Tag: Sacrament

Awakened by the Spirit, the Water, and the Blood

“So there are three who testify,
the Spirit, the water, and the Blood,
and the three are of one accord.”

1 John 5:7-8

At church this past Sunday, we stood in line to receive a personal dousing of Holy Water from the priest in renewal of our Baptisms. My baby girl had finally fallen asleep in my arms, but you better believe she awoke when she felt that Holy Water spray her! Luckily, and no doubt in God’s freshly bestowed grace, she fell right back asleep. Earlier during the liturgy, drops of the Precious Blood of Jesus in the Eucharistic form of wine woke her from her slumber as the priest placed them upon her teeny lips. Twice on Sunday she was awoken by sacramental encounters with Jesus. 

If you have never heard of a baby receiving the Eucharist or a communion line-style Baptismal renewal, don’t worry. These traditions were foreign to me a few years ago. They are traditions of the Byzantine Catholic Church. When I met my husband he introduced me to the Byzantine Rite, an Eastern rite of the Catholic Church in full union with the Pope and the Roman, or Latin, Rite of Catholicism. While the Roman Catholic Church will celebrate Jesus’ Baptism this coming Sunday, we celebrated it last week in the Byzantine Church. In both rites of the Church, especially through the Sacraments, we encounter the Spirit, the water, and the Blood John speaks of in today’s first reading. 

Some of us may be familiar with this standard definition of a Sacrament: “an outward sign of an inward grace” instituted by Christ Himself. Indeed, the sacraments are physical realities in which we encounter the living Christ and His Holy Spirit. In the three Sacraments of Initiation, Baptism, Confirmation/Chrismation, and the Holy Eucharist, we encounter the water, the Spirit, and the Blood of 1 John 5. (NOTE: In the Eastern Tradition, babies and children entering the church receive the three sacraments of initiation at the same time. Yes, even the youngest, the baby Byzantines, receive a drop of the Precious Blood of Jesus on their lips. This explains why my baby had been awoken by the Eucharist on her lips in church this past Sunday.)

The waters of our Baptism, through God’s grace, signify that we have become His precious son or daughter. The Holy Chrism, or oil, of our Confirmation or Chrismation, is the sign that communicates the seal of the Holy Spirit and the gifts of the Spirit which were made ours through our Baptism. The Precious Body and Blood of Jesus present in the Eucharist unite us more fully to Him and allow us to enter into the Mystery of the Cross. We are members of a Church that makes the spiritual realities of the faith tangible. We actively participate in these Sacraments to signify our spiritual relationship with the Living Son of God. John’s words in the first reading are a call to action, a call to live out our faith in Christ. The Sacraments of Initiation provide our initial encounters with this Spirit, this water, and this Blood of Jesus. 

The Gospel shows us how this call moves outside the sanctuary of the Church to the world beyond Her walls. Jesus’ healing of a leper reminds us of the cleansing He has imparted on our own souls — and how we can now be His hands and feet to impart this on others. See, we have been healed by Christ not only for our own sake, but also for the building up of the Kingdom. We have been sacramentally initiated, welcomed into the family of the Church by our good Father through His Son Jesus and His Holy Spirit. This is why celebrating His Baptism every year, renewing our baptismal promises, and being doused anew with the waters of the Spirit is so important for our spiritual life. Each week we are nourished by His Body and Blood in the Eucharist. God provides us with the grace we need to share our own healing with others, so that they may know that they are loved by God in this same way, and may be invited into His healing love. Most of us are in a continual process of healing of whatever forms of “leprosy” we are sick with — the Divine Healer continues to heal, cleanse, and purify us. Though even as we are in the process of deeper healing, He wants to use us to bring the people we encounter into His healing Love.

May we all be awoken by the drops of Holy Water that land on our faces and by the drops of Jesus’ Precious Blood that touch our lips. His Spirit is alive and well and among us. In fact, it dwells within us. Let us ask Him how He wants us to share the Spirit, the water, and the Blood that we’ve been so blessed to encounter.

Hierophanies

Back in my undergraduate career, I took a fascinating class on Religious Studies. Coming from a small-ish town in Minnesota, I had a yearning to hear about the world and how people lived; my upbringing was about as homogeneous as it gets (unless you count the occasional interdenominational Christian marriage as “diversity”), so I wanted to soak it all in; I ended up majoring in Global Studies and Spanish, after all.

After I had knocked out my homework for my required classes, it was almost something of a treat to dive into the study of spirituality and find common threads and distinguishing characteristics of various religious experiences around the world.

Surprising (or possibly, unsurprisingly, if you’re familiar with the academic world), this class came with a dense vocabulary book; terms invented or repurposed to define the through lines between different expressions of spirituality. Until today, one term in particular has stuck in a way that others haven’t: Hierophany.

A hierophany, simply put, is a bursting through of the divine or the spiritual into humanity. It is a melding of the “sacred” with the “profane,” or at least an interaction between the two. Some traditions are rife with them; it is not at all uncommon for some peoples’ gods to manifest in regular, frequent ways.

Now in Advent, I’m drawn to reflect on this theme within my own beliefs: What constitutes a hierophany in Catholicism? Where does God burst through into our very human existence? How does Jesus Christ meet us?

In some ways, I would almost argue that the term doesn’t even apply; if you believe that God is ever-present, is he really ever breaking through any kind of divide between the “sacred” and “profane”? If the God-Man came to Earth as a human infant, can anything human truly be called profane?

But let’s flip the script. Can anything be more accurately described as a bursting through of the divine than the incarnation? What about the Eucharist? While it’s true that God is always with us, that His Spirit dwells within us, we also profess a unique faith in the Sacraments. The Sacraments reflect God’s understanding of the very human desire for a tangible, material experience of the divine.

Sisters and brothers, GOD CARES FOR US. Even the imperfect parts of us that cannot believe without seeing! He gives us real matter, things that we perceive with our five senses. St. Thomas Aquinas is famous for his view that our physical perception of the world around us was an essential to experience and learn more about God.

If this is true, how good it is that God gave us His Son, who became man! How wonderful it is that Jesus gave us the Sacraments!

Last week, I discussed the “Three Advents”: The birth of Jesus Christ, his Second Coming, and Christ coming into our lives every day. The first two move us greatly. What inspires greater celebration than Christmas? And what inspires greater fear and awe than the Second Coming?

But how deeply are we affect by the Third Advent, where Jesus Christ bursts forth into our lives every day. He is present in Spirit, in Scripture, and in the Sacraments. Let us rest in His Spirit, soak in the Scripture, and avail ourselves of the Sacraments. As we reflect on his birth during the Advent season, may we also reflect on the ways he visits us every day.