The Sacrament of Today
The first time I tasted eternity I was ankle-deep in water gilded with golden hour light. The sun setting over the Mediterranean felt like an invitation to step into a world suffused with light, a world without an end, an amen not only heard, but felt in the warm wind on my face and the tide lapping around my bare feet. My toes dug into sand that shifted with each current, but somehow in that moment, I knew my life wouldn’t be swept out to sea like those grains.
Sperlonga, Italy
That experience of heaven greeting a passing day gave me a love for beaches. I know they aren’t heaven, but they’re the nearest measure I have. The Mona Lisa isn’t the subject painted on the picture, but that likeness drew something real from the person DaVinci so patiently depicted. The beach, for me, is a likeness that breathes with the reality of what is to come.
I moved to Los Angeles for photography and to be near the beach. When I press the shutter release on my camera, the light loitering in front of my lens is transferred to pixels that make a photograph. The picture intrinsically lacks something of the scene it rendered; it’s not the moment in full. But it is a memory that pulls me back to the place like a tide inviting me into the sea.
Theologians call this moment of overlap sacrament. The great systemitizers of the West strove to make a list of all those moments. Some say seven and others two. But in the East, sacrament suffuses all of existence. Like the light from the sunset on that Mediterranean beach, it touches everything.
The important moments in church traditionally called “sacraments” are just heightened versions of those moments. In baptism, submersion intimates the cold sting of death while emerging brings us back to the onrush of fresh air, a picture of life restored.
In communion we taste the body broken for us and the blood spilled on our behalf. The moments aren’t the things themselves, but they also are in some ways because they touch the realities we will one day, by grace, experience in full.
When my oblivious human heart grasps the meaning of these church sacraments (in itself a gift of grace), the sacraments of everyday life are thrown into sharper relief. Drinking my morning coffee is categorically different from having communion wine, but it can be a snapshot of fellowship. Going for a run isn’t the same as coming up after a cold baptism, but the breath burning in my throat recalls the day when the Spirit will rush into my lungs and my soul without effort.
To be in heaven is to see God face to face. But to embrace the sacrament of life is to learn how to see him today. Maybe it will feel like stuttering words or stolen glances, but imagine in eternity how it will be when you can talk to him with the articulation of angels and see him through the eyes of Christ? Heaven isn’t fully here yet, but this day can be the moment when you start to see it. For me it always comes with a simple prayer: “Come, Holy Spirit.”
Laguna Beach, California