A Life Lived Sacramentally

Believing in and Being Aware of God in All Things

My Ground of Being, always grounding me,
My Maker’s Bounding Line, defining me,

Come, hidden Wisdom, come with all you bring,
Come to me now, disguised as everything.

- Malcom Guite

I have always been attracted to the way in which people like J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis seemed to treat all of life as sacred. They spoke of even (or especially) the ordinary moments of the world as if they were filled with enchantment. As I read them more and more, their way of living tends to rub off on me. I too desire to see and worship God in all aspects of my life, and I know I am not alone in this way of thinking. I recently wrote about how Coleridge pictures this in his poem Frost at Midnight and I have come across many different versions of this in the writings of ancient and modern saints.¹ However, as I have been thinking on and attempting to live with this vision of life in recent years, I have been struck by the realization that there doesn’t seem to be a unifying name and a clear definition to go with it. Maybe this is simply an observation originating from my need for well-designed philosophical systems—so be it. This is the task I pick up here: to define and put words behind the idea of living a life in search of God in all things.

So first, a name. I propose we call it Sacramental Living. I have attempted to dig around to see if any other writers have used this name in conjunction with these ideas, and there have been very few. If I ever do find them, they specifically originate from the Eastern Orthodox or Anglican traditions. Chris Webb has written the best article I have found on the topic, and I will link it here. He was clearly thinking down the same path that I am, and I am thankful for his contribution. Using a term like sacramental is risky given its close association with the Sacraments, however as I will illustrate below, I believe this is actually a strength of using this word, rather than a weakness.² Further, it draws special focus on the idea of the sacred which is the core of the matter at hand—all things being spiritual.

Second, we need a working definition. There are objective and subject elements at play in this truth, so we will need both to be included in any explanation. Given all of that, I believe a sacramental life is devoted to two things: (1) the belief that all goodness, truth, and beauty experienced in our world come from God, and (2) the intention of communing with Him through those experiences. This definition will serve as the outline of the rest of this article as we work through both the belief one needs to hold and the practice of acting into that belief.

i. Belief

Before we can begin to practice a sacramental life, we must first know what is true. What do we need to believe about God and about His world? We need to start with a correct view of good, evil, and the doctrine of creation.

In the creation narrative of Genesis, God creates everything and repeatedly calls it “good” (Genesis 1:4, 1:10, 1:12, 1:18, 1:21, 1:25). Then, having finished His work, God steps back, and declares the whole of His creation “very good” (Genesis 1:31). This shouldn’t be surprising, we would expect a perfectly good God to create only good things. What may be surprising, however, is that this declaration of goodness is never revoked throughout the rest of Scripture. Yes, the Fall introduced evil into the world, but it did not remove the goodness embedded in all creation. In fact, it is a metaphysical impossibility for evil to fully destroy the Good.

We know that goodness is fundamental to reality, and this fact alone tells us something crucial about evil: namely, that it is a privation of the good. This classical view, held most prominently by Augustine, teaches that there was a time when evil did not exist—and that it now exists only as a corruption or distortion of what is good. Simply stated, evil is the absence of good. And as a privation, evil has inherent limitations.³ If it can only exist contingently—relying on the very good it opposes—then we can be confident that goodness can never be extinguished or fully overcome by the non-being that stands against it. Goodness is the fundamental reality of creation, because God is fundamental to all things.

This means we can have assurance that everything we see and experience in life contains some measure of goodness, and therefore some connection to the Good Creator who brought it into being.⁴ This same logic can be extended to truth and beauty. All the divine principles that are woven into the fabric of creation through God’s creative act remain, regardless of the negative effects of the Fall.⁵ We don’t live in a dualistic universe in which there are good spiritual forces at war against the fallen physical materials that have been overcome by pure evil. No, we live and move and have our being in God and in his Goodness, Truth, and Beauty. This is one reason why we constantly see the biblical authors referring to the blessedness of nature and the fact that our world still reveals God to us (Psalm 19:1, Psalm 50:6, Romans 1:20, Isaiah 6:3).

There are many profound implications here, but for now, the heart of the matter is this: we can commune with God through his creation. This is where the word sacred begins to be illuminated with deeper meaning. When we embrace this abundant vision of the world, we come to see that everything has spiritual significance, each thing bearing the imprint of its Maker. All of creation participates in God, and in its own unique way, reflects the Great Source of Light from which it came. All we have to do is look along the light beam.⁶

ii. Intention

This view of the world, taken on its own, is glorious—but unless we act upon it, we miss out on tasting the sweetness of the Divine life that stands before us. I love the word intention because it conveys the truth that our wills are involved in this pursuit. We must become aware of the sacred all around us and then we must also intend to fellowship with God through those things.

