The Focussing of God

Extract

The renewal of sacramental theology in the past fifty years or so has depended considerably on a recovery and development of the primitive insight that the primary and primordial sacrament is Christ himself, whose sacramentality is the ground and the culmination of all human existence in the world in time. It is because we are as we are (and it is good, ‘very good’, that we are as we are), because basically if not most interestingly we are men in virtue of a shared flesh and blood, unable to communicate or be men except as such, even with and before God, that we enact our human and our Christian existence sacramentally. We interpret ourselves to ourselves, discover what it means to be who we are and so find how to become who we are, by projecting ourselves on and realizing ourselves in external nature. By our bodily creativity, in words and symbols and the extraordinary variety of human art-forms we are able to make sense of our life in the world, to make its flux and chaos precisely meaningful, to focus the whole in a perceptible sign which in contracting the immensities allows us to live amongst them as those who are at home there. And the Jewish-Christian tradition at its classical moments has maintained that a particular history has redeemed us more deeply into our bodies, into being more authentically at home in our flesh and blood and sexuality, in our passions and emotions and instinctual drives.