THE WORLD AS SACRAMENT

Let me insist, first of all, upon the tentative nature of this essay. Our subject here is one that is only now beginning to be studied, and I am in no position to offer any kind of final thesis; rather, I see myself as taking part in our common search for the light — a search that will one day, perhaps, lead us to concrete and consistent conclusions, but not yet. I am weary of those speeches and articles that propose to solve all problems once and for all with neat ready-made answers: we find them even in connection with the liturgical movement, even when a subject like this comes up for discussion — "The World as Sacrament" — a subject that surely ought to make us move very cautiously and tentatively indeed. My own thoughts have achieved neither certainty nor finality. I only feel sure that this kind of subject has enormous importance for Christian theology. Although I use the word "theology," this is not going to be a theological essay — at least not if by theology we imply "definitions." It seems to me a great tragedy that in the past, sacramental reality should so often have been made the object of clear definitions after the juridical model — definitions so lucid and thin that they tended to obscure and even to diminish the things defined. We are concerned with that reality itself, newly rediscovered. My own approach to it is by way of my own tradition — the liturgical experience, the living tradition of the Eastern Orthodox Church — and only in a secondary way through the formal theology derived from that tradition. And I am raising questions, not proclaiming answers. Let me begin with my title: a rich phrase, drawing together the two great preoccupations of Christian thought and activity today. "World" and "sacrament": here we have two great concerns, the two objects that outstandingly engage our thinking and acting as Christians in the world of today. It hardly needs to be stressed that our time is marked by a new degree of concern for the world; this is at the forefront of our modern consciousness. I find it, for example, explicit in Pope Paul VI's encyclical Ecclesiam Suam, and in the very idea of "dialogue" as well. This point of view has been gaining ground for decades: the idea that the Church exists to save the whole world, not merely to satisfy the religious needs of the individual, narrowly conceived. This hardly needs saying today. On the other hand, and of equal importance, we are experiencing something in the nature of a complete rediscovery of the sacramental nature of Christian life. This is not merely a renewed insistence upon the importance of particular sacramental acts in the life of the individual. That is most necessary, but we are going further, to reassert a sacramental character in the whole of life.

Thus when we bring together the two words "world" and "sacrament," we can see in sharp focus two basic tendencies of our time — two aspects, perhaps, of a single tendency; and this is an exercise not wholly original, perhaps, but still worth attempting. A perspective is needed, a frame of vision to help the thought and work of the future. What is the relationship between these two concepts, these two realities, world and sacrament? If we gain some new insight into the sacramental nature of Christian life, will that help us to understand the world? If we develop a greater degree of concern for the world, will that deepen our experience and understanding of the sacraments?

But before attempting a synthesis along these lines, we should perhaps focus our attention on each of the terms separately. In the long history of Christian theology and spirituality, people have spoken of "the world" in two ways, both of them well rooted in the Gospel. On the one hand, we say that "God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son"; that the Eucharistic sacrifice is an act of giving for the sake of the world; that the world is an object of divine love, divine creation, divine care; that it is to be saved, transfigured, transformed. But in another sense, and with equal authority in Scriptures and church Tradition, we speak of the world negatively: it is the thing we must leave, a prison from which we must be free, God's rival, deceptively claiming our love with its pride and its lust.

No doubt I am oversimplifying here, but it seems to me that the true Christian experience involves some kind of synthesis between these two visions of "the world." The negative vision is very positive in a spiritual sense; that is to say, it is genuinely necessary to leave the world, to cultivate detachment and freedom from it. But this detachment develops too easily into a kind of indifference, a lack of regard for God's creation; gradually the Church becomes aware of this tendency and corrects it by a renewed emphasis upon concern for the world and its goodness.

Today, we are very plainly at the second stage of this cycle, increasingly involved in the world and its affairs. Perhaps we go too far; there is certainly this danger. We find it suggested in certain quarters that we should drop the ideas of God and religion completely, so as to devote ourselves more wholly to the world and to others, living as men in the world of men. In "honesty to God," we are asked to dismiss Him: so far has the pendulum swung from self-centered pietism.

That is where we find ourselves today — and we must insist again that both views of the matter are rooted in revelation and the experience of the Church. If we chose one of them and pushed it to its logical extreme, ignoring the other, we would end up in heresy: the original Greek sense of that word refers to error based on false choice, to mistaken selectivity. If we insist upon choosing where we ought to effect a synthesis or reconciliation, we shall tend toward heresy.

If our attention is to be given more seriously — and even, in a carefully denned sense, wholly — to this world, that does not mean that we are committed to "worldliness" in the other sense of that twofold idea. We are not to suppose that when jets can fly faster, when doctors can save more lives, Congress will be able to certify that the Kingdom of God has begun. Rather the reverse. The more deeply we think in Eucharistic and therefore in eschatological terms, the more acutely we shall be aware that the fashion of this world passeth away, that things only acquire point and meaning and reality in their relationship to Christ's coming in glory. In this context, the unworldliness and detachment preached by so many moralists return to their full importance.

Our lives are congested and noisy. It is easy to think of the Church and the sacraments as competing for our attention with the other world of daily life, leading us off into some other life — secret, rarefied and remote. We might do better to think of that practical daily world as something incomprehensible and unmanageable unless and until we can approach it sacramentally through Christ. Nature and the world are otherwise beyond our grasp; time also, time that carries all things away in a meaningless flux, causing men to despair unless they see in it the pattern of God's action, reflected in the liturgical year, the necessary road to the New Jerusalem.

We have a simple task, and a happy one. Some say that we should concentrate upon this world as though God did not exist. We say rather that we should concentrate upon this world lovingly because it is full of God, because by way of the Eucharist we find Him everywhere — in hideous disasters as well as in little flowers. In a way, it is not supernatural at all; we return to our original nature, to the garden where Adam met God in the cool of the evening. No, we do not meet Him wholly and consciously: we are still fallen, still estranged, and our fallen nature could not at present survive that.

A sacramental correspondence is not an identification. It always points beyond. But it creates also a present unity, making us contemporary witnesses not only of Christ's death but also of His coming again, and of the fulfillment of all things in Him. Thankfully we accept from God's hands His lovely garden, the world. We eat its fruits, transform its substance into life, offer that life to God on Christ's cross and our daily altars, and look forward to the possession of it, as a risen body, in the Kingdom.

But it will be the same world, the same life. "Behold, I make all things new." These were God's last words to us, and they only say at the end, and eternally, what was in His mind at the very beginning, when He looked on the sacramental world of His creation and saw that it was good.

From: Church World Mission by Alexander Schemann, St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, Crestwood, NY 1979