Sacramental World/Creation

“The term ‘sacramental’ means here that the basic and primordial intuition which not only expresses itself in worship, but of which the entire worship is indeed the ‘phenomenon’ – both effect and experience – is that the world, be it in its totality as cosmos, or in its life and becoming as time in history, is an epiphany of God, a means of His revelation, presence, and power. In other words, it not only ‘posits’ the idea of God as a rationally acceptable cause of its existence, but truly ‘speaks’ of Him and is in itself an essential means both of knowledge of God and communion with Him, and to be so is its true nature and its ultimate destiny. But then worship is truly an essential act, and man an essentially worshipping being, for it is only in worship that man has the source and the possibility of that knowledge which is communion, and of that communion which fulfills itself as true knowledge: knowledge of God and therefore knowledge of the world – communion with God and therefore communion with all that exists. Thus the very notion of worship is based on an intuition and experience of the world as an ‘epiphany’ of God, thus the world – in worship – is revealed in its true nature and vocation as ‘sacrament.’” (Fr. Alexander Schmemman) 

“Fr. Alexander Schmemann taught that, in the sacraments, we are not asking God to make something to be other than it is but to reveal it to be what it truly is…A problem associated with sacramental thought, if this principle is forgotten, is that things that are blessed somehow cease to be what they are. Instead, they become exceptional moments in which the things of this world are no longer things of this world. They change while everything around them remains the same. We go to Church, the miracle happens, but remains confined to the altar or the font, while the world around it remains unchanged. The Church becomes the locus of the extraordinary while the world is stuck in the ordinary. It is, ironically, a two-story sacramental order. This thing is holy, that thing is not. It is a diminishment of Christ’s work. The sacraments become points of contact with the second-story, tiny windows in which miniscule rays of sunshine peak out into an otherwise darkened world. But the world itself remains dark.” (Father Stephen Freeman)

“What does it mean to have a “sacramental imagination”? The sacramental imagination involves learning to perceive the world according to its real shape or essence. It is a way of picturing things that is faithful to the reality we experience while living in a world where grace transforms nature.” (Robin Phillips)

“C.S. Lewis famously said that knowing what a star is made of doesn’t tell us what it is. There is a spiritual dimension to nature, he argued. I would agree, at least in the basic sense that every created being came into existence through falling in love with Beautiful Theophany, as we’ve been arguing all along…And we don’t just receive sacraments; we are meant to become sacraments for others and for the life of the world. You don’t become who you really are until you attain this sacramental status, this level of symbol. We are meant to be the icons of God, his epiphanies in this world.” (Timothy G. Patitsas) 

“…the Church, the sacramental Mysteries as well as any miracle are not the discontinuance of God’s creation, but rather the experience of what God in fact is continually working through His creation, our world and us. But Jesus answered them, “My Father is working still, and I am working” (John 5:17). The continual creative activity of God is visible in our daily lives: When you send forth your spirit, they are created; and you renew the face of the ground. May the glory of the Lord endure forever; may the Lord rejoice in his works…” (Psalm 104:30-31).” (Fr. Ted Bobosh)

“When it comes down to it, this non-iconographic way of seeing the world is by nature unfaithfulness. When I look at creation and I don’t see God, it is like looking at the physical body of a woman in loveless lust and not seeing the fullness.” (Andrew Williams)

“The Enlightenment comes directly out of Scholastic theology and the medieval notion that there is a nature that is all right on its own, to which grace is then added. That is totally heretical, just nuts….no existing thing would exist for even the tiniest moment were it not sustained by uncreated grace. The Enlightenment sciences…take the medieval notion of nature a step farther and say, “Ok, let’s look only at the nature and leave grace to the clergy.”…this wouldn’t make sense. We won’t completely understand anything in nature unless we also see it as an icon and as existing because God’s grace sustains and permeates it.” (Timothy G. Patitsas) 

“We are thinking matter, made of the same stuff as everything around us…though we can say much about the activities of our brain, we cannot…actually translate or even correlate that activity with the thing we experience as thought. It is thought itself that we have mythologized and mis-imagined. With this same failure of imagination, we do not understand the fundamental communion of all created things, nor the utterly cosmic nature of the statement that God “became flesh and dwelt among us.” We hear our own voices but do not recognize their kinship to every other sound around us. The sound of my voice and the sound of the river belong to the same class of event. Fantasy novels often do a better job of imagining. Trees speak and animals discuss among themselves. We think to ourselves, “What if trees could actually speak?” But we never seem to think, “What if we actually knew how to listen?” (Father Stephen Freeman)

