Seven Sacraments Series
What is a Sacrament?
Every moment of our life is sacramental if we realize that the outer is an expression of an inner truth and reality. Our whole life is an expression of divine grace. St Augustine defined a sacrament as “the visible form of an invisible grace” or “a sign of a sacred thing.” Well, is not our entire life sacramental. And should we not approach every aspect of our life as a holy relationship of love. What would our life be like if we did indeed approach every relationship and dynamic as an expression of love and truth. What would our life be, if this were indeed the way we lived? I invite you to be open to exploring the deeper meaning of a sacramental life by examining the rituals laid out by the Catholic/Christian religion and exploring what these initiations actually mean. I offer just a taste to use as a springboard to your own deeper contemplation.
Baptism
“I take thee at thy word:
Call me but love, and I'll be new baptized;
Henceforth I never will be Romeo.”
― William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
The sacrament of Baptism is the outward ritual of symbolically washing oneself of earth (ego). Water is the symbol of the psyche/soul and it is the soul that washes away the impurities of the mind and body and when one is purified, then spirit symbolized bythe dove descends and soul is filled with spirit rather than the ego. Meister Eckhardt says, I never ask God to give himself to me, I beg him to purify, to empty, me. If I am empty, God of his very nature is obliged to give himself to me to fill me. Water also symbolizes emotions and becoming aware of the common suffering of humankind can lead to temptations to escape back into the ego. Setting an intention will throw up all the obstacles to attaining your hearts desire (power, greed, addictions, materialism) so that they can be removed by the heart of love, your own soul.Baptism represents a commitment to the inner life and to returning to the source of your being with consciousness. Confirmation is a rededication to this commitment. Wells are symbols of the Soul - the Divine Feminine - the place to go to draw on deep truths that are hidden, gateways to the spirit world and the place where inner and outer worlds connect and are integrated
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Baptism of Jesus
We stood together hand in hand in primordial time; now at last, we are one again. We are all of one soul struggling along one path, and all drunk with the same wine. From among the two worlds we chose Love alone except for that Love there is nothing we adore. What bitterness did our souls suffer from separation! At long last, we are free from separation. A ray from the sun came in through an opening and raised us up in dignity, however low we were. O Sunlight! Don’t withhold Your loving radiance from us! Aren’t we sitting in the robes of Your radiance? By Your radiance we are transformed into rubies, it is because of You that we exist. Dancing like particles before You; in our yearning for You, we abandon all our chains. ~Rumi
Forgiveness and Reconciliation
"Know all and you will pardon all." ~Thomas a Kempis
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Holy Matrimony
“For us the question is, has the marriage to do with well-being or with salvation? Is it a soteriological institution or a welfare institution? Is marriage, this opus contra natura a path to individuation or a way to well-being?”
“A marriage only works if one opens (actually only if both people do) to exactly that which one would never ask for otherwise. Only through rubbing oneself sore and losing oneself is one able to learn about oneself, God, and the world. Like every soteriological pathway, that of marriage is hard and painful.”
~Adolf Guggenbuhl-Craig. Marriage: Dead or Alive
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Holy Orders
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Holy Unction
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Holy Communion
Everything exists so that everything else can exist. Every time that you eat, whatever it is you ate gave its life so that you may have life. When we start understanding that this giving and receiving is symbolic of giving and receiving divine love (wine) and truth (bread) we can begin to understand the enormous responsibility of becoming a worthy sacrifice ourselves - may we be the bread of Truth and the wine of Love that feeds and gives life to others. And may we be eternally grateful to those that have been bread and wine for us and given us life. ~ Lyndall Johnson
“It was a joy to me, O God, in the midst of the struggle, to feel that in developing myself I was increasing the hold that have upon me, too , under the inward thrust of life or amide the favourable play of events, to abandon myself to your providence. Now that I have found the joy of utilizing all forms of growth to make you, or to let you, grow in me, grant that I may willingly consent to this last phase of communion in the course of which I shall possess you by diminishing in you.
After having perceived you as he who is “a greater myself,” grant, when my hour comes, that I may recognize you under the species of alien or hostile force that seems bent upon destroying or uprooting me. When the signs of age begin to mark my body (and still more when they touch my mind); when the ill that is to diminish me or carry me off strikes from without or is born within me; when the painful moment comes in which I suddenly awaken to the fact that I am ill or growing old; and above all at that last moment when I feel I am losing hold of myself and am absolutely passive within the hands of the great unkown forces that have formed me; in all those dark moments, O God, grant that I may understand that it is you (provided only my faith is strong enough) who are painfully parting the fibres of my being in order to penetrate to the very marrow of my substance and bear me away within yourself.
You are the irresistible and vivifying force, O Lord, and because yours is the energy, because, of the two of us, you are infinitely the stronger, it is on you that falls the part of consuming me in the union that should weld us together. Vouchsafe, therefore, something more precious still than the grace from which all the faithful pray. It is not enough that I should die while communicating. Teach me to treat my death as an act of communion.” ~Teilhard de Chardin