Sacraments
Last night, I had the pleasure of teaching my favorite class. It is a class on the sacraments of the Church that is intended to engage the participant with a feast of the senses. There is music, art, scripture, film, dialogue, baseball, signs, symbols, and I wish that we could have smells and tastes involved as well.
The sacraments are unfortunately many times reduced in the Catholic faith to the lowest common denominator. It is a shame that we do not more often see them as a feast for the senses. The sacraments are meant to overwhelm the body and the soul and put us into overload. Jesus seemed to always make this clear, whether it was healing the sick, forgiving sins, changing water into wine, dying on cross, you name it, he meant for us to understand that it is not just our souls he is after, but our bodies as well. He truly wants to claim everything that we are as persons as his own and he goes to great lengths to do so. He doesn’t ever leave any doubt that he is passionately in love with humanity.
My favorite part of last night’s class was viewing a short scene from the last Harry Potter movie. In it, Lord Voldemort says to the hero of the series, “You are a fool Harry Potter, and you will lose everything.” Those of us who have finished reading the book know that this is indeed true. Harry will lose everything. Harry will be willing to freely accept death if it will save his friends and even his enemies from what Lord Voldemort will bring. And in freely accepting death, in making the greatest sacrifice one can make, Harry saves them. The story should be familiar to Christians. We should remember the self sacrificial love of Christ every time we celebrate any sacrament and give thanks for a God who loves us so much that he would willingly give himself over to death.
Often times we as Christians focus too much on the power and dominion of God. It is easy to forget that it was the weakness of God, in fact the death of God, that saved the world.
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