EVERYDAY LIFE AS SACRAMENT
Our belief is that the universe shows forth God’s glory. That means each of us is made in God’s image, that our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, that the food we eat is sacramental, and that in our work and in our sexual embrace, we are co-creators with God.
In Christianity “the word becomes flesh”, God enters into the physical and thus everything that is physical is potentially sacramental. It’s noteworthy that scripture does not simply say that God became a human being. It says more: “God becomes flesh” - physical, earth.
There are many reasons why we aren’t more habitually alert to the fact that we are standing on holy ground. Although our everyday activities come laden with sacrament, most of them are rooted in the fact that we are human, that life is long, and that it isn’t easy to sustain high symbols, high language, and high ideals in the muck and grime of everyday life.
Eating, working, and making love should be holy, but too often we do them more for survival than for any sacramentality and “getting by” is about as high a symbol as we can muster on a weekday. I say this with sympathy. It isn’t easy, day by day, hour by hour, to experience sacrament in the ordinary actions of our lives.
But there’s another reason why we have lost the sense of sacramentality in our lives, namely, we have too little prayer and ritual around our ordinary actions. We too seldom use prayer or ritual to connect our actions – eating, drinking, working, socializing, making love, giving birth to things – to their sacred origins.
Generally, we don’t connect our food to its sacred origins, don’t consider our work as co-creation with God, don’t bless our workplaces and boardrooms, and would shrink at the very thought of blessing a bedroom where sex takes place.
We are the poorer for that, not just religiously, but humanly.
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