Celebrating the God Who is With Us: the Meaning of the Sacraments

Reflections on assigned texts from my Sacraments masters course at the University of Notre Dame

My son, Ezra, on my husband’s shoulders inside the Basilica of the Sacred Heart during a family trip to South Bend, IN.

Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper and theologian Joseph Ratzinger ground their complementary conceptions of the sacraments in an anthropological claim: that humankind is fundamentally fashioned for festivity. We will sketch out this anthropological vision, particularly as it relates to the sacramental life of the Church, to see how Pieper and Ratzinger provide much-needed context and enrichment of our often parched modern sensibilities about the sacraments.

Made for Festivity

This vision of the human person as oriented toward celebration is not simply a feature of select civilizations, but a universal truth corresponding to the human vocation to know and behold God in communion with all of creation. In light of this reality, festivity can be understood as the fulfillment and manifestation of this vocation, which comes from “experiencing the true presence of God among his people" (In Search of the Sacred, Pieper, 44). It is constituted by receiving, in joy, the “God who is here for men and is defined precisely by his being with people” (“The Sacramental Foundation of Christian Existence”, Ratzinger, 161).

In this way, festivity is the character of salvation, which finds its fullest expression in the celebration of the sacraments, for sacraments reveal and make present this divine reality. By receiving the sacraments, we can thus awaken — in creaturely humility, gratitude, and celebration — to the one in whom “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). We can encounter, as embodied person, our Creator God “who through his historical life and suffering has become ‘Bread’ for us” — or “in other words, through his Incarnation and self-abandonment to death” becomes “the One who is open for us” (Ratzinger, 167). 

Where can we find the natural grounds for these lovely, lofty theological notions? Let’s locate them together — by first following Ratzinger’s lead!

The Meal and the Meaning-Seeking Creature

Ratzinger traces this anthropological orientation toward festivity by beginning with the human experience of partaking in a meal. In a meal, we encounter something far more than simply the means to our own survival; we are confronted with the contingency of human life and our intrinsic dependency on others for our existence. Ratzinger notes that human eating has the capacity to become something fundamentally different from the food intake of any other creature – that is, it can become a meal, wherein the human person experiences “the delightfulness of those things whereby men are supplied with the gift of the earth’s fertility”, and in the company of fellow human-kin, who are united by nourishment “in the common interest of receiving the gifts of this earth” (Ratzinger, 156-157).

This human capacity for an act such as eating to take on meaning (beyond the satisfaction of biological demands) is an expression of the symbolic nature of the person. Such a reality, however, is often lost on us modern folk, as Pieper writes: “they will never realize how entirely normal it is for man to act not merely with a practical goal in mind but also…with the intention of setting a sign – be this only the gesture of lighting a candle, not to brighten the room but rather to express the festive atmosphere of the moment” (42). This symbolic dimension of the person is integral to our orientation toward festivity. Ratzinger accordingly describes what is discovered in the universal meal experience: 

In a meal, man discovers that he is not the founder of his own being but lives his existence in receptivity. He experiences himself as someone who has been endowed […] And what is more: he experiences the fact that his experience, his ‘being-there’... is grounded in communion with, or ‘being-with’, the world, in whose stream of life he is immersed, and that it is founded on communion with men, without which his humanity would lose the ground under its feet. (Ratzinger, 157)

In a meal together, we human-kin recognize — consciously or not — that our embodied existence is entirely unmerited and wholly contingent upon those around us. We can likewise see here, by our very ability to seek meaning, how “things are more than things: that they are signs whose meaning extends beyond their immediate sensorial power” (Ratzinger, 158). Thus, the meal can become for the human person a sign of the divine life supporting and nourishing humankind, holding her into existence. 

Reality Revealed in the Sacraments

And that divine reality — which one can perhaps discern echoes of in a shared meal — is revealed explicitly in Jesus Christ (and by him, the deeper meaning of an ordinary meal is confirmed). The historical mystery of his life and God’s history with humankind is accordingly opened up to us believers in the sacraments; the sacraments are thus Christ’s invitation to us, through the mystery of the Church, to partake in his Triune life. They make present the meaning of reality itself — that all of creation is an outpouring of the love of the Triune God, and made for that love. The sacraments are thus never “done” and “performed”, according to Pieper, but celebrated — carried out in a nonordinary manner, and in a communal setting (Pieper, 26), reflecting the unity and community of God himself!

While sacraments certainly express in concrete images what can be difficult for the mind to grasp (Pieper, 27), they, even more significantly, make present him who loved us first. That said, when we pray before the Blessed Sacrament in a Church, we are not simply just sitting before God “in a circumscribed locality” (168, Ratzinger); rather, “praying in church and before the Blessed sacrament” is properly situating ourselves in “the ‘classification’ of our relation to God under the mystery of the Church as the specific locality where God meets us” (Ratzinger, 169). Therefore, as Ratzinger writes, our purpose in going to Church is this:

so that I in an orderly fashion may take my place in God’s history with men — the only setting in which I as a man have my true human existence and which alone therfore opens up for me the true space of my encounter with God’s eternal love. For this love does not seek merely an isolated spirit…rather, it seeks man utterly and entirely, in the body of his historicity, and it gives him in the holy signs of the sacraments the guarantee of a divine answer in which the open question of being human arrives at its goal and comes to its fulfillment. (169)

Authentic human festivity finds its fullest expression in the person who, in accepting her creatureliness and opening herself up to receive all God has given, steps into what is really real and beholds Him as gift. In such an act, our salvation, and our joy, are found.