Sacramental Life and Experience readings Essay Example

done during the baptism rites – each symbolic act and item like the pouring of water on the baby’s head – has its roots on Jesus’ own baptism two thousand years ago. Baptism then becomes a solemn rite of welcoming each new member of the Catholic Church into the family. It is an awesome celebration of Jesus’ love and promises. Baptism rites are among those that hold the Church in strong bonds of constancy and continuity.

The very baptism that John the Baptist administered on Jesus at the Jordan River two thousand years ago has been all this time conducted using the same symbols and meaning to proclaim the same message – a new brother or sister has just been welcomed to the family. Clement of Alexandria has written, “Being baptized, we are illuminated; illuminated, we become sons; being made sons, we are made perfect; being made perfect, we are made immortal. ‘I,’ says He (Jesus), ‘have said that ye are gods, and all sons of the Highest. ’ Ps. Ixxxii. 6. (Alister E. McGrath; The Christian Theology Reader) Having learned the story of God’s people, Jesus’ life and passion on the cross, His death and resurrection, Pentecost and the birth of the Church, I find myself thanking God for saving me from sin and for loving me enough to suffer as he did and to die on the cross. Being baptized, we are blessed to be in the light and not stuck in the dark. Being in the light, then, we know we were created to live good lives and to be united with God, both while we still live our earthly lives and thereafter.

We

are illuminated, as Clement of Alexandria has written, because we know that so long as we lead good lives and follow God’s commandment, then we are beloved children of God whose birthright is His Kingdom. Keeping in mind that we are God’s children leads us to want to stay good and to not do sinful things. We would want to never lose sight of the Lord so as to never lose our claim to His promise of leading us home with Him in the heavenly abode once our earthly lives are through. Being illuminated is one of the graces we received during baptism.

But such grace can easily die down if not fanned regularly and kept aflame by the grace that the other sacraments bring. Thus, we recourse to asking the Lord for the grace to stay “illuminated”. We pray for the grace to be good and to be able to avoid sin. And when we sin, we come to God for forgiveness through the sacrament of Reconciliation. Reconciliation reminds us that God is a loving God who is ever ready and willing to forgive us for the sins we commit so long as we come to him with contrite and penitent hearts.

When sincerely ask forgiveness from people we have wronged and then come to the Lord for His forgiveness, we can trust that it will be given. Reconciliation is, then, the sacrament of mercy. It reminds us of how God’s mercy is ever-flowing and it leads us to be merciful ourselves to those people who need our mercy and compassion. Similarly, Reconciliation is a sacrament of faith. We confess our sins and in faith, with

the absolution given by the priest confessor, we obediently believe that indeed our sins are forgiven.

All these we do out of faith in God, and faith in him leads us to see the tremendous value afforded us by the sacraments. It has been written, “Through the act of faith, the believer comes to a new awareness of self and self’s relationship to God, to others, and to the world. ” (Thomas P. Rausch; The College Student’s Introduction to Theology) Having faith in God performs miracles each day. It leads us to try to be good even when it is a lot easier to do the bad thing. Faith leads us to do unselfish things for want of pleasing God. Faith helps us to pray with confidence that God hears our every prayer and every sigh.

Indeed, faith keeps us in God’s care and helps us to never go astray toward vices and sinful livestyles. Through it all, faith keeps us trusting God and his sacraments to send help whenever it is due. The sacraments strengthen us and bring us to trust in the Lord and His love and mercy. Amazingly, faith also brings together the people in God’s Church. Because of faith, strangers get to meet and work for common projects to contribute to the fulfillment of the Church’s mission. Thus, we see people with varying opinions and different interests working together as one community for want of serving the Lord.

The sacraments of Holy Orders and Holy Matrimony bring God’s blessings on people’s choices of vocation in life. But whatever our choices are, we have roles to play in God’s church. Priests receive the sacrament of

Holy Orders and commit to devote their entire life administering the sacraments and being among God’s shepherd for his pasture. The sacrament of Matrimony showers blessings and grace on the union of couples whose vocation in life is to serve God by raising a family in God’s light leading them to receive the sacraments as the infallible means of living life in a manner that is pleasing to God.

Belonging to the Church as God’s family is best experienced during the Mass when we celebrate Jesus’ triumph from the dead and victory over sin. The Holy Communion is the sacrament signifying Jesus’ body which we partake together with everybody in the family, the Church. The Holy Communion is a symbol of God’s love. For all our being undeserving of forgiveness and mercy, Jesus loves us. For all the times we try to be good only to sin again, Jesus lovingly forgives us again and again.

All these are what I am made to realize now that I know more about the theology behind the sacraments. We live in such modern times when occasions for sin and temptations of all kinds come in all forms. It has come to a time when it is even fashionable to be bad. We see some movie and music stars we so admire setting such bad examples that millions follow. We see in people around us the diminishing of ethical and sound values, the general lack of knowledge of God and the weakening of their will to live good lives.

It is so easy to just give in and join them if not for the strength and grace derived from partaking of the

sacraments. The strength to resist temptation, the wisdom to know what is right and wrong, the understanding of what is behind all the things we see, and the faith that keeps us trusting and hoping in the Lord… We need these graces to keep on believing that through all times, happy and sad, God is there for us. The Holy Communion brings us these graces that help us lead good lives. Thus, John Paul II, in his writings, has established the Eucharist as a sign of hope. (Alister E.

McGrath; The Christian Theology Reader) All is not yet lost; the lost people may yet be enlightened and then be led to find their way back to God. The sacraments are symbolic rites that brings God right in our midst. Faith in God and in his sacraments can farther be bolstered by trying to figure out why we have such faith. For want of knowing God more, we study as much as we can the theological writings and literature composed by great men and women of faith through the years – the evangelists, the doctors of the church, the saints, the martyrs, and many leaders of the Church.

To love God is to do things to know Him more and to experience Him more in our life. Thomas Rausch, S. J. has written, “Theology is concerned with our experience of God, particularly our experience of God as a community of faith. It is the effort to understand and interpret the faith experience of a community, to bring it to expression in language and symbol. In the words of St. Anselm (d. 1109), theology is fides quaerens intellectum, faith

seeking understanding. ” (The College Student’s Introduction to Theology)

Through the resources of theology, we should seek to understand the sacraments and the wonderful graces that we can receive in faith through them. Doing so will lead us to realize that we can ask God for many blessings and to have the means for doing it. Truly, the sacraments are untapped reservoirs of God’s graces. They are not to be brushed off as useless rites and ceremonies for they are well-grounded on the history and traditions of the Church.

The Church would not have been the same Church without the sacraments. Thomas Rausch and Catherine Clifford have written, The Church as the community of the disciples of Jesus is a visible, historical reality. Catholicism understands that community as mediated and preserved by sacramental symbols and institutional structures, the expressions of a living tradition reaching back to the time of the apostles, as we have seen. ” (Thomas P. Rausch and Catherine E. Clifford; Catholicism in the Third Millennium) The sacraments are what we see with our own eyes, while the graces they bring along are what our faith alone can perceive. Only in sincere faith can we receive the graces of the sacraments.