May,1  2022

Sacramental Vision

Dear beloved sisters and brothers in Christ Jesus.

we are in Easter Season (liturgically) and in spring. We are able to sense the newness of life and thus our negative attitude shifts over to the positive side of joy and peace. Our focus these days in our parish is to help our children to mature themselves in Christian faith with the sacraments of First Communion and Confirmation.
I have few extracts of the reflection of Christine Valters, inviting us to celebrate the sacramental nature of all life and all beings to share with you. One of the classic definitions of a sacrament is something that is an outward, visible sign of an inward, invisible grace. In the Christian church there are different rituals that are considered to be sacraments. The Catholic Church has seven sacraments, while other denominations count fewer among their number.

However, this idea of sacramentality extends beyond the formal sacraments such as Baptism, Matrimony, Communion, and the Anointing of the Sick. This sense of sacramentality, rooted in the Incarnation, extends our vision out to the world so that everything can be a sacrament, meaning every person, creature, plant, and object can be an opportunity to encounter something of the Divine Presence in the world. Sacramentality is a quality present in creation that opens us up to the Sacred Presence in all things. Sacraments reveal grace. When viewed through this expansive lens, we discover that the more we cultivate intimacy with the natural world, the more we discover about God’s presence.

All of our interactions with nature can be sacramental, and all the ways nature extends herself to us are sacramental as well. Sacramentality breaks through our surface obsessions in the world and plunges us into the depth of the Sacred at every turn. It is a spontaneous reminder of God’s creative upwelling and expansive love, calling us to love beyond boundaries. This discovery that every creature and every created thing can be a window of revelation into the divine nature is an invitation to fall more and more in love with the world. When we encounter nature as sacrament, we can no longer objectify it. Sacramental vision means not only that we grow in our love of God’s ways in the world but also that we grow in our sense of kinship with creation.

There is a sense of God’s incarnate presence in creation that shimmers forth to reveal the holiness of all things. Notice how your senses come alive when you walk out in the world aware of its sacramental nature. What do your eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and skin each reveal to you about how God is alive in the world around you? . . Fr. Eslin Pereira, CMF  

God bless you all!  
Fr. Eslin Pereira, CMF