not of this world

The sacraments could not do what Christians believe they accomplish if their special sacramental activity were just one more mundane kind of representation or depiction or symbolization added to the ways in which other signs function in the world. Unless the Christian sense of the divine is differentiated from anything and everything in the being of the world, unless the Christian God is differentiated from what philosphers have called the whole, all the Christian mysteries cease to be mysteries. Either they become impossibilities, or they become accommodated to natural necessities, or they are made to compete with what is natural and to obfuscate the way things have to be. The Christian distinction between God and the world allows the formulations of the other mysteries to say something and prevents them from shattering as statements.

the debate continues in Dr. Long’s class about whether or not Christianity alone really made (or can make) the critical distinction, “the unusual movement” regarding the radical otherness of God with respect to what is created (without destroying the real relation we have to Him), can have an adequate account of creation at all - but i in my 40-60% intellectualism find his case very well made. naturally speaking, why would man conceive of such radical, and yet accesible, otherness, when what his natural, earth-bound sensation fed rationality conveys to him has no access to what preceded and supercedes the sensible as such.

many days i judge myself to be a deplorable, sins of omission saturated whiskey priest strain of catholic, but what never fails to bend my stick back towards the mean, awakens and reawakens the better angels of my nature, lifts me out of all the bs and catastrophizingly constricting tendencies gravitated towards, are the sweet, mysterious kisses of the sacraments. when i bring myself regularly to those beckoning gates for the senses which humbly reach their hands out to draw us into the reality that formed the sensible realm, though i don’t fully comprehend what i do, it is an anchor (and ladder) i cannot deny.

i can see how some could argue that rather than an anchor, it is a crutch, an interesting, poetic hypothesis attractive to the weak ones who seek to cling to something substantive in the chaos of existence they find themselves alone unable to cope with. i wonder that myself sometimes. but with sebastian i too would say to charles that i do believe it because (though not only) it is such a beautiful idea, is so deliciously other than all other thoughts brewed up by man about the veiled reality and relation of eternal, uncreated, subsistent divinity and temporal, created, dependent beings.

the sacramental road the church opens up to man has been termed the “ordinary means of salvation”. there may very well be other disembodied or fully bodied means of stretching forth to fill the God sized hole we all have and attempt to satisfy with various and sundry appetites and inclinations. but none that so humanly meets us where we are and yet draws us beyond to what we are not yet, but most wish to be: truly satisfied, truly integrated in spirit, body and Source, fed and heard, cleansed and annointed, bound and set free by means of familiar sensibles which draw the sensing soul beyond itself while not denying the integrity of its nature.

Sokolowski’s emphasis on the point that the Creator of all that has being, of all natures, must necessarily transcend the non-contradiction principle which disallows all unions constrained by the distinction inherent in the very notion of what is by nature this kind of a thing, and not that, as contradistinguised to that which is confessed to take place in the uncreated/created union of Christ Himself, and thus the sacraments, is incredibly sweet fodder for reflection. a sacramental sense of reality is ultimately dependent on a gifted faith capable of stretching past what is presently seen; but the rational insights of preceding faithful, which by solid philosophical steps from revealed principles can nudge us into the mystery and expand our horizons towards the full sight we strain for, is a great consolation to the hungry mind. in the sacraments we are given to touch the source of all creatity reality through a veil which when rightly understood, does not violate the mind’s ordering principles, but would elevate and harmonize our created infinite desire with an uncreated infinitely diffusive love, drawing us into Itself by means of “otherness” infused matter.

i think that’s more babbly than i originally intended. the short version is just yay sacraments! yay doctrine of creation! yay philosophic distinctions which shed light on what we believe by faith!