Communication Incarnate: A Sacramental Reflection

“Thou hast formed us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless till they find rest in Thee.”

St. Augustine’s beautiful exhortation has achieved immortality not because it speaks to the presence of human desire, but because it exposes the true nature of that desire: our inborn purpose as created beings to remain in a state of eternal communion with God and with others. This divine purpose, or telos, is more than an attribute of our humanity. It is a fundamental and inescapable human reality. We can ignore it, we can resist it, but we cannot escape that eternal end God has instilled so deeply within us.

If eternal communion is our end, sacramental communication is the means to achieve it. Such communication binds the Church together, in heaven as on earth. Indeed, the Holy Sacraments represent both a medium of divine communication and a model for Christocentric communication. This is because we were created by a Triune God, who exists in a state of perpetual communication, who created a sacramental cosmos by speaking it into existence — a God who shaped humanity into His likeness, and who left us with the Holy Sacraments, so that we may not only desire but also reach the true end of all communication — communion with God and with others. We should communicate sacramentally because we were created to live sacramentally. We are sacramental beings. Sacramentality is embedded in our reality.

This shows us why we must communicate sacramentally to a world starving for wonder.

When viewed through a sacramental lens, the universe — reality itself — becomes a blueprint for Christian communication, a multilayered mystery that reveals itself both broadly through the Church and acutely through the administration of her Sacraments. By living out the sacramental life, we begin to realize the fullness of our human potential for God-centered communication, marching ever closer to that ultimate reality we long for, the culmination of our relationship with Our Lord Jesus Christ, that blessed eternal feast — the beatific vision. Outlining the form of sacramental communication in turn shows us the path to Christocentric communication. Thus, we see that communication not only binds the Church together, but also connects the faithful to God and to one another.

In the Holy Sacraments, communication and ritual combine to remind us of, and conform us to, the divine order. Indeed, we were created for festivity, and that creative design demands to be lived out in properly ordered actions. The Church teaches that the Sacraments are the normative means to such fulfillment on earth. Even those outside the visible bounds of the Church, however, display an innate penchant for sacramental festivity and ritual, even if it is not always practiced in a proper or purified form. Whether replete with the pure or profane, sacramental rituals define the human experience, shaping, and not merely punctuating, our existence.

Our innate festivity coaxes us toward the Sacraments by compelling us to embrace the “small-S” sacramental life: morning and evening routines, graduation celebrations and anniversary dinners, birthdays and funerals. The inclination to treat these as sacred naturally flows from our innate sacramentality, fueled by our festivity, pointing us toward the divine Source of all, whether we realize it or not. Identifying this sacramental common-ground affords the evangelist a solid foundation for further discussion. To reach those outside of, or on the margins of, the Church, we must first identify and celebrate that which we already share in common, using our shared sacramental orientation to redirect our gaze upward.

This shows us how we can communicate these sacramental truths to an unbelieving world.

When properly ordered, sacramental desire leads us straight to God. But if God is not at the helm, our human inclination toward festivity will be hindered by concupiscence, distorting the sacred good we desire into something profane. Godlessness will not remove the sacramental desire that defines our humanity, but it will corrupt it, presenting a decayed alternative to the Incorruptible Bread and Wine we crave by nature. Indeed, Pope Benedict XVI (Cardinal Ratzinger) was right to warn us of the dangers we would face as a result of our self-inflicted desacralization — a uniquely dangerous sacramental unraveling of our own making. In wide swaths of society, we have lost — no, abandoned — all appreciation and respect for the sacred. This neglect no doubt stems from a related rejection of the sacramental worldview. But since the world is fundamentally sacramental, insofar as it exists in and for God, who is not only holy but also the Source of Holiness, then we must view the world through a sacramental lens or risk obscuring reality. Both divine revelation and personal experience support this conclusion.

