In his poem “God’s Grandeur,” Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins observes, “the world is charged with the grandeur of God.” And for all our toil and trade, “nature is never spent.”
If Hopkins is right, then the world is filled with signs of the sacred. Our job, as today’s gospel reveals, is to read those signs and know that God is with us now and forever.
There are days when the signs are obvious: in the sunrise, wide-eyed wonder of a child, compassion of a friend, reaction of someone surprised by our care.
And then there are the other days—when the signs hide behind the clouds and the calamities, heartbreak, and frustrations of life.
These are the days when we are challenged to see with the eyes of faith. To turn “seeing is believing” into “believing is seeing.” To live sacramentally.
Living sacramentally is not merely about recognizing God in what we see, smell, touch, taste, and hear. It’s about being a living sacrament of God ourselves—in our homes, places of work, neighborhoods, churches, and communities. It’s about loving others, spreading peace and joy, being decent and ethical, fighting for people’s rights, caring for the Earth, and serving those in the greatest need?
Today and every day, how can we live more sacramentally?
—Jeremy Langford is the director of communications for the Chicago-Detroit Province Jesuits and author of Seeds of Faith: Practices to Grow a Healthy Spiritual Life ©2007 Paraclete Press, Brewster, MA.