This week’s episode of the podcast explored the sacraments. It’s an episode we’ve had planned for a while – although ‘planned’ might be putting it too strongly – so long, in fact, that we’ve forgotten what discussion originally inspired it.
Sacraments are hard to define. Augustine defined them as ‘a visible form of an invisible grace’ which, in the formulation of the BCP becomes ‘an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace’. But that hardly narrows anything down, really. Which is why, throughout Christian history, people have argued about what exactly is a sacrament and what isn’t. (Augustine, for example, included the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed in this category.) The Catholic Church affirms seven Sacraments, the Protestant church only two (Baptism and Communion). Eastern churches grant that the seven are the ‘major’ sacraments, but refuse to give an exact number on the grounds that everything the church does is basically sacramental.
The word itself comes from the Latin theologians of the third century, notably Tertullian who used it to interpret the Greek word mysterion. It was the word used for the Roman solder’s oath of allegiance. This oath meant that he was starting a new life: he had new status, new rights and privileges. And there was a physical aspect as well: the soldier was branded behind the ear with the number of their legion.
For me, it is this physical aspect which is characteristic. A sacrament is a symbol which, in one phrase, ‘effects what it signifies’. In other words, it’s a kind of physical metaphor. It replicates, through the senses, what it is symbolising. Bread and wine feed you. Water washes you. Oil anoints you. The metaphor is made real, and through that reality something happens. What happens, of course, is open to debate, but at the very least, we change. We shift our focus. Christ is present with us in our senses as well as our intellect.
The other aspect of the sacraments is that they have a ritualistic quality. I’m reading a lot about ritual at the moment, and the need for us as a society to rediscover it. Rituals are all about patterns and expectations. So we go to the sacraments prepared for some kind of encounter.
This, I think, gives us a clue as to how we can shape our own sacraments. Create ritual. Use our senses. Embrace metaphors which are physical and embodied. Find some kind of container for the mystery that is all around us.