I have always felt some sense of sacred space in mundane life. For most of my life, I was taught to dismiss these senses as emotional whims; God was not speaking to us through melodies, that is just what sound scientifically does to us. Every “sense” of God could be explained away by neuroscience (that most of us don’t really understand anyways). The stirring that I felt at the sound of beautiful music, the speechlessness in the presence of beautiful art, and the awe of the fog of the forests should be dismissed. God is found in words, in reason, in speech; God is not found in beauty, in truth, or in goodness—unless these things are testified to by written or spoken word.
At my high school graduation, my AP Art History teacher gave us all a small Moleskine journal as a gift. In the back, she wrote a note to each of us, and while I don’t remember every word she wrote, I will never forget reading the first words to my now favorite poem, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God./ It will flame out, like shining from shook foil.” In two lines, the tension of the beauty of the world and its finite nature finally captured my imagination. Beauty is not a temptation to stray from God, for God Himself is Beauty. The world’s “grandeur” is not a created characteristic, and by its own nature, it will pass away. The context of the poem should not be lost to us. Gerard Manley Hopkins was an English Jesuit poet in the tradition of St. John Henry Newmann and wrote his poem at the height of the Industrial Revolution as he was more or less cloistered at a parish in Ireland. What more does this tell us about the line in this poem? First, Hopkins was given the eyes to see the beauty of the world through his encounter with the Eucharist, and in turn the sacramental imagination. Second, the longing for a re-enchanted world permeated writers of the Victorian era, from Hopkins to Yeats, Tennyson to MacDonald, it is clear that the technological advances troubled many on the British Isles and Hopkins conveys this longing for God’s involvement in the world to be tenable again. Thus he calls out in the last stanza:
And for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; And though the last lights off the black West went Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs — Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
The world’s grandeur is the beauty that is self-evident and awe-inspiring; it is inherent to God alone and bestowed upon his creation by him alone. God evidences himself through all creation by its simple existence, creation acts as a conduit for man’s experience of God. Origen, in First Principles, says of the sun, moon, and stars:
And this creation, he says, was subjected to vanity not willingly (Rom. 8:20). For it did not by will undertake rendering service to vanity, but because he who subjected it willed it, on account of the one who subjects it, promising those who were being subjected to vanity, unwillingly that when the service [lighting the world of mankind that they may find God] of their distinguished work should be complete they would be set free from this bondage of corruption and vanity, when the time of the glorious redemption of the sons of God should have arrived. Having received this hope and hoping for the fulfillment of this promies, the whole creation now, in the meantime, groans together, as even suffering for those whom it serves, and patiently labours in pain, hoping for what has been promised.1
Origen, who in many ways defined the faith we now hold, makes clear from St. Paul’s epistle that creation is not inanimate as the materialist worldview defines it. Rather, creation quite animately groans, hopes, suffers, serves, patiently labors, and completes a distinguished work that “they would be set free from this bondage of corruption and vanity.” Delightfully, when St. Paul writes that in the last days “God may be all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28), the term covers much more than only a part of His creation, all really means all. Truly, this is divine activity, and being such it exists outside of time as we know it, so that we may even experience glimpses of it within time before it comes to fulfillment. These glimpses can only be grasped when we receive him sacramentally in the Church, the divine activities which lighten every moment of God in the rest of creation.
