Not so long ago, I met a thoughtful, university-educated Englishman, who moreover spoke three languages. He also seemed to have a notably less materialistic, more spiritual orientation to life.
On reading something I had written, he asked me what a Sacrament was. As all his education had evidently failed him in this regard, I told him. But now I wish I might have told him rather more.
Your culture told you what aspirin was, I might have said.
Your culture told you what heroin was.
Your culture told you what psychotherapy was.
Your culture told you of countless different ways to address suffering, some good, some not-so-good.
But as I have suffered, nothing helped me more than the Sacraments.
Your culture told you what a sermon was.
Your culture told you what a hymn was.
Your culture probably told you that religion was a system of belief (but not a living reality of spiritual respiration. Or as St Augustine said: of eating what you become and becoming what you eat).
But you an educated, thoughtful Englishman, oriented to something beyond this materialistic world …
You were led (I would imagine) to think that religion was about singing hymns, hearing sermons and being told to be a good person.
Your English culture never told you what a Sacrament was.
(It never told me, either.)
Not surprisingly, dear thoughtful, educated friend, you and I were brought up in Protestant cultures.
In Protestant cultures, it is indeed easy not to know what a Sacrament is …
It is really dead easy not to know that there was a time—before the Reformation took thirty per cent of world Christianity with it—that all of Christianity (from Reykavik to Constantinople) not only understood what the Sacraments were—but knew that they were the Centre of the Faith.
(Yes, something like thirty per cent fell away. But in the English-speaking world, it was perhaps ninety per cent – at least in the first centuries after the Reformation. So that we Anglophones frequently unconsciously suppose that Christianity is not principally about the Sacraments – assuming we even know what a Sacrament is).
Dear thoughtful, educated, non-materialistic English friend, who does not know what a Sacrament is …
Dear thoughtful, educated non-materialistic friend, who may suppose that Christianity amounts to going to a church and being told what to do (and perhaps singing a dreary hymn or bopping to an Evangelical rock group) …
Dear thoughtful, educated, non-materialistic English friend, who are in search of something beyond this world, something transcendent, there is something I cannot imagine.
I cannot imagine if you were not English, but instead a cultivated Frenchman, Spaniard or Italian, you would need to ask me what a Sacrament was (even if you were the most materialistic of men.)
But in this English-speaking world, not having the slightest clue what Christianity is …
(At least, this is how I myself once was: clueless …)
You could likely turn to the New Age movement.
(At least, that’s what I did.)
Dear thoughtful, educated, non-materialistic friend …
Will you forgive me, if I tell you frankly: you were robbed?
(Just like me …)
Foreword for Monarchy by Roger Buck
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