An excellently relevant quote. Thank you.

Regarding your post, as well as the fabulous comments, I was reminded of (Saint Silouan’s I think) notion that: once a person’s heart becomes the altar and the throne of God it was intended to be, (His true temple), he does not even need to visit the earthly Temple… -although he probably does so and desires to do so more than all those who expound on the earthly temple’s significance.

Thanks once again Fr. Stephen. You make me sometimes younger and sometimes older but always better.

My own simplification (translation) is that because of the identity of each thing that God implants in each thing as He creates it, that thing is able to respond to His voice and be ordered by Him, through us (and directly from time to time). It is what enables us to carry out the commandment to dress and keep the earth and bring it under our dominion.

It is not in our intrinsic power to do so, any more than it is intrinsic to the priesthood to celebrate the sacraments, but an authority delegated to us by God and only properly carried out when we are in obedience.

All the world is sacrament, because (in a non-liturgical sense) all people are priests (or the other way ’round?) That is the other aspect to you thought I think that deserves some further exploration and comment. I’d like to see it any way.

The Logos, or the Word of God, was in the world since its inception, on one hand through the reasons/inner principles of things, which are created images sustained by God’s eternal reasons, and on the other hand through human persons who, in their living rationality, are the images of the Word of God’s own Hypostasis. They were created in order to think the reasons of things through together and in dialogue with the divine Personal reason.

The divine reasons are not only meanings of the divine Logos’ infinitely deep richness, but they are also rays of divine life and power which radiate from the ocean of life and power that is hypostasized in the Son and Word of God as well as in the Father and the Holy Spirit. Created things, too, as rational images of these rays radiating from them, are therefore units of power and life. Their ultimate substratum is the energy which has in itself a meaning or a complexity of meanings. This energy includes in itself the tendencies of certain indefinite interferences, which produce those units that are connected among them. Created things are the created images of the divine reasons given material form, images filled with power and carried by the tendency of innumerable references among themselves. In the state of these images given material form are reflected the meaning, the power, and the life of the divine reasons in their unity, which comes from the divine Logos.

I daresay this is fairly thick reading for most. Two quick observations. He does not mean by “reason” the mere thinking process we often mean by the word. Rather, it is a play on “Logos.” Thus “logicity” would be a way to render “rationality.” “Logoi” would render reasons, etc.

More to the point: every thing in creation exists as “image” of the “logoi” or “reasons” in the One Logos. They are “rational images” (logika ikona) and hypostasizations of the “rays of divine life and power.” Their “ultimate substratum” is the “energy which has in itself a meaning or a complexity of meanings.”

I find it easier to say, “The world is a sacrament.” I also like to say that “everything is an icon.” Sacrament and icon are ways of speaking about the relationship that everything (Everything!) has to the logoi that exist within God. When Staniloae (or St. Maximus or other fathers) speak about these logoi and their images as a “meaning” or a “complexity of meanings” they do not mean “meanings as mere ideas.” That is the nonsense of two-storey secularism (which is a variation on Nominalism as I’ve described in earlier posts). It is important, it seems to me, to find language to stress the realism of these things. Sacrament does that fairly well.

This is probably the most indecipherable response I’ve ever written to a comment.

The rest of creation is meant to be part of that communion through us. It has built into it the proper form to bear the presence of God and be part of the celebration of His Life that sacrament is all about.

Please Fr. correct me if I’m wrong.

Excellent words as always. I took away two big gems from this:

1. The tendency of the West to look at all of life as “two things”. I suspect I’ll take years to unpack that one. Currently I’m of the mind that “fullness” and “two things” are both valid signature of God’s work in our world, but maybe time will tell otherwise.

2. This one is hard to put in a single phrase. I believe it’s what Philip Jude was wrestling with. You presented the idea of sacrament as I’d never heard it before. As you said, most people “think about the Body and Blood of Christ and concern ourselves with questions of why and how.”

But you instead suggested that all is sacrament. The Liturgy where we “meet Christ” in the Eucharist may in fact be the place where we first begin to see bread and wine in the proper way, but it is only the beginning of sight. Once we begin to “see” through that weekly experience, we should move on to view all of life through those eyes. We also need to move forward in the way we look at the brothers and sisters around us [The Day the Earth Stood Still] and understand how they are part of us, how we all are one body.

Truly I’m not surprised you’ve had such a huge number of responses to this post. If people pay attention and understand at all, this is mind-blowing stuff and not the least bit neutral.

May God bless your ongoing ministry. Oh, and I wouldn’t be surprised if God chose to witness to those around you when you go through the process of “falling asleep”. Best not predict what you have no control over. (grin)