The Sacraments

EWTN Global Catholic Radio and St. Joseph Communications proudly present Life is Worth Living with Archbishop Fulton Shin. This 50-part series was recorded on photograph records in the 1960s and the sound quality is sometimes limited. But the word of God spoken by Archbishop Shin is timeless and now here is Archbishop Fulton Shin. Peace be to you. Because the subject of grace is so very important, it might be well to continue it a bit here and then to tell you how that grace is communicated to us. Grace divides the world actually into two kinds of humanity, the once born and the twice born. The once born are those who are born only of their parents. The twice born are those who are born of their parents and also born of God. One group of men are what might be called natural. The other in addition to having nature also share in a mysterious way in the divine life of God, in His thoughts and in His love. Grace is a very sensitive that it is possible for us to reject it many times even during the day. Familiar for tell you two incidents about grace. On one occasion I went down from Belzend to Paris to preach a sermon in a church of Paris on the first Sunday of February. I stayed in a tiny little hotel near the Oprah Comique and in a small side room there was an Englishman playing a piano. I listened to him for a while and then complimented him and invited him to dinner. He said, I have never eaten with a priest before and I said, well, we are just like anyone else. If you stick me with a pin, I will bleed too. In the course of the dinner, he said, I have a problem I would like to present to you. I have never met, he said, in my life, one good man or one good woman. I thank him for the compliment and then he went on to tell me. The just a year from this coming in 12th of February, over at that table there indicating a table in the corner, he saw a woman trying to break a lump of sugar into a cup of coffee. He went over to her, broke the lump, she then told him how cruel her husband was and he said, commonly with me. He said, I am now tired of her, I get tired of them all after about a year and I wrapped up all over clothes this morning, left them with a concierge and told her to leave but she left me this note. The note read, that if you do not continue living with me, I will commit suicide by throwing myself into the same. Now this is my problem he continued, may I allow her to continue living with me to prevent her from committing suicide? And I said, no, you may never do evil that good may come from, it but in any case what is more important you will not commit suicide. It got to be late, he said, where are you going? I said, I am going up to Mo-Mart. He said, I was just beginning to think that you were good now you are going up to that hellhole of Paris. Right that there is something else on the hill of Mo-Mart besides dives and dens. There is the beautiful basilica, the sacred heart. Where there are hundreds of men every night in prayer and in perpetual adoration of our Lord and the blessed sacrament. Come with me. We went up together and he said, how long will you stay? I said, I intend to stay all night. But I will even you want to go. He stayed all night. And I suppose there were about 800 to 1000 men spending the night there in prayer. When we left the next morning after I had read Mass, he said, this is the first time in my life I ever came in contact with goodness. He asked me to stay in Paris for a few days and teach him. I arranged to meet him that night. At the appointed hour he came into the courtyard with another woman, not the woman involved in the story. And he said, the three of us will go out to dinner. I said, no, tonight I want to see you. Then I called him aside and I said, now you received a great grace yesterday. You got the first dim contact with goodness and love and holiness. And tonight you have to make a choice. Either you're going out with this woman or you're going out with me. Which will it be? He walked up and down the courtyard for a few minutes and then came back to me and he said, well father, I think that I'll go out with her. And that is the end of the story. Now these impulses of grace that he received could have developed him into a saint. But it was like the story of Arlo are looking over Jerusalem. I would, thou would not. Now that is taken another incident. I used to do a great deal of procured work in Saint Patrick's Church, Soho Square, London, England. I opened the church door one cold epiphany morning in the month of January. The limp figure fell in. It was a young woman, about 23, 24 years of age. And I said, how did you happen to be here? And she said, I didn't know where I was, father. I said, oh father, yes, she said I just be a Catholic. Not anymore. And I said, but why are you here? You seem to be a little bit intoxicated. What are you running away from? She said for men each of whom thinks that I love him. And I didn't know that I was here. I asked her her name when she told me I pointed to a billboard on the other side of the street. And I said, is that your picture over there on that billboard? Yes, she said, I'm the leading lady in that musical comedy. Since she was very cold, I made a cup of coffee for her and told her to come back before matinee. She said, I will on one condition. That you do not ask me to go to confession. I said very well, I promise you not to ask me to go to confession. She said, I want you to promise me very faithfully that you will not ask me to go to confession. I said, I promise you, faithfully, not to ask me to go to confession. She came back that afternoon before matinee. I said, we have a