Sacraments: enter the world of God's imagination.

I am a professor of theology, but I cannot tell you what sacraments are. The sacraments, you see, are not things to be explained but acts that engage us in a very special kind of imagination, an imagination that flows from the origins of things. The sacramental imagination is like a child's repeated "why?" If we kept answering the child's question, we would soon find ourselves unable to keep on. Sooner or later we would reach a moment where explanation loses its force and the "why?" takes over. We have, in effect, reached the origin of things.

From that moment on, only a special kind of imagination can carry us further. This is why it is so difficult to explain what sacraments are. If explanation could take us to the origins of our being, then reason and reflection could, in principle, satisfy us. The nature of the origins of our being, however, is not to be found in the mind but in the imagination of the Creator.

At the origins, there is only a special imagination, a primal imagination that can "imagine" us into being. This is the sacramental imagination that has the capacity to change our lives. The sacramental imagination operates where there is no "is" yet, where insurmountable problems of being have yet to be solved. The sacramental imagination is about surmounting those obstacles, about creating a new "is" in our lives.

As such, I cannot tell you what sacraments are, but I can tell you why we must enter that primal imagination to be re-created, reimagined anew. I intend to do this not with reason or philosophical reflection but with stories of my own experience with the sacramental imagination, my own trip to the source of all things. I must, then, be elementary. For the elements of the sacraments are the pathway to the imagination, the building blocks of the new creation. To engage the "why?" of the sacraments, I will tell you stories of the elements of the sacramental imagination: bread, wine, oil, and water.

BREAD

As it happens, bread is, literally, food for our imagination. Bread contains vitamin B, which, when slightly altered, becomes the hallucinogenic drug LSD. Some scholars believe that the infamous mass hallucinations at the Convent of Loudon in the 16th century were due to such an alteration. A virus had infected the wheat that grew around the convent and began to make LSD out of its vitamin B. When the good sisters baked their bread with this infected wheat, they began to hallucinate. It is not LSD, however, that makes bread an element of the sacramental imagination. It is the people who eat the bread.

Eva was schizophrenic. She suffered hallucinations that are apparently caused by the slight alteration of a vitamin-like molecule inside the brain. Eva was also our eucharistic minister. This was a concern for many of us. Eva also suffered violent seizures that involved superhuman strength. During one of her hallucinogenic seizures, Eva had picked up a heavy oak table and threw it across a room. A social worker brought her to our church with the hopes that socializing with people might have a calming effect on her. Many of us were afraid that Eva might injure someone if she started to hallucinate during Mass.

Nonetheless, there was something attractive about Eva. She portrayed a certain innocence about people that captured our imagination. Eva showed no favoritism about who she approached for a conversation. She felt equally comfortable carrying on a conversation with a 5-year-old child as with a 90-year-old adult. Moreover, Eva had no guile. She could ask Mrs. Rodriguez where she had bought her wig without any sense of impropriety.

Eva also seemed blissfully unaware that she was "mentally challenged." One could find Eva in the soup kitchen of our church, serving the poor as if she herself had driven from some comfortable household to help out those more needy than herself.

Most endearing, however, was Eva's clear and direct vision. Eva had no concept of the little white lie. When the liturgy committee made excuses why she should not become a eucharistic minister, Eva simply asked them if they were afraid of her schizophrenia. Eva's innocence was her charm, yet we all knew that that innocence could explode into hallucination at any moment.

And so it did. Apparently Eva had forgotten to take her medication that Sunday. During Mass, her hands began to tremble slightly. When it was time for Communion, that tremble became a visible shaking. Suddenly Eva rushed to the altar, grabbed the bread, and threw it up into the air. Little pieces of wheat rained on everybody. With a tremendous shout, Eva grabbed the chair in front of her and threw it at the door of our chapel. The chair hit the glass window on the door and shattered glass all over the crowd. Three strong men finally got a hold of Eva and pinned her to the floor until her seizure was over. The medics arrived, and Eva was rushed to the psychiatric ward of the local hospital.

