I am seriously liturgically challenged, and I blame it all on the most honorable group of people that I have ever known: the Society of Friends, or Quakers. (This is an exceptionally low risk comment because Quakers have been pacifists for the past 350 years and can't hit back!) I joined an evangelical Friends meeting while in college and felt right at home in the gestureless simplicity and mystical focus of their worship. Quakers do not celebrate the sacraments at all—not even baptism or communion—and the severity of their worship made the liturgical starkness of my Baptist childhood seem like Holy Week at St. Peter's. Their meeting houses have a sort of hyper-Cistercian austerity about them: no stained glass windows, no crosses or statues or images of any kind. Quakers sought to avoid anything that would smack of the "creaturely", an archaic term for that which appealed to the senses. Worship was to be "in spirit and truth," an unmediated encounter with the inner Light of Christ.
Traditional Quaker worship involves simply sitting together in silent prayer until the Holy Spirit moves an individual to rise and give a testimony or prophecy. Since the Spirit sometimes doesn't move, the silence can fill the entire hour. Nothing to look at but bare wood walls and your fellow worshipers. Nothing to listen to except the occasional cough or labored breathing. Nothing to do but sit quietly in contemplation of the God who dwells within you. In Indiana, I once worshipped while sitting on an exceedingly hard and lumpy 19th century minister's bench where Elizabeth Fry, the great Quaker prison reformer, had waited for the Spirit to move her to speak. It wasn't exactly comfortable. (Liz must have had a derriere of iron because meetings in her day lasted two hours.) But it was peaceful and no one expected you to do more than shift your weight occasionally.
So perhaps you'll understand why I have this theory that when you become a Quaker, the part of your brain that was designed to deal with complex liturgical actions turns to jelly. This is unfair, of course, but it makes me feel a bit better about my kinesthetic incompetence. After I became Catholic, it took me an entire year to learn how to make the triple sign of the cross at the reading of the Gospel. Even today, if I don't concentrate, I'm likely to give the impression that I'm thumbing my nose at the celebrant.
The irony is that these same Quakers first exposed me to the idea of sacramentality—the idea God could and would convey grace not just through the medium of my personal and inward faith, but through visible, earthly things like water, bread and people. In my Baptist past, we baptized with gusto, but we regarded it as a purely symbolic act, a public witness to the real salvific event which was assumed to have taken place within your heart. The idea that God would convey his grace through things or ritual actions was completely foreign to me. But I met a Quaker leader who was reading the great Catholic mystics and was quite taken with the concept of sacramentality. He did not go so far as to suggest that Quakers start baptizing or celebrating the Lord's Supper, but he did talk movingly of the need for us to become living sacraments ourselves.
Nowadays, at least two or three people at every teaching event ask me why I became Catholic. I always tell them that the very short version of a very long journey is that "the sacraments became essential." While it is true, however, that I was drawn to the Catholic Church by the sacraments, it is also true that until very recently, I didn't really "get it". I accepted intellectually what the Church taught about each of the sacraments but floundered badly as I tried to integrate them into the heart of my spiritual life. I was wrestling with an area of Catholic belief and practice for which there is simply no equivalent in either my Quaker or my evangelical experience. I knew that I had missed something important. One day, however, a passage I was reading leapt out at me:
The gift of the Spirit ushers in a new era in the "dispensation of the mystery", the age of the Church, during which Christ manifests, makes present, and communicates his work of salvation through the liturgy of his Church, "until he comes."[2] In this age of the Church, Christ now lives and acts in and with his Church, in a new way appropriate to this new age. He acts through the sacraments in what the common Tradition of the East and the West calls "the sacramental economy"; this is the communication (or "dispensation") of the fruits of Christ's Paschal mystery in the celebration of the Church's "sacraments". (Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC), 1076)
My map of the spiritual universe had just been turned upside down. I could hardly take it in; Christ communicates his work of salvation through the liturgy! Questions raced through my mind. Christ dispenses the fruits of redemption through earthly things and ritual actions? He does so through the actions of someone else rather than as a direct and unmediated response to my inner devotion? What about faith? What about my faith?
I realized that I had been participating in the liturgy and sacraments while in the grip of a profoundly non-sacramental worldview. No wonder I had struggled! The idea that the grace of Christ really and only enters this world in response to and through the vehicle of the invisible, personal faith of individuals was embedded in my bones; it made grasping Church teaching about the role of the liturgy and the sacraments nearly impossible. Everything in Catholic worship and sacramental practice presumed something very different, but no one had ever spelled it out for me. After 14 years as a Catholic, I had finally blundered onto one of the foundation stones of the faith: the sacramental economy of salvation.
