Tag: sacrament

It’s that time of year — the “love” holiday is just around the corner — Valentine’s Day. I’ve never been a fan of this made-up excuse to entice (pressure?) people (mostly men) to spend silly amounts of money on silly things to prove just how loved their partner is. There are saccharine words and images on cards, pounds of candy, overpriced, crowded and understaffed restaurants selling a night of romance and ostentatious displays of flowers, worst of all, delivered to the partner’s place of work.

Who, what or where are those sacraments in my life? Can I identify the outward and visible signs of an inward and spiritual grace that are manifest in my daily existence? How do they function to transform me and my interactions with the wider-world?

In a time when the public voice of Christianity is predominantly fundamentalist and predominantly anchored in reactionary politics, it is water in the desert to hear someone speak as the Queen did last Christmas and as she did so many times before that. I will miss her witness as a disciple profoundly.

A handwritten card is a sacrament. When it arrives in the mail, you hold in your hands the beautiful evidence that we are in relationship.

A birthday cake can be a sacrament sometimes. So can be a book. So can be a cabin or a bicycle or a painting. So can be tools, with their history written on their bodies in flecks of paint and old sawdust and patterns of wear