The church was peaceful again. Eva was convalescing in the hospital and would not be out for another three months. Yet something was missing from our Mass. The innocence that Eva had brought to our community combined with the danger she posed seemed to be the incarnation of the mystery of the Eucharist. Such combination seemed to capture the very essence of the bread we ate at Communion.

Eva had shown us that the bread we ate at Mass was a bread of innocence and danger, a bread offered for us by an innocent One who placed himself in danger and was taken to an anguished crucifixion. Bread, in Eva's hands, revealed that life, at its most elementary, is filled with innocence and danger--the innocence of our first parents before the Fall mixed with the danger of a hostile world after the Fall.

Eva's hallucinations had allowed us to step into the sacramental imagination and revealed a startling comparison. The sacramental imagination is akin to a hallucination: bread becomes flesh and a man becomes a Lamb. The hallucinatory nature of the sacramental imagination snaps us out of the complacency of our everyday lives and reveals to us the very real danger of this world and the need for innocence.

The sacramental imagination allows us to experience the temptations and lures of this life as hallucinations even as it opens up to us the possibility of a new innocence that sees clearly and directly.

After the Fall, the sacramental imagination tells us, we all became schizophrenic. We mistook gold for God and pride for justice. We saw good in what was evil, and evil in what was good.

The sacramental imagination invites us to see the world as it really is, to shift our gaze from the hallucinations that have blinded us to the world as God made it. The sacramental imagination invites us to become innocent again, the only cure for our schizophrenia, the only way to see clearly once again.

Eva had shown us all that. When Eva left the hospital, it was unanimously decided that she should return again as our eucharistic minister. We had missed her innocence, and we needed her danger. The bread we ate from her hand would now take us to the origins of our own lives, to the original place where we had all started, to reimagine again the new world the Eucharist was proclaiming. We all knew by then that it would look a lot like Eva.

WINE

Ferment is all that separates wine from grape juice, yet it makes an the difference in the world. I was surprised, then, when I took the cup at the Mass given for the homeless of our center. It tasted of grape juice rather than wine. I did not feel I had had a proper Communion. And then I realized that most of the homeless we served were alcoholics.

It was one more disappointment to add to the many others that I had experienced since working there. I had started working at this mission in Seattle's Skid Road (the country's original skid row) because I was hoping to make a real change in the world. The Lord had said to sell all I had, so I gave up my well-paying engineering job at Boeing and went to work at this mission to "make a difference." After all, I was highly skilled and young. The problems at the mission, I felt sure, could be solved with energy and ingenuity.

Day, however, passed into day, and the problems did not go away or get any better. My idealism began to turn into cynicism. Whatever was making these people alcoholic and homeless was bigger than I was.

During those dreadful days at the center, my wife and I were blessed with the adoption of a 6 1/2-month-old Mexican American girl. Angela was also homeless. Her mother apparently had succumbed to the devastation poverty has on families and had decided that she could not take care of another child.

Now Angela was in our hands; our family would be her home. We wanted some rite of passage, however, to mark our new life together. Angela had already been baptized; so we decided on a christening.

When the chaplain at the center heard our plans, he volunteered to do the christening at the center. The idea seemed strange at first, but, as I thought about it, the suggestion began to make sense. What better place to "Christ"--en a baby than at an inn for the homeless?

My wife and I began to make preparations for the christening. We began to ask friends and acquaintances from our church to take part in the service. We were surprised when many made excuses not to participate. Apparently many felt it inappropriate to have our christening at the center. It became obvious that few from our church would attend. I began, then, to ask the homeless themselves if they would take part in the service. Jerry, who played the sax on the streets for donations, would play "What wondrous love is this?" as an offering. Harold, who used to be a ship's captain, would read the first lesson. And so the liturgical staff was appointed.

As the day for the christening came near, there was excitement in the streets. The homeless sitting outside begging for coins would stop me and ask me how the little girl was. Angela was the topic of conversation at our soup kitchen as well. Out of nowhere, a fellowship had revealed itself in the midst of a ragged group of panhandlers and hustlers.

The day of the christening came, and it seemed like the entire homeless community had shown up. The service was moving, the homeless wishing one of their own, a homeless girl, a family of her own. As Jerry played his sax, the offerings of bread and grape juice were brought to the altar. The time had come to take the cup and drink. Once again, I was surprised, the grape juice, this time, tasted like wine.

