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R e v i e w s
SEEKING THE SACRAMENTAL LIFE
I rallied the kids to help clean and sort through the laundry room a while ago. It’s a daunting task. That room is the repository of the bags and boxes of stuff that has accumulated in our house; some hadn’t even been unpacked since we moved nine years ago.
What made it gratifying—aside from the greater order, which is no small matter—were the surprises and treasures we found: Artwork and school papers. Valentines and Mother’s Day cards the kids had done in the early grades. Shells from our camping trip through the Maritime Provinces. A dress I had made for my daughter of fabric I had woven; she was three, and when she outgrew it wanted me to "save it for when I have kids, Mommy, so they can wear it." Books from my journeying through various religious traditions. Books and stories the kids had written in and out of school. Pictures of friends whom I hadn’t seen in two or three decades but remembered fondly. Papers from graduate school. Letters, many from my mother, who died last year. A lot of my pottery. Grandma Green’s linen place mats and napkins. Stuffed animals and dolls: each named, each a beloved member of our family for a time, now ready for new homes.
The kids and I talked. I told them family stories they hadn’t known; they shared their memories and perceptions of the events of which we were reminded. We laughed a lot. Sometimes we were brought to teariness over the struggles we had shared. It struck me later that a tape recorder would have yielded a large volume of our family history that day—from our own family, but also from earlier generations. A listener could have told our priorities, our values, our shared griefs and struggles and passions from those tales, each brought to memory by the keepsakes we had gathered.
It was a help, too, to both the kids and me, to go through that stuff. As we talked, those priorities and values were reaffirmed and given historic value as a tradition ingrained in us-as-family. We valued the gifts made over the gifts purchased. The efforts were treasured so much that each was kept, moved, and then moved again. "This is who we are," those inanimate objects proclaim, and "This is who we have been," and "This is what we hold dear." They tell our story, and our history, to any who wants to look, to listen. It would be hard for anyone really to understand us without our hauling out some of that stuff.
Profound theological differences led me to Catholicism, but those very differences became clearer to me, in some respects, through what was not available in the day-to-day life of the Protestant church. I hungered to know what had happened before 1738 when Wesley’s "heart had been warmed." I felt, acutely, the lack of knowledge about early Christians and Christianity.
I wanted to be faithful above all else, but needed more than Sunday worship and Tuesday Bible study. People wore crosses, but their homes were not adorned with them. There was little talk or awareness of our progenitors in faith; the Communion of Saints was an idea, but not a life-giving reality of people we could look to for inspiration, much less assistance.
"Catholicism is a culture" was a phrase that began to have tremendous personal import to me. I was starving for the sacraments, but oh! there was so much more to be had: There were rosaries and encyclicals, medals and statues, holy water and incense, holy cards and novenas, crucifixes and palms.
As I became acquainted with each, I learned the word "sacramentals." It came to mean all of the props, the helps, that would keep God uppermost in my mind.
I began to understand that each sacramental bore part of the community’s story of faith and contained.aspects of its understanding of the sacramental life and theology. Each was a piece of the Church’s history, the history of how God was working among us, how he was available to us, how he reached out to us in our need. Sacramentals showed, in other words, the substance of Catholicism and the results of its sacramental life in the lives of so many people.
Just as the contents of my laundry room tell and retell of my life with my children, so do the varieties and forms of sacramentals in the Church tell us its story. And as they do so, with the approval of the Church, they carry its prayers and hopes for each of us with them.
It takes effort, however, for a sacramental to bear its full fruit or to be more than merely an inanimate object, an idol of sorts or an encouragement to superstition. Without knowing why or how we use each object to remind us of faith, a good part of their potential is denied. A crucifix in our houses may be a casual reminder that we are Catholic, but if we stop to consider Jesus’ passion and death, we are strengthened in our times of struggle.
Holy water can be sprinkled on someone or something in times of need or crisis, but it is the water of baptism, our fidelity to our baptismal promises, that we are called to remember, enter, and depend on in that sprinkling.
A statue of St. Joseph buried upside down doesn’t get a house sold, but our prayers to Jesus through St. Joseph may bring the help we need—is he not, after all, the patron saint of families?
Holy cards may lead us in prayer, but so much more would we benefit were we to know the lives of the saints they honor and model our own after theirs.
Each becomes, therefore, not only a specific means to grace, but the invitation to lean on, and finally share, the strength and virtue of its source.
I read A Handbook of Catholic Sacramentals over many days and not in any particular order. Divided into sections about the varying kinds of sacramentals, it introduces each topic with historical information and its place in the life of the Church.
