“In Him we live, and move, and have our being”

I wrote recently of how all of life is to be “sacramental.” Every breath I take, every muscle I flex, every bite of food that I chew is intended, from the “beginning,” to be an act of communion with God. The great “original sin,” according to Father Alexander Schmemann, was not eating an apple:

. . . the original sin is not primarily that man has “disobeyed” God; the sin is that he ceased to be hungry for Him and for Him alone, ceased to see his whole life depending on the whole world as a sacrament of communion with God. The sin was not that man neglected his religious duties. The sin was that he thought of God in terms of religion, i.e., opposing Him to life. The only real fall of man is his noneucharistic life in a noneucharistic world. The fall is not that he preferred world to God, distorted the balance between the spiritual and material, but that he made the world material, whereas he was to have transformed it into “life in God,” filled with meaning and spirit. (For the Life of the World, p. 18.)

To far too many who struggle to follow Christ in this present age, the struggle is to maintain the proper balance between the “spiritual” life and the “physical” life. We have our religious or spiritual duties (going to church, bible study, prayer, evangelism, sanctification, etc.) and then we have our physical duties (our job, paying bills, recreation, voting, civic duties, etc.). But to Schmemann, there ought be no such division. All of life is sacrament. All of life, a mystery of our relationship with God, our Creator and sustainer.

I’ve mentioned before that this is perhaps the most profound realization I have come to since finding Orthodoxy. To know that God is all in all, filling all things with His presence, and that therefore all things can be “sacramental,” or as we say in Orthodoxy, a “mystical communion with God.” All actions of my life done with God are a mode of communion with God, from eating to breathing to sleeping to playing and to praying.

In this mindset the “Sacraments,” or “Holy Mysteries,” as rituals done within the life of the Church, suddenly can be seen not as magical acts that preserve some disconnected “spirituality” or “religion,” but as highpoints, profound symbols, of the life of God in Christ which we experience as part of the Church, His People. Seen thusly, the Mysteries are not just accessories. Neither are they viewable as “works of man” done in some legalistic attempt to draw near to God. In fact, the Fathers spoke of baptism as the “gate” through which the heavens opened and God descended to us (not the other way around, a fact they saw represented by the parting of the clouds and the descending dove at the baptism of Christ).

Putting all that together, we receive a perspective of the Mysteries as holy acts within a holy existence that make real to us the coming of God to us, to live and abide in and with us. We have not ascended to heaven by our merits; heaven has descended to us in great mercy. Thus, it is no surprise to hear us pray, at the end of our Liturgy:

Let our mouths be filled with Your praise, Lord, that we may sing of Your glory. You have made us worthy to partake of Your holy mysteries. Keep us in Your holiness, that all the day long we may meditate upon Your righteousness. Alleluia. Alleluia. Alleluia!

Shortly thereafter, the priest prays: “Having partaken of the divine, holy, pure, immortal, heavenly, life giving, and awesome Mysteries of Christ, let us worthily give thanks to the Lord,” to which the people respond, “Lord, have mercy!”

God has made us worthy, and in that worthy state, we partake of those mysteries — which are divine, holy, pure, immortal, heavenly, and life creating — while worthily giving thanks to the Lord. And in all of this, we continue with no attitude other than that of the Publican, “Lord, have mercy!” What a beautiful marriage of our unworthiness with the deifying grace of our Lord! Suddenly, all the “old” controversies between “works” and “faith” and “grace” become obsolete, sound childish, and appear sadly ignorant of the beauty of this way of seeing the world sacramentally.

This is the way the Church has viewed the Mysteries for two millennia now. I’ve been reading St. Nicholas Cabasilas’ The Life in Christ since my baptism and chrismation, and I came across the following excerpt a few days ago, with which I will close, given its appropriateness. The Sacraments are not magic tricks, nor are they works of human innovation, nor are they merely “ordinances” or “nice rituals.” They are the high points of a life that is to be wholly consumed by communion with Him in whom we live, and move, and have our very being, attested to by this Saint in the late 14th century A.D.:

In the sacred Mysteries, then, we depict His burial and proclaim His death. By them we are begotten and formed and wondrously united to the Saviour, for they are the means by which, as Paul says, “in Him we live, and move, and have our being” (Acts 17:28).

“Baptism confers being and, in short, existence according to Christ. It receives us when we are dead and corrupted and first leads us into life. The anointing with chrism perfects him who has received [new] birth by infusing into him the energy that befits such a life. The Holy Eucharist preserves and continues this life and health, since the Bread of Life enables us to preserve that which has been acquired and to continue in life. It is therefore by this Bread that we live and by the chrism that we are moved, once we have received being from the baptismal washing.

“In this way we live in God. We remove our life from this visible world to that world which is not seen by exchanging, not the place, but the very life itself and its mode. It was not we ourselves who were moved towards God, nor did we ascend to Him; but it was He who came and descended to us. It was not we who sought, but we were the object of His seeking. The sheep did not seek for the shepherd, nor did the lost coin search for the master of the house; He it was who came to the earth and retrieved His own image, and He came to the place where the sheep was straying and lifted it up and stopped it from straying. He did not remove us from here, but He made us heavenly while yet remaining on earth and imparted to us the heavenly life without leading us up to heaven, but by bending heaven to us and bringing it down. As the prophet says, “He bowed the heavens also, and came down” (Ps. 18:10).

“Accordingly, through these sacred Mysteries as through windows the Sun of Righteousness enters this dark world…”

(The Life in Christ, pp 49-50; SVS Press, 1974)