactly, are our energies to be enlisted in the effort to convert a world to Christ?   How, exactly, does the Church propose to bring Christ to the world, demonstrating His presence among men in order that she might then transport them home to Heaven? Tweet This

The answer, of course, is by sacramentalizing the world, raising it to the dignity of Christ Himself. In a word, by steeping everything in the Blood of the Lamb. 

Starting from the morning of Pentecost, the Church has, over the course of many centuries, basically elaborated two strategies pursuant to this end, neither of which we may dispense with. The first is evangelization, about which every Christian knows something. And what is it that we know? I mean, at the most bedrock level? Once again, the answer is simple and straightforward; in fact, we have been commissioned by Christ Himself for this task. And that is to go out and proclaim the Good News of the Lord Jesus to every human being on the planet. If He came into the world to redeem everything and everyone, then no one must be allowed to slip through that evangelical net. We must all become fishers of men.

Why else does the Cross bear the shape that it has, its outstretched arms extended into the four winds? The very wood on which the Eternal Word consented to be bound bespeaks universality; it is meant to be a sign of expansion, of solidarity and kinship with all the children of men. Therefore, we are constrained—exhorted by evangelical necessity, no less—to draw all men to God, which we do through the Church He Himself fashioned as an extension of Himself, leading the world back to the Father.

A couple of images come to mind here, each expressive of the idea, of the relation that exists between Christ and His Church. The first is that of a road, a royal highway, mapping the route the Church must take in order for the whole of the human race to find its way back home to God. The Church is herself that road, along which she carries Christ, bearing His body for all to see. 

Straightaway, that suggests another image: that of a window standing wide open before the world. The Church is to be that window. And through the prism of her transparency, we are invited to see the face of God shining upon the countenance of everyone we meet—perhaps even those whom we do not wish to meet. The poor and the dispossessed, for example. The ones from whom we avert our gaze because, being either unlovely or unloving, they remain unloved.

However, Christ loves them, which is an added reason for us to love them. And to give them, therefore, the best gift we have got. “For Christ plays in ten thousand places,” we are reminded by the poet Hopkins. “Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his / To the Father through the features of men’s faces.”

It is, admittedly, no easy thing to love as Christ loves, which is why we so often prefer the soft soap and sentimental playacting that masquerades as love. Not that “harsh and dreadful thing,” of which Dostoyevsky speaks; or that “Lord of terrible aspect,” of whom Dante writes in the final line of the Paradiso, “the Love that moves the sun and the stars and the planets.” 

The poor are everywhere, of course. But in order for us to find them more easily—and not shun their company—Christ specifically entrusted them to His Church. It is she who looks after them, seeing in them the clearest reflection of Christ’s own poverty. As did, for instance, the Deacon Lawrence who, when ordered by the Prefect of Rome to turn over the treasury of the Church for confiscation, produced all the poor of the city instead. Pagan Rome was not amused by the gesture; and for his troubles, they proceeded to barbecue the poor man on a grill designed for its own amusement.

But where else are we to find the wealth of the Church if not among the poor, with all those whom Christ identifies in the starkest and most scandalous way? Much as He identified with them when a certain Jewish zealot named Saul sought to persecute and destroy as many of them as he could find. Christ would need to first unhorse him before the grace of conversion could work its magic. 

Or the example of Il Povero himself, Francis of Assisi, kissing the sores of so many lepers because on each he espied the figure of Christ Crucified. It is that same “distressing disguise” the Missionary Sisters of Mother Teresa remain on the lookout for in their selfless quest to do something beautiful for God.

And where else but in Jesus Himself do we find the model, the prototype for evangelical witness? He who spent His days scouring the streets and byways of Judea in search of the lost sheep of Israel. He was not engaged upon making grand gestures of vast macroeconomic reform. He was looking, rather, for one wretched sinner at a time to carry home to His Father.

We are all beggars before the Lord, our hands outstretched to receive what we cannot give. “Stretch forth Thine hand,” we ask, “to heal our sore, / And make us rise and fall no more; / Once more upon Thy people shine, / And fill the world with love divine.”

It is the business which most becomes the Bride and Body of Christ. But not, as we shall see, the only business.