beautiful Rembroth and Van Dyke in this church. We'd like to see them. As we walked down the middle aisle, I gave her a gentle push into the confessional. I did not ask her to go, but she went to confession. She is now a nun in a conference of perpetual adoration in England. And here are two stories of responses to grace. In both instances, the human will was free. And the one there was a correspondence. And the other a rejection. We receive millions of these graces called actual grace. As everyone receives them, you need not be a Christian, every Muslim, every Buddhist, every Communist in the world. We see these actual grace. But here we're speaking of what is called now a... An habitual grace, a more permanent grace that which creates inness, a lightness that remains. How is this grace communicated to us? How does it get into the soul? Frasuseine signs on roadways. They are often pated on rocks which read Jesus' haze. Yes, indeed he does. The very practical question is how? We have a span of 20 centuries between the life of our Lord and our days. Yes, he is God. But how does he pour and infuse this divine life and power into our souls? Well, he does it by what are called sacraments. Now here we define the word sacrament in a very broad way. In Greek it means mystery. But a sacrament is any material or visible thing that is used as a sign or a channel of spiritual communication. We'll go back about as far as we can to explain. This reason we might say that the Lord made this world with a sense of humor. What do we mean by a sense of humor? We mean he made it sacramentally. We say a person has a sense of humor if he can see through things. We say a person has not a sense of humor if he cannot see through things. We say he's too thick. Now God made this world with a sense of humor in the sense that we were always to see him through things like the poets do. We would look out on a mountain and think of the power of God. On the sunset and think of the beauty of God. On a snowflake and dwell on the purity of God. Notice that we would not be taking this world as seriously as do the materialists, to whom a mountain is just a mountain. A sunset is just a sunset and the snowflake is just a snowflake. The serious minded people of this world write only in prose. But those who have this penetrating glance of perceiving the eternal through time, the divine through the human, have what we call the sacramental outlook on the universe. Now coming up a little bit closer to our own experience. There are certain signs and events in our daily life which are a kind of natural sacrament. Take for example a word. A word has something audible about it and at the same time something unseen invisible. If for example I tell a joke and if it were a very amusing one you might laugh. But if I told it to a horse, a horse would not even give a horse laugh. Why? Because you get the meaning. That's because you have a soul, a reason and an intellect. The horse lacks that spiritual perceptive power. And hence does not get the meaning. Handshake is something visible, material, pleshy. But there's also something spiritual about it, namely the communication of greeting and welcome. Now if I take my right hand and lay it upon my left as I am doing it this particular second, this is not a handshake. It has a visible aspect about it most certainly the clustering of hands but it lacks that invisible element, which is the communication of personal warmth. A kiss is a kind of sacrament. It is something visible at the same time something invisible, namely the communication of love. This is getting a bit away from the point but we just cannot resist saying it. You noticed how very much our modern architecture is devoid of all decoration or to contrast to the cathedrals where there were all material things, even cows and angels, sometimes little devils purring around corners. The ancient architecture was always using material things as signs of something spiritual. But today our architecture is flat, nothing but steel and glass, almost like a cracker box. Why? Well because our architects have no spiritual message to convey. The material is just the material, nothing else. Hence no decor, no significance, no meaning, no soul. I wonder if decor and decoration and so forth in architecture has not passed out of the world at the same time for life and sense. We certainly are not as polite in this century as we were in another century. And possibly the reason is because we no longer believe that persons have souls. They are just other animals and hence they are to be treated as means to our ends. When you believe that in addition to a body there is a soul, then you begin to have great respect and reverence for personality. Now after that regression on the relationship between architecture and politeness, we come back to the very important point again is how do we ever, ever contact the life of Christ in this Christ? The basic idea that connects all that we have had with Him is this. The Christ Himself was the great sacrament. Because He was the word made flesh. He was the God man. We would have seen a man. But we would have known that He was the Son of God. Therefore Christ is the supreme sacrament of history. His human nature was the sign of His divinity. We saw God through His body. We see eternity through His time. And the loving God in the form of a man that was like to us in all things they've seen. Now our blessed Lord took His human nature to heaven. Once He has glorified in heaven, as we said in speaking of the ascension, He is our mediator, our intercessor, our high priest, who can have compassion for us and on us, because He passed through