Everything that meets our gaze is a parable veiling and unveiling its higher meaning.
Hugo Rahner
Sacramental vision is not instant photography of the world – it is something learned by patient education of our sensibility to the engagement of God with the world.
Alan Ecclestone
The sacramental principle means that God is present to humankind and we respond to God’s grace through the ordinary and everyday life in the world. Life in the world is sacramental – the medium of God’s outreach and of human response.
Thomas Groom
Image: Marianne Lettieri, Fenêtre de Réparateurs (Window of Repairers), 2020.
Vintage pincushions, wood, paper.
Take some time out and either walk or sit in a pleasant place
(garden, at the beach, having a coffee)
and, in turn, use your five senses.
Try not to think so much as experience.
Live the moment.
Live in the moment.
Be as engaged as possible with your surroundings.
Relax, and don’t try too hard.
Living sacramentally is about living as though the world has depth. Recall moments when such a moment has ‘spoken’ to you. Recall moments in your life when the world has ‘opened’ up to you in this way.
Gerard Manley Hopkins says that the harder you look at something the harder it looks at you. Let, or allow, a natural object yield its inner secret.
The only news I know
is bulletins all day
From immortality
Emily Dickinson
The Sacred Scriptures are time-honoured gifts for Christian people. We no longer have Jesus with us in the flesh, but we do have the text of Scripture, and we are at no disadvantage because of that. The words of Scripture offer us a very special place of encounter.
The Scriptures provide a privileged place of meeting between God and God’s people. As symbolic or sacramental texts they speak profoundly of God’s search for us as well as humankind’s quest for truth, meaning and hope. They open us up to the Mystery at the heart of all things.
The art images in this post are of installation work by Marianne Lettieri, who takes ordinary and every day objects, often cast offs, and creates a new vision with them. The image at the top of the post is called Church Ladies, and is made of ladies’ gloves embroidered with four-letter house-keeping words such as dust, wash, bake.
She says of her work, “I create art with found objects and everyday items that embody, preserve, and challenge social systems and individual identity. I want my work to elicit reflection and conversation around how people move through the world and mark time. As physicality becomes increasingly irrelevant to human activities in the digital age, artifacts once central to daily rituals and work routines become imbued with a sense of humanity that forms bridges to imagination. I present these castoff materials in new configurations, reinforcing the interconnectedness of people and communities through time and the shared human desire to remember.”
Source; Marianne Lettieri CIVA
For a printable PDF of the text of this meditation please click on the link below.
2 Comments
The senses as portals to the soul – literally portals in two of this artist’s work above.. Delightful.
And the humble labours on gloves transformed into angel wings is quite gorgeous. Looking at it instantly lets some God into my soul!
Thanks for your comment Chris. I too found the artist’s work beautiful in the way she transforms ordinary things in life into a contemplation of sacred.