Beneath the practices of my Quaker and Baptist friends was a common assumption: the truly spiritual is invisible and disembodied. Indeed, Quakers often quoted John 4:24: "God is Spirit, and those who worship him must worship in Spirit and truth," to make the case against water baptism. We were certain that Christ's saving grace was communicated in a non-corporeal, unmediated manner by the Holy Spirit directly to the unseen heart of the individual in response to that person's faith. When, as evangelical Protestants, we asserted that salvation was by personal faith alone, sola fide, we meant unmediated faith alone. We understood personal faith as both the pre-requisite and the instrument through which one becomes a Christian, receives forgiveness for all sins, justification, adoption as God's child, and eternal life. The only embodied alternative we could envision was "earning" our salvation through works.
As Catholics, we definitely believe that we are saved by grace. But if Christ has chosen to communicate this grace through sacramental means, then the instrument through which we receive initial justification is not our own faith. We become Christians, are forgiven, made God's sons and daughters, and receive God's own life through perceptible signs that actually do what they signify—the sacraments. As the universal catechism teaches:
Holy Baptism is the basis of the whole Christian life; the gateway to life in the Spirit (vitae spiritualis ianua) and the door which gives access to the other sacraments. Through Baptism we are freed from sin and reborn as sons of God; we become members of Christ, are incorporated into the Church and made sharers in her mission.(CCC 1213)
The sacraments of Christian initiation–Baptism, confirmation, and the Eucharist–lay the foundations of every Christian life… The faithful are born anew by Baptism, strengthened by the sacrament of Confirmation, and receive in the Eucharist the food of eternal life.(CCC 1212)
The Church affirms that for believers the sacraments of the New Covenant are necessary for salvation.(CCC 1129)
Personal faith is the necessary pre-disposition that makes reception of the sacraments fruitful. Personal faith moves us to cooperate with the graces we have received through the sacraments and to be transformed by Christ, to become holy. But in the first 14 centuries of Christian history, one's personal faith was never understood to replace the sacraments as the instrument of grace.
In the early centuries of persecution and martyrdom, the Church taught that even those who had no access to the sacraments were still saved through the same sacramental economy–either through a baptism of blood (via martyrdom) or a baptism of desire. The doctrine of “baptism of desire” held that an individual's desire to know and serve God implies a desire for baptism if it were available. If the individual has no access to baptism, God in his mercy, confers the graces of it in ways we do not understand. But no early Christian theologian or apologist envisioned or taught an unmediated, non-sacramental way of salvation.
Why am I focusing on this point? Because we live in a culture that is saturated with the idea that "spirituality" is something that happens entirely within the heart and soul of the individual. “Sole fide” has morphed into “sola psyche”. This belief permeates popular psychology, most secular and New Age thought, and reinforces the assumptions of evangelical Protestantism, the most pervasive Christian culture in the United States. But once a person absorbs the idea that one meets God entirely through the disembodied, invisible, and interior means of one's personal faith, the sacramental economy of salvation is not only difficult to grasp, it is literally unimaginable. The proposal that the grace of God is actually and truly made available to us sacramentally—by the visible, physical, public means of the Church and the sacraments—makes no sense at all. The sacraments are, at best, mere symbols of the “real” event, that which happens entirely in the privacy of one's heart. Sola psyche rules!
One consequence of the lack of solid catechesis in the 40 years since the Second Vatican Council is that a deep, prayerful knowledge of the sacramental way can no longer be assumed among Catholics. In the course of my work, I have visited 100 different parishes in 40 dioceses around the world and have never yet heard a homily or attended a class that clearly articulated the sacramental economy of salvation. On more than one occasion, I have had to explain to well-meaning RCIA directors that baptism is not merely the ritual celebration of an individual's faith journey but that it really changes those who receive it. I have seen Catholic parishes and dioceses uncritically adopt evangelical Protestant approaches to evangelism and Christian formation without first correcting the non-sacramental, even anti-sacramental, assumptions with which they are filled.