Since the time I had drunk last, a ferment had taken place, the grape juice had turned to wine. It had not been the ferment of yeast, which only adds alcohol to grape juice, but it was the ferment of the sacramental imagination revealing a profound fellowship where I thought none existed. Angela had stirred that imagination, its profundity reaching into the streets and revealing the presence of the One who also lived there. The sacramental imagination, however, had also penetrated my heart. I realized that L too, was part of this fellowship, that I, too, was homeless. God had not brought me here to save these people from themselves but to join their fellowship. I finally realized that to follow Jesus was not to change the world but to embrace it as he once had done, raising the cup of his blood on a wooden altar and creating a ferment that changed his blood to the fellowship called church. The world was not so much to be changed as to be fermented.

After the service, life on the streets went back to normal. Angela went on being a very sweet baby. The folk on the street would still ask me now and then about Angela, but such questions were unnecessary. Angela's presence had been fermented by the sacramental imagination into the invisible fellowship of the homeless. She would be one of them even as they now were part of us.

OIL

I often remember the wonderful smell of my mother's cooking. It was a welcome smell for it meant company was coming. It was a healing smell for it meant we would be spared from loneliness that day. Olive oil, garlic, peppers, and onions simmered in anticipation of a special event or family gathering. Excitement-brushed away whatever feelings of loneliness we might have felt. Soon our home would be filled with people also intoxicated with the smell-people talking, laughing, enjoying themselves. I always wondered what magic my mother used to produce the smell that would bring all those people to our home.

The Bible taught me the very special meaning of the olive tree and its oil--the oil that created my mother's magic in the kitchen. The olive tree grows at the border between life and death, between rich, brown soil and pale desert sand. The olive tree grows in rocky, almost barren ground at the margins of civilization, at the beginning of the wilderness. Yet from such a difficult life, the olive tree produces an oil of exquisite taste and a wonderful image of the church.

The church, like the olive tree, has always flourished at the margins. At the rocky, barren areas of our life together--the slums, the hospitals, the cynical heart, the moment of death--the church, like the olive tree, produces an oil of exquisite nature, an oil that speaks of life together, where desert silence is replaced by the bustle and excitement of a family visit. The church generously gives of its oil, in the making for thousands of years through the experience of difficult living in hostile circumstances. The church gives of its oil to those who find themselves in rocky, barren ground, at the border between life and death, not to purify or to anoint the dead or dying but to announce a family visit and to stimulate hope and anticipation of a joyful meal around a festive table. The sacramental element of oil is not for the dying but for the lonely.

There is, after all, no lonelier feeling than being seriously ill. At least that is how I felt when sharp pains in my abdomen sent me to the hospital a few years ago. Suddenly I was set apart from everyone else. Restricted to a bed in the hospital and far away from the familiar surroundings of home, I felt a stranger in somebody else's house. My body also became a stranger to me. This painful mass of flesh was not the body that silently supported my everyday life without complaint or grumble. This body had now taken me away from home, and I felt alone, very alone. My loneliness was accentuated when the doctor informed me that my pains were due to a gall bladder that had to come out. In a few minutes, I was to be wheeled into the operating room. It was then that the real loneliness started.

A nurse began to prepare me for the operating room, a ritual that began to strip the last vestiges of familiarity with the life I had known just two days before. The nurse shaved my abdomen and then painted my chest with a brown disinfectant. Several tubes began to sprout from my nose, mouth, and arm.

I was slowly turning into some kind of machine. The hospital room was austere, not a single painting or even a window by which I could reassure myself that I had not lost touch with reality. Instead I was greeted by grotesque machines and even more grotesque human beings who were covered from head to foot with strange clothing in an unreal color. I had entered a barren, frightful territory.

I was groggy when I woke up from surgery. A burning, intrusive pain surged from my belly. I looked down and saw a six-inch cut through the middle of my abdomen. The reality of what had just occurred struck me with sudden force. Someone had taken a knife and actually cut my belly open.