our temptations and our sufferings and our trials. Because He is God as well as man, He is going to pour down upon us from heaven. He is truth, His power, His grace, His life, and how will He do it? He will not do it through what we might call His body-ness, because that is already glorified in heaven. He will do it through things and also through human nature. He will use certain things in this world as extensions of His glorified body. These things might be water, bread, and oil and so forth, as channels or vehicles for the communication of His divine life. Now He Himself instituted these sacraments. But why did He do it? Well, first of all, because His life is so very rich, that it has to have various manifestations in life, and it is very much like the life of the sun. The sun is so very bright that if we are to understand this inner beauty, we have to shoot that sunlight through a prism. And so, and when we do, it splits up into the seven rays of the spectrum. And so our blessed Lord, having a life that is infinitely rich, shoots this divine life through the prism of the church and it splits up not into the seven rays of the spectrum, but into the seven sacraments of the church. And in another reason why He used sacraments, was because this material world of ours has to be spiritualized. God not only redeems man, He redeems things. So we lay ahold of material things like water and oil and bread and so forth. And we make them serve God. Too often they've been used for purposes that were not divine. We have a body too as well as a soul, and we get all of our spiritual thoughts, at least the beginning of them, through the senses. And why therefore, simply because we have a body as well as a soul, should God not use things that appeal to our senses. Some material signs, which would be to us tale tales and revelations, of this grace that He's pouring into our souls, for example. It would be wonderful if He used water to indicate that our great sin that we inherited from Adam was being washed away. Bread would be a very good sign and symbol of nourishment. Oil strengthens us from the natural order. It might also be a very good sign too, for strengthening our souls. So as one's divinity used humanity, so now divinity uses humanity and things in order that there might be something trans-historical, trans-cosmic, in order that there might be the divine life of Christ pouring into our souls. That is how the Christ in heaven contacts us and disdain it. How many sacraments are there? Seven? Why seven? Because there are seven conditions for leading a physical life and there ought to be seven conditions for leading a spiritual life. Five of these conditions are individual and two refer to society. In order to live a physical, natural life, one, I must be born. Two, I must role the maturity. Three, I must nourish myself. Four, I must heal my wounds. Five, I must drive out traces of disease. Then as a member of society, one, there must be a propagation of the human species, and two, there must be government. Now over and above this human life, there is the divine life. And there are seven conditions of leading that divine life. If I am to live the Christ's life, I must be born to it. That is the sacrament of baptism. Two, I must grow to maturity and accept the responsibilities of life. That is the sacrament of confirmation. Three, I must nourish myself. Sustain this divine life. That is the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist. Four, I must heal the wounds of my soul caused by sin. That is the sacrament of penance or confession. Five, I must drive out all the traces of the disease of sin that are found in my senses. That is the sacrament of the healing of the sick. And as a member of society, there must be a propagation of the kingdom of God, the growth of the mystical body of Christ. That is the sacrament of matrimony. And finally, there must be divine government. There must be holy orders, or the sacrament of the Episcopacy and the priesthood. Now, the reception of the grace that is in these sacraments is very effective in our soul because it is Christ that confers the grace. The mere fact, for example, that we turn on the faucet water comes out. The water does not come out because we subjectively believe that water will come forth. And the divine life of Christ is poured into our soul by the mere fact that we receive the sacraments. Of course, we must not put an obstacle in the way of receiving the sacraments, but it is Christ who baptizes. It is Christ who forgives sins. There are ministers. Of course, there are bishops and there are priests. But we alone Christ, our eyes and our hands and our lips. It is He who gives the grace. That incidentally is why, even though you receive the sacrament from an unworthy priest, it will still be a sacrament because the sanctification does not depend upon the priest. Because sunlight comes through a dirty window, sunlight is not polluted. A messenger may be very ragged, but he could still bear the message of a king. So you see the church. The mystical body of Christ takes care of you. From the cradle of the grave, it meets you in all of the events and circumstances of life. And your sanctification does not depend upon our preaching. It depends upon Christ Himself. This is the sweet mystery of life, the sacraments. God bless. This has been Life's Worth Living with Archbishop Fulton Shin. For more information about this series, contact St. Joseph Communications at 1-800-526-2151. Outside the US, call 818-3313-3549. And please join us again next time for Life's Worth Living with Archbishop Fulton Shin on EWTN Global Catholic Radio. Thank you.