Intention also speaks to the mental activiy that is involved in sacramental living. Contemplation plays an essential role in this way of life, so we must cultivate a life of the mind, in which we train our mental muscles to find the connection to God in any given life experience.

An easy way to see this in action is by considering one of the capital-S Sacraments: the Lord’s Supper. When we partake of Holy Communion, we cannot experience it in its fullness unless we are prayerfully contemplating the presence of Christ⁷ and the significance of the Meal. Hypothetically, imagine someone approaching the Table with a completely blank mind, simply eating the bread and drinking the wine without a single thought. Or worse, imagine someone partaking of the elements while listening to and mentally engaging with a podcast on their phone. It’s not controversial to say that this person would fail to experience the full riches of Communion. That is because there is a step required after we interact with our sense perceptions. It doesn’t quite get us there to only taste the bread and the wine, we must press further up and further in. This reveals that in order to fellowship with the Divine, there has to be a kind of mental ascent through the sacred.

This same truth applies anytime we come face to face with any of the Transcendentals.⁸ First, we must become aware through our senses; then, we must center our intention on fellowshipping with God by tracing these Divine principles back to their Source.

I find diagrams really helpful for thinking through complex ideas, so I have created the one below to illustrate how we can think about this process.

Essentially, this image helps us visualize how we can move from our sensory experiences and awareness⁹, to a mental ascent, where you trace the Good, True, and Beautiful back to God who is the fundamental reality of these experiences.

Also, there are many different ways to practice this kind of tracing, but the two I want to highlight are thanksgiving and awe. Through thanksgiving, we can naturally practice fellowship with God. The Apostle Paul speaks to this when he writes, “For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving” (1 Timothy 4:4).¹⁰ Any time you discover something good in the world, give thanks to God for it. Any time you see something beautiful in the world, give thanks to God for it. Any time you uncover a new truth about the world, give thanks to God for it. Cultivate a James 1:17 posture where you acknowledge that “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.”

The same applies to awe. When you grow the practice of expressing wonder at God’s good and perfect gifts, you begin to experience fellowship with him through those very gifts. The key in both of these tracing exercises is to always make God the telos, or the end goal. Be wary to avoid falling into the Romans 1 pattern of worshiping the creature rather than the Creator. God is the fountain of all goodness, so let us give honor and thanks to the One who gives all to us.

This is a vast and beautiful topic—one that I want to continue pondering and giving voice to. Sacramental Living, as a name, points us to the spiritual and sacred reality of all that surrounds us. All we have to do is rightly order our wills to seek God through his creation. Once we begin to believe in, become aware of, and reach out to God in all things, we then become partakers of the divine immanence—and in doing so, commune with our abundant Creator.

Come, hidden Wisdom, come with all you bring,
Come to me now, disguised as everything.

- Malcom Guite

1. See the life and writings of J.R.R Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, John Piper, Jonathan Edwards, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, George Herbert, John Calvin, Plotinus, Augustine, David Bentley Hart, and many more.

2. I am Baptist and acknowledge that the word “sacrament” isn’t often used in the modern Baptist church. This is also unfortunate.

3. Han-luen Kantzer Komline, Augustine and the Limits of Evil (Luy, Levering, and Kalantzis, Evil and Creation. Bellingham, Washington: Lexham Press, 2020).

4. I acknowledge there will be a lot of questions at this point wondering about the things in life that seem to be “purely evil.” It is not my intention to try and work through those instances. Many smarter people than me have written and defended the privation theory against those types of questions.

5. I view the Fall not as introducing destruction per se, but instead introducing bondage (Galatians 5:1, Romans 8:22, Romans 7:23).

6. See C.S. Lewis, Meditations in a Toolshed.

7. I believe in Real Presence but think the metaphysics of it all is just one big mystery. “It is a mystery too sublime for me to be able to express, or even to comprehend, and to be more explicit, I’d rather experience it than understand it” - John Calvin

8. Beauty, Truth, and Goodness.

9. A quick note on “awareness.” I am using this term in close relation to our sensory experiences but also acknowledge that awareness requires a prior intention that is seeking out these divine experiences. There is a lot of philosophy that could be teased out between intention, sense perception, and will, but for sake of brevity, I am fine using awareness in a simpler way. If you want to read more, I would point you to David Bentley Hart’s All Things Are Full of Gods.

10. Added emphasis.