Gilead and Sacramental Vision
The language of sacramental vision is likely foreign to most American Christians today, regardless of background. In Protestant churches, sacraments are representations and symbols: they serve as teaching tools, and reminders of God’s grace and love. In the Catholic Church, sacraments are actions: they are something that you do to receive grace. Marilynne Robinson, in her novel Gilead, offers an alternative representation of sacrament and sacramental vision in her character John Ames. In Gilead, the reader follows John Ames as he meanders through his formative memories and experiences at the end of his life, in a series of vignettes and reflections. Each vignette reaffirms Ames’ sacramental experience of life; he finds God even in the dullest moments, perhaps more than in moments of religious practice. Again and again, Ames returns to the times when God reveals Himself in the natural world.
Ames’ discovery of God in the everyday illustrates Alexander Schmemann’s concept of participatory knowledge. In his exploration of the relationship between sacrament and symbol, the twentieth century Orthodox priest and theologian distinguishes between “discursive knowledge”—knowledge about something—and “participatory knowledge”—knowledge of or in something (141). Schmemann describes symbol as something that allows people to understand God without actually experiencing God. Symbol offers insight into the parts of God that are undiscoverable by intellect or reason alone. Schmemann labels this discovery epiphany.
Schmemann’s epiphany requires acknowledgement of the “natural symbolism of the world,” or “the symbolical structure of the world” —something that John Ames considers throughout Gilead. Schmemann suggests that all of God’s creation is a symbol of sorts, designed to reveal God by nature of its being; since God cannot be revealed by intellect alone, God must be discovered through participation in this natural symbolism. Ames illustrates sacramental participation in this symbolic structure when he reflects on a childhood epiphany that he experienced during an impromptu kitten baptism. As he and several companions imitated his father, a pastor, in baptizing newborn kittens, Ames recalls encountering anew the mysteries of baptism as the acknowledgement of sacredness in natural being. He describes it as “really feeling its [the being’s] mysterious life and your mysterious life at the same time.”
Ames experiences the kitten as a kitten, not as a symbol of the holy, but he still experiences something sacred in that moment. Likewise, the water of baptism is not a reminder of something holy, but a vessel of holiness, in its “natural quality.” Although still a symbol, he realizes that baptism does not make things holy but recognizes or draws out the holiness that already exists within them. In this kitten baptism, Ames experiences the potential of the natural world to allow contact with the Divine—its sacramentality—and therein experiences epiphany about God.
Ames’ sacramental vision is one in which the natural world is constantly converging with God, and can pull believers along with it, should they choose to recognize its potential. He is ultimately describing theosis—the idea that the process of growing to know God is the same as slowly becoming one with the nature and being of God. Since the world is God’s creation, and creation contains bits and pieces of its creator, interacting with the world reveals elements of God’s nature. What is this experience of the nature and being of God but sacrament—the interaction of the human and Divine, the meeting of mystery, reason, and knowledge? To choose to see God scattered throughout one’s day-to-day experiences is to adopt sacramental vision; it is to know God on a spiritual and ontological level as well as an intellectual and rational one; it is to move towards communing with God, not just thinking about Him. It is to participate in God. If sacramental vision is the process by which we become aware of the mysteries of God’s nature, and thereby closer to God, it is an essential component of the thriving Christian life.