'But the Beholder Wanting'

The Catholic Thing

By Fr. Robert P. Imbelli One of Saint John Henry Newman's best-known sermons is entitled "The Invisible World." In it he articulates one of the core convictions of his life and thought. He says of this invisible world: "though unseen, it is present; present, not future; it is now and here; the kingdom of God is among us." Unseen, yet present, because intimations of this other dimension abound everywhere. Indeed, in his Apologia, he speaks of the "sacramental principle," "the doctrine that material phenomena are both the types and instruments of real things unseen." Nowhere is this truth more actual than in the sacraments themselves, and, to a surpassing degree, in the Eucharist, "the sacrament of sacraments." Here the gifts of earth and the work of human hands are not spurned much less annihilated, but are transformed, transubstantiated into the very body and blood of the Son of God. In its unduly neglected "Decree on the Life and Ministry of Priests," the Second Vatican Council proclaims the Church's rich Eucharistic faith: The other sacraments, as well as every ministry of the Church and every work of the apostolate, are joined with the Eucharist and are directed toward it. For the Holy Eucharist contains the entire spiritual treasure of the Church that is, Christ himself, our passover and living bread. Christ, through his flesh, made alive and life-giving by the Holy Spirit, offers life to men and women who are thus invited and led to offer themselves, their labors, indeed all created things, in union with Christ. Hence, the Eucharist shows itself to be the font and the goal of all preaching of the Gospel. (no. 5). Yet, one of the sad marks of our secular age is a paradoxical double loss. Not only do we struggle to find access to the other dimension, that is, the spiritual, but we also seem impervious to the true sense of the material. Our sacramental sense has atrophied. Indeed, these two losses may be intricately connected. Charles Taylor, whose A Secular Age magisterially traced its emergence and accomplishments, has also diagnosed its perils. He speaks tellingly of the constricted horizon of its "immanent frame" - absent any sense of transcendence. He goes beyond detached analysis to lament "buffered selves" who flee community and relational commitment to one another. But Taylor also employs another term, even more suggestive and troubling: excarnation. To a great extent secular men and women, for all their surface materialism, live deeply disembodied, disincarnate lives. They often disdain the very tradition that bore them. They disaffiliate from communities that nourished them. They fantasize in the virtual sphere of the Internet, rather than risk face-to-face bodily encounters that alone can foster fulfillment. And, finally, in a last desperate attempt at excarnation, they strive to marginalize vulnerability and death to the point of destroying the body by drugs or suicide. Then, venturing beyond the philosopher's ordinary purview, Taylor recommends to his fellow Christians the one true remedy. He writes: "In a world where objectification and excarnation reign, where death undermines meaning. . .we have to struggle to recover a sense of what the Incarnation can mean." In the final chapter of his book, significantly entitled "Conversions," Taylor celebrates those "pioneers" who discovered new paths to transcendence beyond modernity's stunted imagination. Among them is Gerard Manley Hopkins, priest and poet, whom Newman himself had received into the Church. Hopkins's poetry is a sustained paean to the multi-dimensional richness of concrete particulars. Without once devaluing their material grandeur, he records the signals of transcendence they emanate, he espies the intimations of the Creator their very being broadcasts. His poem, "Hurrahing in Harvest," recapitulates his intense appropriation of Newman's sacramental principle: I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes, Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our...