According to a well-publicized 1994 New York Times/CBS poll (cited by Germain Grisez and Russell Shaw in Homiletic & Pastoral Review) a hefty 45% of Catholics aged 65 years or more believed that the consecrated host is merely a "symbolic reminder" of Jesus. Among those a little younger (aged 45-64), this number increased to 58%. In the youngest group (18-44), those who were still children or not yet born when the Council began, it is a whopping 70%. According to the same survey, even the majority (51%) of the most regularly practicing Catholics, those who attend Mass every Sunday, held this symbol-only view of the Eucharist.
What is lost if we fail to communicate to this generation the reality and life-changing power of the sacramental economy of salvation? Vast portions of the faith are simply gutted of their power and relevance. The quarter of the universal catechism devoted to the "Celebration of the Mysteries" is rendered incomprehensible.
Baptism, "the basis of the whole Christian life, the gateway to life in the Spirit," becomes a rite of passage. The Eucharist–the closest, most intimate and life-changing encounter with Christ available to human beings in this life–is reduced to a ritual of communal self-expression.
The sacraments are not magic. Deficient catechesis on the sacraments seriously diminishes their impact. Our Church teaches that, although they always bestow grace objectively, the transforming power of sacramental grace is directly dependent on expectant faith: the spiritual openness and disposition of the receiver. It is nearly impossible to receive a "mere symbol" with expectant faith. (cf. CCC 1129).
A "sola psyche" view of God's working even undermines Catholic social teaching, which presumes that God enters and redeems this world through embodied human means in human history.
A couple of years ago, I came across an interview with the sort of raw-boned country preacher that I knew growing up in Mississippi. He summed up his response to the Catholic understanding of the Eucharist in one no-nonsense sentence: "If I believed what you Catholics believe about communion, I'd crawl down that aisle on my belly." I have never known a committed evangelical who would knowingly neglect to tell others about the most intimate and life-changing encounter with Jesus possible in this life. If evangelicals and Quakers believed about the Church and the sacraments as we do, they would never base their evangelistic and formation efforts on anything else.
Why then do we, as believing Catholics, so often evangelize and form Catholics in a non-sacramental, sola psyche vision? Have we lost confidence in the transforming power of Christ mediated through the Church, the sacraments, and the Tradition? Perhaps we have yet to experience it ourselves. Or perhaps we have unwittingly absorbed a sola psyche worldview.
We need to hear once more powerful stories of sacramental grace such as that of Raissa and Jacques Maritain who were baptized in 1906 and later became the center of a powerful Catholic cultural revival in France. I would like to leave you their story. In her book entitled We Were Friends Together, Raissa writes about their experience of conversion:
We suffered, Jacques and I, a kind of agony. This lasted for about two months.
Once, during those months, I heard in my sleep these words, said to me with a certain impatience: ‘You are forever seeking what you must do. You have only to love God and serve Him with all your heart.’
Our suffering and dryness grew greater every day. Finally we understood that God also was waiting, and that there would be no further light so long as we should not have obeyed the imperious voice of our consciences saying to us: ‘You have no valid objection to the Church; she alone promises you the light of truth–prove her promises, put Baptism to the test.’
(We) betook ourselves to the Church of Saint John the Evangelist in Montmartre. I was in a state of absolute dryness, and could no longer remember any of the reasons for my being there. One single thing remained clear in my mind: either Baptism would give me Faith, and I would believe and I would belong to the Church altogether; or I would go away unchanged, an unbeliever forever. Jacques had almost the same thoughts.
‘What do you ask of the Church of God?’
‘Faith.’
We were baptized at eleven o'clock in the morning . . . An immense peace descended upon us, bringing with it the treasures of Faith. There were no more questions, no more anguish, no more trials—there was only the infinite answer of God. The Church kept her promises. And it is she whom we first loved. It is through her that we have known Christ.
Sherry Weddell is currently developing a new offering on the life-changing power of the liturgy and the sacraments. As part of her research, she is collecting true stories of people who have experienced life-changing conversion through exposure to the liturgy, the sacraments or the presence of the Blessed Sacrament. She is particularly interested in experiences of initial conversion of the completely unchurched, non-Christians, or non-practicing Christians. Stories of major healing (from addiction, depression, physical or mental illness, etc.) are also most welcome.
If you or anyone you know has had such an experience and would like to share it, please send your story via e-mail to sherry@siena.org or via postal mail to Sherry at the Institute: PO Box 26440, Colorado Springs CO 80936. Please include your phone number and e-mail address so that Sherry can contact you.