“These patterns, these descriptions of hierarchies of beings and of angels and of the mountain, of paradise, of temples—all of these descriptions that have been with us since the beginning of known history, that’s really how reality works. Right now is actually an aberration. The modern world is an aberration on that pattern. You could call it the end of that pattern or moving out into the wild of that pattern, but the real pattern is going to come back. It has to, because that’s actually how reality works. So in a way there’s a despair, because we see that everything is falling apart and everything, that society is fragmenting and people are at each other’s throats, not literally yet, thank God, but it seems like that, at some point, will be the case again. So I think there’s a kind of sadness to see that happen, but there’s also hope to know that when it’s really dark and you light a candle, then you will see the candle. I think that that’s also part of it, that the meaning will shine brighter for a lot of people because of the darkness around. And many will ignore it, but some people will… Those that see it will see it. It may be even more than in a world where these patterns are completely traditional and just a forgotten part of how reality works and it just kind of functions like a clock almost. Whereas now people who want to recover an enchanted world have to fight for it. They have to fight in their own lives. They have to fight in their communities to kind of get things going, to get a sense of community, to get a sense of meaning going. But since it is the real pattern, it’s going to shine.” (Jonathan Pageau)

“The medieval man looked at the night sky and wept, feeling himself enclosed in the double darkness of his physical and moral separation from God. But he also believed that the stars were holes in the floor of heaven: that light was streaming in from that world of endless day where all things danced in the delight of creatureliness, were radiant in the changeless light of God.” (Sisters of St. Xenia Skete)

“In all its most ancient traditions Christianity is a sacramental religion. Sacraments form the very life of the Church through which the Spirit of God flows into the world...[a] sacramental view of the world is a world suffused with the grace and love of God. It is a world view as warm as the rationalist view is cold, as profound as the rationalist view is superficial, and as full of meaning and hope as the rationalist view is pointless and despairing.” (Archpriest Lawrence Cross)

“The world, for us, has been “disenchanted,” its words pressed into ever more distinct and discrete meanings. The sacramentality of the world has become opaque to us…The world is not accident and caprice. It is deeply intentional and personal, and conspiring towards our salvation…It is only the dark and callous objectivity of the modern heart that has so disenchanted reality. We imagine ourselves the only sentient beings marooned on a small, blue planet in space. We wonder if there is “life” out there, as if there were anything else anywhere. The world is icon and sacrament.” (Father Stephen Freeman)

“So many believe they will find wisdom only by acquiring vast stores of the world’s ever-expanding body of applied knowledge…Ever since the so-called Age of Enlightenment, scientific discoveries have flourished in astonishing and wonderful ways. But has the majority of mankind found true wisdom as a result?...Reverence for God is the supreme wisdom… power and the wisdom…can be gained from the practice of goodness and godliness” (Dynamis 8/20/2019, St. John Chrysostom)

“A man who has within him the Kingdom of Heaven radiates holy thoughts, Divine thoughts. The Kingdom of God creates within us an atmosphere of heaven, as opposed to the atmosphere of hell that is radiated by a person when hades abides in his heart. The role of Christians in the world is to filter the atmosphere on earth and expand the atmosphere of the Kingdom of God.” (Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica)

“The world must be accepted as created by God and having received from God its own meaning and its own calling, which is encapsulated in the incarnation that sanctified not man alone, but through man, all of creation.” (Ivan Ilyin)

"Christianity has had a sacramental view of creation from its very earliest beginnings…In the Christian view, the world we see around us is not only sacred but is also the vehicle for the grace of God...for the Christian, all creation is sacred both because of its creation by God and because it is caught up in the paschal mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection.” (Archpriest Lawrence Cross)

“The sacramental world is utterly permeated with meaning and spiritual communion…Time moves through a calendar in which the days of the week and the whole of the year are a collection of occasions in which people encounter the reality of Christ’s saving work” (Father Stephen Freeman)

“…the entire world is sacramental. Everything speaks of God. Everything unveils God to us. The true contemplative is a naturalist, a lover of life, a respecter of persons, a diviner of the tangible who sees behind the masks of creation to the Creator.” (Joan Chittister)

“The world is a sacramental marriage of spirit and matter...one of the most beautiful realities is that the whole world is a sacrament.” (Craig Bernthal, Jonathan Jackson)

“…it is important to remember that all of life is given to us in order that it might become "sacramental.” (Fr. John Breck)

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