A late posting: I was out of town this weekend, and since I already discussed Mary and the saints in the previous entry, little to report. It’s still a little weird, I’ll be honest, but in the end this all comes down to the question that led me to Catholicism in the first place: sacramentalism. What does that mean? For me, that divine reality can and does interact with physical reality. Words matter, offices matter. When the priest says, “This is my Body”, he is not just some guy quoting some holy text. He occupies the office of Christ, and by using the same words that Christ used, offers the actual body of Christ to the people. We can nitpick all we like about transsubstantiation, and point out that as far as science can tell we’re eating crackers and fermented grape juice. That’s not the point. The point is that the bread and wine become capable of acting in a divine manner, of altering us. What’s true of the Eucharist is true of all the other sacraments. Baptism is not just a psychological experience, or blind obeisance to the letter of the law. It’s a means by which God changes us. Marriage, too. It’s especially hard in these times to understand the attitude the Catholic Church takes towards marriage, refusing as it were to even admit the possibility of divorce. But as anyone who has had a good, loving, healthy sexual relationship will know, there is not much else in this world that can communicate quite so well what God’s impassioned love for us is really like. I apologize for not warning the Baptists to leave the room a few sentences earlier. That’s not sacrilege, it’s Gospel truth. God loves us through sex. It behooves us to treat it like the sacred act that it is.

There is an even deeper point to make about sacramentalism, though. We’re often inclined to treat the objects involved in a sacrament as inherently sacred, and to conclude that there is something “magic” in the way the priest handles the bread and wine. That sort of attitude is very close to idolatry, and indeed, when Protestants object to sacraments it is because they think they divert our attention from the Creator to created things, to human rituals and human symbols. The problem with the Protestants is that they then conclude that nothing physical is sacred. But God made the world, and he made it good. Water, light, food, drink, and sex don’t lose their power or their goodness just because we misuse them. The point of sacraments is to acknowledge the goodness of God and of God’s creation. We surround good things with rituals and taboos not to keep people out, but to show that we understand how precious they are. And it is that act of gratitude that matters, not the physical things. In admitting that God can change reality we allow him to change us.