On sacramentality, phones, metaphysics

"A spiritual experience reveals a reality of life beyond the self, beyond the here and now. It may be recognition of our own fragility and vulnerability as much as a joyous awareness of a reality beyond our normal encounter with life." - Paul McQuillan

--

I decided to finally kick my blog off with a damp thud and put together a meandering post on only the most inoffensive topic I could muster: religion. Some people in my life, but not all, know that somewhat inexplicably, I have an ongoing interest in theology. I didn't grow up religious, my parents are both agnostic or atheist, however a few circumstances have resulted in this being a fun flavour in, sometimes the foreground, sometimes the background, of my life - those circumstances being a) my on-and-off work in Catholic schools, b) people close to me in my life being religious, and c) my choice on a whim to enroll in a theology course at university (and I guess you could also say the inevitable spiritual collapse of modern western society, but let's keep the tone light). I also like spirituality and religion as they're inherently vulnerable topics that demand us to agree we don't understand everything that's going on.

Anyway, I started writing this post as I'm no longer taking any theology studies at uni this semester, and I needed a place to write about intangible, wishy washy stuff in a slightly dense manner, but I guess this blog is more for me rather than any general audience. Anyway enjoy!

--

The introduction of the, perhaps slightly on-the-nose, "Phone-free Sunday" at the school where I was working earlier this year, got me thinking about the role of mindfulness in these pastoral care settings. It ties into some learning I did in my most recent theology course about sacramentality that has persisted in my brain.

Essentially, I have learned that in Catholic spirituality, it’s often said that our closeness to God can be dulled by distraction or overstimulation. This topic (phones, screen-use) is quite in-vogue to talk about, but still bears repeating. In such an overly stimulating world, we are almost always occupying ourselves with something or another. And sometimes a source of stimulation feels more like a pacifier. I suppose I'm interested in how overstimulation through technology might dull our awareness of the sacred.

To illustrate this point, if you personally like to use your airpods, see if you can remember a time when you were going for a walk, or maybe travelling somewhere and your headphones broke. Maybe at first you were annoyed, but slowly found yourself more in tune to the environment, or even suddenly thinking thoughts so unfamiliar to yourself that you wanted to take out a notebook and start writing. Or just felt a strange sense of peace. Instead of finding ways to run from muddled thoughts, you might find giving them a little space to breathe can help them make sense.

I'm not meaning to sound preachy, here. And not that music or other forms of entertainment aren’t fantastic, just that sometimes we can find ourselves using them to block out any silence that otherwise allows us to generate our own thoughts.

But anyway, this in a roundabout way got me thinking about the theological idea of sacramentality in Catholicism. In other words, the recognition of God’s presence through ordinary, everyday things.

Sacramentality (as opposed to the Seven Sacraments) essentially refers to seeing “sacredness” in all of life. This means being spiritually aware of a “transcendent” element beyond the everyday experience or thinking about the greater meaning or significance beyond what we literally see. So in Catholicism, sacramentality is, simply put, the idea that God's grace is communicated through our created reality; that his presence is communicated through observable signs and symbols.

These signs and symbols might include overt signs such as blessing oneself with holy water or lighting a candle in prayer. It also includes historical and recognised signs such as the cross or even the eucharist. In general, sacramentality is a way for Catholics to percieve the world in a way that recognises God’s presence in the material aspects of life.

To engage in sacramentality on a general level might look like engaging in nature or a Catholic going to mass. The idea is taking time to make regular practice of detaching from surface-level distractions to think deeper beyond the material.

Bear in mind that my understanding on this topic may be influenced by the more contextualist (modern hippie church vibes) or even pantheistic ("everything in the universe = God") reading of "sacramentality". For instance, for a little history on this concept, some of the more controversial changes during the second Vatican included "sacramental renewal" which was kind of a rebranding of the Seven Sacraments (eg. the eucharist). Instead of seeing sacraments as sacred things (like the holy objects), religious authorities told people to see sacraments as sacred actions instead, resulting in controversial decisions such as churches no longer requiring the priest alone to administer communion (and also didn't require people to do some verifiably cool things like genuflect anymore). Their perspective was that mass helps us to realise what we already have and celebrate it, rather than mass revolving around a relationship we have towards a spiritual building or objects.

I suppose to play devil's advocate, changes like above to the fabric of the Church's understanding of sacredness, and who or what can be considered "sacred" could be considered controversial because then you could supposedly argue that if all of life is "sacramental", you could start pointing at anything and calling it a church or religious. Like I said, this is something pantheism can risk - you do want to avoid seeing the importance of incarnation to mean that your interpretation of God is always accurate and real (eg. "I had a great day at work today screwing over my employees - thanks God!"). You could easily see that getting cult-y or new age-y. As still mostly an outsider I think it generally seems like a good progression to acknowledge that spirituality can be observed anywhere, and I think that this thinking is more in-line with the teachings from the New Testament.

I'm getting quite longwinded now and I'm risking not really having said anything in particular, so to summarise, I suppose I think that sacramentality as a topic may be my favourite in all of theology, and it's a practice that's sorely missing at the moment in secular society. For all the talk of mindfulness and grounding, modern Australian culture still doesn't really consider it an expectation that people will regularly seek out beauty with the aim of appreciating the ethereal nature of it, take time to bask in a sense of gratitude, and humble themselves as a small link in the chain of our vast plan we're living in.

Sacramentality might even be the centre of theology itself - my tutor mentioned that one way of understanding theology is as the study of symbols and the meanings we draw from them. It's interesting to think of some things in our lives as anti-sacramental symbols, I suppose.

On this note, I would like to end on this poem by William Blake that encapsulates these feelings:

“To see a world in a grain of sand

and a heaven in a wild flower.

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand

and eternity in an hour.”

--