Sacred Living

Christians have sacraments, which Augustine defined as "the visible form of an invisible grace." Protestants have two: baptism and the Lord's Supper or communion; Roman Catholics have an additional five: confirmation, confession (or penance), marriage, ordination and extreme unction or last rites (although I understand that this last can now be done if the person is ill rather than dying). My Baptist lecturer at Regent's Park College, Myra Blyth, stated that "they point to and reveal the creating, redeeming grace of God through their association with the life, death and resurrection of Jesus ... They are an extension of Christ's ministry in and to the world."

But as I have stated elsewhere on this blog, I would rather believe with the Christian writer John Macquarrie that we live in a sacramental universe. Rather than the Divine presence being limited to either two or seven sacraments, Macquarrie believes that God has so arranged things that the material world can “become a door or channel of communication through which he comes to us and we may go to him." For this reason, “man’s spiritual wellbeing demands that he should recognise and cherish the visible things of the world as things that are made by God and that provide access to God.” 

In other words, God / the Spirit / the Divine other is present everywhere, all the time. The trick of sacred living is recognising this.

Sacred living is about weaving moments of attention into your everyday life, and recognising the sacred there. It is about living with a new level of awareness. It is about going through our day paying attention to what is happening in each passing moment. It is about noticing the presence of the divine, the numinous, everywhere, in the natural world, in other people, in ourselves, and in things that happen to us. Sacred living is about rediscovering our sense of wonder, and living our lives in response to that.

A prayer quoted by Rachel Naomi Remen, in her wonderful book My Grandfather’s Blessings, reads:

“Days pass, and the years vanish and we walk sightless among miracles.

Lord, fill our eyes with seeing, and our minds with knowing.

Let there be moments when your Presence, like lightning, illumines the darkness in which we walk.

Help us to see, wherever we gaze, that the bush burns, unconsumed.

And we, clay touched by God, will reach out for holiness, and exclaim in wonder: ‘How filled with awe is this place, and we did not know it.’”