It was then I noticed a strange form on the wall directly in front of me. It was the portrayal of a man in great pain. He had been cut, too. His belly had also been cut open, and his hands and also his feet. I suddenly became very angry. What kind of a cruel place was this hospital? What had they been thinking of when they put up this gruesome wall decoration to greet the ill?

When the anesthesia wore off, I realized that the wall decoration was a crucifix, a cross of olive wood with the figure of the pierced and cut crucified Lord hanging to it. I had entered the world of the sacramental imagination.

Strangely enough, relief was my first reaction when I realized that the gruesome form in pain was a crucifix. By now I knew that my illness had taken me to another land, a territory where the ill must walk, a place where family and friends cannot walk with you, a geography that must be walked alone. It is terrain that is more desert than soil, a place of unimaginable lonely proportions, the land where olive trees flourish. I also knew that I was not alone in this land. There was a certain solidarity with the crucified Jesus. His eyes were not looking at me as if a rare creature but as One who was walking this strange territory with me.

The next day my pastor asked me if I wanted to be anointed with oil. I wondered if he knew something I didn't. Was I terribly sick? Was I in danger of death? My questions were soon put at ease as I heard words of celebration and saw the oil puddle up and quickly seep into my skin as water does when it meets dry soil. This was no farewell rite but a family visit.

The oil and the words stirred my imagination; they reminded me of previous family visits, where the smell of my mother's simmering oil mingled with the sounds of friends and family happily conversing. The oil connected me to the ancient and broad trunk of the church. I was reminded that the territory I found myself in had been walked before by the man hanging from that olive tree and by all his disciples after him. My loneliness faded away. The sacramental imagination had taken over and began to re-imagine my health, not just of body but also of spirit.

I am now walking around without a gall bladder. I am reminded of it anytime I eat anything that is too oily. I am also reminded, however, that oil is a medium of the healing sacramental imagination. I am not as afraid as I used to be of unfamiliar places, of rocky and forbidding territory, for now I know that that's where olive trees grow, the place of the sacramental imagination, our true home of olive trees and honey, where we shall someday sit at a large banquet table and enjoy the delicious smells of a mother's cooking.

WATER

I was baptized on Sept. 15, 1951 at a church near the blue-green waters that lap the coast of Cuba. For the next ten years it seemed that the waters of my Baptism would be one with the waters of the Atlantic and Caribbean seas. The warm tropical sun of Cuba warmed my childhood, a childhood oblivious to the storm that was rapidly becoming a revolution. On Nov. 3,1960, I was baptized again, a baptism of fire. My family and I crossed the waters of the Atlantic to the safety of Miami, Florida, crossed from the frying pan of Castro's revolution into the fire of cultural and prejudicial shock.

At first, my child's eyes saw a wondrous land. The language and customs were exotic and exciting. Everything seemed to have a magical quality for it was so different from our own language and customs in Cuba. Later, however, the wonder left. I was playing outside with some new friends who were teaching me how to play a new game, football.

As we were playing, a couple of teenage boys accosted us. They were yelling words I had learned but that didn't make sense, words like Cuban and pig. Some of the boys around me began to run, and so did I. Next thing I knew, one of the tall teenage boys had tackled me to the ground. I tried to get up, but my leg wouldn't move. My leg had been broken at the hip joint.

My father came running and attended to me. He tied my legs together in a makeshift splint and with help from the other boys placed me in the back of our station wagon and took me to the hospital. When my mother and father left the hospital, I was panic-stricken. I could speak little English and had never been away from them before.

When the nurse turned off the lights for the night, my imagination ran wild. I saw monsters and devils peeking at me from the darkness. I began to cry. I was horrified. Then the lights came on. A nurse with obvious disgust once again said words I understood but that didn't make sense, Cuban, crap. Apparently I had disturbed the other children in the ward, and she was rolling me someplace where I couldn't disturb them.

The nurse rolled me into an empty room. I was crying even harder and louder for her brisk manner had scared me even more. I must have made quite a racket because the next thing I knew, the nurse was tying a gag around my mouth. Then she tied my arms and the leg that wasn't broken to the bed. I knew then I would never see Cuba again. I prayed in the darkness the prayers of children, Hail Marys, Our Fathers, and Glorias, but no one answered. I felt totally abandoned. Exhausted, I fell asleep. During the night, the nurse had taken the gag from my mouth and untied my arms and leg. She couldn't untie, however, the bindings she had placed on my spirit, the feeling of profound abandonment.