When I began to see the Church’s liturgical acts as a real embodiment of divine nature, my eyes also opened to the current which ran under and above and through all natural things. This is the goal of the sacramental life: to understand that the whole cosmos is animated by the Divine Word. This, again, is the key to unlocking the sacramental imagination. Springs that come forth at the prayers of saints in Alaska flow with the same holy water that is contained in cathedral fonts. The fog that rolls through peaks of the Virginia Appalachians veils great mysteries as the incense which cloud the foot of the altar. In the Benedictine tradition, the Psalms at Sunday Lauds (the major office before Mass) and the prayers of thanksgiving after Mass include the same canticle, “O all ye works of the Lord bless ye the Lord, praise him and magnify him forever.” All creation is called to give praise to their creator, and it is only because God finally calls them do they turn to him; not only to praise him but to be united to him in the age to come. It is Christ, the heart of the Church, which shows us that God can—and does—transfigure created things into his flesh and blood. First, in his incarnation, he elevates nature unto himself, and because of this causes a miracle that each liturgical act can be spoken of as an embodiment of Christ. By the Eucharist2 God demonstrates to us that each sacrament—baptism, confirmation, holy orders, marriage, confession, and holy unction—is charged with Divine Power because they are united to Christ through the sacrament of the Eucharist. And these sacramental acts are not the end, for at the consummation God will assume not only bread and wine, sun and moon, beasts and birds into himself but especially us, his beloved Bride. This is why the Church must offer the Eucharist, not only for our health but for the life of the world. This offering is not merely a medicine to get through this day, but active participation in the mission of God to unite all things to himself and to participate in transforming nature into supernature; it is, paradoxically, the sacrament of eternity that we receive inside of time. Schmemann aptly summarizes this task in the conclusion of his book For the Life of the World (which deserves to be quoted at length),
We can only say that if such a task were undertaken, it would show that the proper function of the “leitourgia” has always been to bring together, within one symbol, the three levels of the Christian faith and life: the Church, the world, and the Kingdom; that the Church herself is thus the sacrament in which the broken, yet still “symbolical,” life of “this world” is brought, in Christ and by Christ, into the dimension of the Kingdom of God, becoming itself the sacrament of the “world to come,” or that which God has from all eternity prepared for those who love Him, and where all that which is human can be transfigured by grace so that all things may be consummated in God; that finally it is here and only here—in the “mysterion” of God’s presence and action—that the Church always becomes that which she is: the Body of Christ and the Temple of the Holy Spirit, the unique Symbol “bringing together” by bringing to God the world for the life of which He gave His Son.”3
This liturgical act of the Church (leitougia) reveals to us the destiny of all created things while simultaneously delivering to humankind the world to come, that is, Christ himself who is the union of God to the world. In the Kingdom of God, Christ is not merely a king which rules at the center, as he is in our own day. On that great and neverending day, God will be all in all (1Co 15:28), which is to say, all of God’s creation will dwell in him and he in His creation (Jn 14:20).
The speechlessness we experience at the sight of beauty, the satisfaction when we witness truth, the peace we feel when we act righteously; these are foretastes of the Kingdom at hand. These experiences must begin in the Church, for we can never truly see the world as God sees the world unless we commune with him and are changed from within. Yes, we can read the Scriptures, but until we hear the Scriptures from the foot of the altar in the presence of holiness we can no sooner grasp their goal. We can offer alms to the poor, but until we assist the priest from the pew in offering the greatest sacrifice to God, we come no closer to seeing our salvation. It is by our experience of the Church’s life that God may draw near to us. God does not ask that we all offer the Mass on our own altars, only a few are called. However, all are invited to the Marriage Supper of the Lamb, this meal which we partake of temporally is the feast of eternity. In this age, Christ calls some men to offer His body and blood on the altar. Still, in the age to come, the life of the whole world will be sustained by his life for eternity. Our only mediated experience of God in eternity will be God himself, no longer reaching us through a text or through passible flesh or created material, but by a perfect, eternal union with our Lord Jesus Christ, to whom we offer all praise, honor, and glory with his unoriginate Father and all-holy, good and life-giving Spirit, now and ever and unto the ages of ages.
John 6:53
Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World, (Yonkers NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press) 151.
Reading:
“Seeing Through Screens: The Gothic Choir Enclosure as Frame” and “Symeon of Thessalonike and the Theology of the Icon Screen” by Jacqueline E. Jung and Fr. Nicholas Constas in Thresholds of the Sacred (Washington DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library, 2006).
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
On Marriage and Family Life by St. John Chrysostom
Watching:
The Crown “Season 1” (Netflix)
The Social Dilemma (Netflix)
Listening:
The Fathers Speak from Fr. John W. Fenton, a podcast from The Orthodox West
American Panic from Conviction, a podcast by Gimlet
Gaudete by St. Patrick Orthodox Chruc Choir
Second Life by Jaws of Love.