Rohr: Epiphanies and Sacramental Living

“The way to any universal idea is to proceed through a concrete encounter. The one is the way to the many; the specific is the way to the spacious; the now is the way to the always; the here is the way to everywhere; the material is the way to the spiritual; the visible is the way to the invisible. When we see contemplatively, we know that we live in a fully sacramental universe, where everything is an epiphany.” Richard Rohr, from Just This, pp 9-11.

Rohr is telling us that every experience good or bad lived in the now, in the present moment, seen as a gift, can become a showing of an outer and inner experience of our relationship to God. A sacrament is an “outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.” (BCP 857) Living sacramentally means viewing everything we see and experience in the outer world as drawing, connecting us to an inner relationship with God.

The result is that every moment in the present moment can become an epiphany, a perception of the essential meaning of everything, an illumination, a discovery, a manifestation of the divine in ourselves and the world. We only need to have ears to hear, eyes to see, hands to touch, a nose to smell, and a mouth to taste it. Our head, our brain perceives what is happening.

We also must be grounded in the rest of our body in the now, the present moment, so that what we perceive in our head moves to our heart.

Joanna joannaseibert.com