Tracksuit to go to massScott Hahn says in his book Committed to God how one day, when he asked a certain friend, a Protestant like himself, about a good book, he took out a copy of a book on Calvin's doctrine on the sacraments. Upon seeing it, Hahn returned it to him with a lapidary sentence: "I am bored with all this sacramental stuff.
On his return home, his wife pointed out the rudeness of his reaction and even more, and I quote: "Kimberly ended her lesson with a smile and a pun: don't be surprised Scott if, when you appear before the Lord, you discover that the boring sacraments have actually gotten you into heaven!
For this Protestant pastor and his family, the sacraments, especially the Eucharist, led them to the Catholic faith. For all of us, you and me, the sacraments also lead us, as Kimberly Hahn said, to Heaven. Even though, like Scott, (and even worse because we know what the sacraments really are), we are capable of thinking that they bore us. And they bore us because we have often reduced the sacraments to a kind of ecclesiastical bureaucratic act, forgetting that in each of these sacraments, we have been able to find a way to get to heaven.
No sacrament is the work of men, but of God. It is true that, dragged by the peculiar individualism of the West, we have preferred, especially in recent years, to emphasize an "individual feeling" of faith, despising, in a certain way, the sacraments that appeared as a simple set of rites and words. Nothing could be further from the truth. God on earth speaks the language of love, he relates in a loving relationship with man in a complete way in the sacraments.
We cannot have a complete Christian life without the sacraments; it would be like pedaling a bicycle without wheels. It is not the same to live an active sacramental life as not to do so, just as it is not the same to manifest love for one's family, wife, children or parents as not to do so: out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.
The sacraments are the voice of God in the world, the way in which the Trinity comes to meet the men and women of all times, (especially evident in the Eucharist), the lifeblood that shapes the Church and therefore you and me as part of it.
Baptism, which, as Pope Francis reminds us, "makes us enter into this People of God that transmits the faith. A People of God that walks and transmits the faith" and that the Holy Spirit founds as Church, the same Spirit that we receive in Confirmation. The Eucharist transforms time and space, the infinite God who materializes, who "adapts" himself to our limits, becoming flesh in our flesh in Communion, and who, as in the Incarnation, awaits the response of each one of us. Reconciliation that recovers us for the life of grace, with which we return to God (re-ligare in the full sense). In Christian marriage the full love of God in his Trinity and in his Church is reflected carnally. The priestly order, by which God can become present in our life and face to face at the end of it, the help of the Anointing. Through these sacraments God tears with his infinitude the line of history, of our personal history, to make us part of his own: his death, his resurrection, his glory.
No. We cannot say, in the face of this panorama, that we don't give a damn, because these, the boring sacraments, are the paths that God has left us to reach Heaven.
Director of Omnes. Degree in Communication, with more than 15 years of experience in Church communication. She has collaborated in media such as COPE or RNE.