I was surprised by some of what I learned—that the use of medals dates to the time of the catacombs, that the Eastern Church starts Lent on Monday and so does not celebrate Ash Wednesday, that the red cross was used by the Camillians, caretakers of the sick, 300 years before the Red Cross organization that we know today.
I was delighted with the examples that were unfamiliar. I had never heard of St. Odilia (much less St. Odilia’s Water) or the Black Scapular of the Passion. A number of the rosaries, prayers, and chaplets, each with directions, were new to me; I noted the Corona of Our Mother of Consolation, the Miraculous Responsory of St. Bonaventure, and the Rosary of Our Lord (a Camaldolese devotion commemorating Jesus’ thirty-three years on earth) as those to learn to pray in the next while.
The book is easy and fun to read and full of good, detailed information that will be useful to anyone seeking devotions for particular needs. The section entitled "Chaplets, Rosaries, Crowns, and Beads" is the most complete I’ve seen outside of books specifically on the topic of prayers—not simply on what they are, but the history behind each—and should be especially helpful to anyone trying to explain them to non-Catholics. I was grateful for the many titles of our Lady in the section on "Images" and with the history of each; reading each one will be effective preparation for the Masses in her honor.
While I mention these specifically, I do not diminish any of the other sections. Ann Ball’s descriptions of each kind of sacramental provide background on many of the teachings and practices of the Church. They make her book an excellent resource for catechists as they teach, parents as they pass on stories of faith to their children, and apologists trying to help Protestants past some of the more common stumbling blocks in the process of conversion.
For every example given, the research is thorough and annotated; anyone seeking more information is provided easy means to find it. Considering the range and depth of material covered, I was grateful that it carries an imprimatur—the assurance of its doctrinal integrity—for it is all too easy to pick up books that stretch truth past the point of accuracy.
It is hard to imagine offering the teachings of the Church without also sharing the means to live them out, and so the greatest gift in the Handbook is its affirmation of Catholic culture, the reminder that there are so many worshipers, worldwide and over centuries, who have been seeking and celebrating God’s presence among us and who, through the use of these manifest gifts, have found it.
-- Julie Green
A Handbook of Catholic Sacramentals
By Ann Ball
Our Sunday Visitor
222 pages
$7.95
Light From The East
Among the lights which shine from the Eastern Church today (which are, sadly enough, unnoticed in much of the Western Church) is Archbishop Joseph Raya. He is a Melkite archbishop, a scholar (his Byzantine Daily Prayer is held in respect by both Catholics and Orthodox), and, in his own way, a prophet. Before John Paul II had written about it, Raya had noticed that a good dose of Eastern spirituality might do the Western Church some good. This book, The Face of God, is his attempt to introduce the subject.
While I recommend his work, I must make some cautions to the Roman Catholic who picks it up. First, remove yourself thoroughly from the reactive mode. Raya can shock with his style as often as he thrills. He points out what he sees as unwarranted directions in the Western Church (clerical celibacy, altars which are too visible), and this may be mistaken for dissent. It is not. If you stick with him long enough, you will see he is simply offering recommendations from one sister church to another.
The second caution would be to approach this book seriously. Although it is not dense, it is not light reading. It breezes along, though, and can sometimes fool you into thinking that what is being presented may be skimmed. The archbishop’s style is often poetic ("A truth which does not sing is a truth betrayed"), and we mechanically-minded Westerners often view poetic writing as either irritating or trivial.
The Face of God is not a catechism, but a book on spirituality. It is not, as someone told me, anti-Roman. Indeed, when Raya finds Roman customs or liturgical devices which serve better than Eastern ones, he does not hesitate to use them. This is a book about spirituality in the awe-colored manner of the Eastern Churches, as opposed to the often linear view of the Western Church. It does not dwell, as do some books on the Eastern Church, on quaint customs, as if to describe a museum piece, but takes a pilgrimage path through our encounters with God in the Church and our lives. It explores the Eastern way of responding to them in order to go deeper into that dread mystery.
This is no book for spiritual sissies. Raya does not wait while you stick your toes in the water. He is a man on a mission, and wants you to come along with him on that mission: to see the face of God in worship. The journey can be wearying, because, even though the book carries you along, some pages must be read and reread to be understood fully. The effort is well repaid, however.
Unfortunately, the book may be difficult to find. It is published in Eastern Catholic circles, which sometimes seem to be a secret more guarded than the third secret of Fatima. If you are fortunate enough to live near a Ruthenian, Melkite, or Ukrainian parish, you may be able to get a copy through it, or you could write directly to the publisher at 3605 Perrysville Avenue, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15214.
—Martin Fontenot
The Face of God: An Introduction to Eastern Spirituality
By Archbishop Joseph Raya
Byzantine Seminary Press
220 pages
$5.95
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