It is for this reason that our human experience comes into focus only when presented in its sacramental context. For this context extends beyond abstraction to absolute reality: the existential framework underlying the sacraments is as real as the tangible elements we taste and feel in them — realer, in the sense that the metaphysical reality precedes the physical. The two realities are inseparable, at once parallel and interwoven. Christ, the glorious Sacrament of all Sacraments, perfects and harmonizes this multilayered reality in the Incarnation. And now, by receiving Him in the Eucharist, we mystically enter the reality of the Incarnation. By receiving Christ sacramentally, we not only become like Christ but become “little christs,” empowering us to give the gift of self to the world. This is both the object and the fruit of sacramental communication.

This shows us what we should communicate to those who doubt the sacramental.

Returning to St. Augustine, we observe an outline of this sacramentality in his description of human desire: “Thou hast formed us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless till they find rest in Thee.” The sacramental life reminds us that we were made for more than this world; the sacramental life also leads us into the next. For we were designed in anticipation of a merging of the divine and the human, the visible and the invisible. We were created sacramentally. These observations highlight how sacramental communication is ingrained into existence itself, a reality we endeavor to emulate in our speech and actions. That is the sacramental communication the Church needs to effectively convey Christ’s message of hope to an unbelieving world.

So, how can we use this knowledge to conform our lives to Christ? How do we elevate our natural festivity, accentuating the good while suppressing the bad? The Holy Sacraments are the answer to both. When we participate in the sacramental life of the Church, we actively reorient ourselves to Christ, encouraging festivity as it was intended. In its highest form, channeled through the Church’s Holy Sacraments, this transcendent communication represents a real participation in the divine. Just as heaven meets earth in the Mass at the moment of consecration, so too does God share something in common with us, his people, when he communicates grace through the Sacraments. In those moments, we truly “become partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4). What a beautiful glimpse of heaven that is!

This shows us Whom we sacramentally communicate when we share the truth in love.

We have seen how, in the Sacraments, our need to communicate and our yearning for festivity are both ordered toward and sanctified by divine decree. The sacred is made tangible and the tangible, sanctified. It is a Holy Mystery that speaks to the heart of our relationship with God and fuels our pursuit of the Heavenly Banquet that awaits us. In English, the meaning of “communication” is rather reductive, so I want to turn our attention to the Latin it borrows from, communicatio, to reinforce this point. In Latin, the term evokes an active participation in, partaking of, and communing with something, with someone. This highlights the relationship that motivates our own communication — eternal communion with God. Only when understood in that context does the proper sacramental order fall into place, inspired by the Word of God made flesh. Communication incarnate. Christ Himself.

This divine communicatio is on full display in the Holy Mysteries, as they are known in the East (for indeed they are both holy and mysterious!), when God unites heaven and earth, the invisible and the visible, the symbolic and the real. The depth and power of sacramental communication are most profoundly revealed in the Eucharist, the source and summit of our faith — the ideal representation of sacramental communication. For when we consume the living flesh of Christ, we proudly remember, proclaim, and participate in the reality of the Incarnation, remembering that “the Son of God became man that we might become [like] God” (St. Athanasius).

Thus, we see that “Holy Communion” represents not only the particular Sacrament but the telos instilled in each one of us: that insatiable desire to be in eternal communion with God and humanity which St. Augustine so famously described. The cosmos’s sacramentality nudges us in the right direction; the Blessed Sacrament shows us the way home. Until that time, our task is to convert our lives into living sacraments — ensuring everyone gets their invitation to the eternal feast.

—

Noah Bradon is the director of marketing and executive producer at the University of Notre Dame's McGrath Institute for Church Life. Noah earned his Master of Arts in Theology from the University of Notre Dame and a Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of Central Florida. His graduate research explored the intersection of theology and communication, which remains a focal point of his work at McGrath. Notre Dame Bio: mcgrath.nd.edu/NoahBradon YouTube Channel: youtube.com/@NoahBradon (@NoahBradon across social) Portfolio / Personal Blog: noahbradon.com

DossPress.com is a place for Christian men and women to collaborate for the sake of our common edification by sharing their written works. As we strive to uphold a standard of doctrinal and spiritual soundness in the articles shared, we note nonetheless that the thoughts expressed in each article remain the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Doss Press.