By the time I reached high school, the binding that had been left on my soul had become pretty tight. The feeling of profound abandonment had become more real to me than the Father I had prayed to that horrible night. Eventually, I decided that God was but a fiction of the imagination, that abandonment is the true reality, and I must do what I can not to let that reality get the better of me again.

I chose science as my reality. I did not have to face God there. Nonetheless, as I went on to college and successfully pursued my own career in physics, I met my wife, a Lutheran woman from central Ohio of Mid-western values and deep faith. Slowly but surely she had filled my sense of abandonment with a sense of family. By the time we had reached Seattle, I had come back to the church but this time as a Lutheran.

It was an uneasy return. Something did not feel right. I had made a sort of peace with God, yet God did not seem to want to leave me alone. Eventually, I left my scientific career and began to come to terms with this restless God. I applied for admission into a Lutheran seminary.

The Lutheran Church was glad to have me. They were desperately looking for Hispanic pastors. I entered the Lutheran seminary in Chicago with the strangest feelings. I knew God was calling me to the seminary, but I also knew that somehow this was not the right place for me. Nonetheless, I felt unable to resist. I had to go. Someone was calling me from a place beyond my soul, a place of the imagination-beyond my understanding. Someone was calling me from the darkness of that abandonment I still carried inside me, and I had to go and see Who it was.

I finished the program at the seminary and was ordained a Lutheran pastor. My first call was to a church in Allentown, Pennsylvania that wanted to start a ministry with Hispanics. The ministry went well. Within a year I was pastor of about 100 Hispanic men and women from Puerto Rico, Peru, and Central America.

These folk, however, were very poor. The Puerto Rican group lived in Allentown's housing projects, and the Peruvians and Central Americans were economic and political refugees with little or no documentation. We were a successful church in terms of numbers, but we were a poor church with not even a chapel we could call our own. Nonetheless, the Lutherans of Allentown were kind and generous and let us use their facilities. It seemed I had heard the call correctly.

Trouble was brewing, however. Some of the members of the English-speaking church and the senior pastor were having second thoughts. Words were being addressed to my members, words I understood but now made all the sense in the world, Puerto Rican, pig, crap. I had come full circle from the words that were the source of my abandonment to words that now would spell out the beginning of a new abandonment.

The abandonment came swift. A year after the words started, I found myself in the office of the senior pastor being asked for my resignation. In a sense, I was an assistant pastor in his church and technically part of his staff. Yet I had become pastor of a community within a community, a community of people who had come to depend on my ties with the English-speaking world for their survival.

When I heard the senior pastor ask for my resignation, I thought I would buckle under with despair, but a force that came from nowhere, an energy that forcefully took hold of my spirit and defiantly proclaimed that I would not abandon our small Hispanic community. I would not resign. I would have to be officially sent away.

When I left his office, I imagined the worst. I thought about the forces that had brought me to this place and wondered Who had called me into this new darkness of my soul. Who had brought me, once again, to this place of abandonment? Who was playing with my feelings and asking me to replay that painful night of my childhood?

The answer came from the Lutheran bishop who had now become aware of my refusal to resign. Would I consider forming a new church, a Hispanic church separate from the host English-speaking church? The small Hispanic group was overjoyed when I told them the news. I asked them what name they would like to give the church and without hesitation, they unanimously chose to be called Saint Martin of Porres Lutheran Church.

Having been Roman Catholic, I vaguely remembered hearing about Saint Martin. He was the mulatto saint of Lima, Peru who had been canonized by Pope John XXIII in 1962. Moreover, Saint Martin's feast day oddly coincided with the date of my exile.

The significance of this fact did not strike me at first. My first thought was how I would explain this to the bishop. Lutherans may name their church Saint Peter or Saint Paul, but they hardly ever named their church after any saint who was not mentioned in the Bible. I suddenly found myself afraid again. I thought the bishop might take back his offer because the name would be too "Catholic." Afraid, I prayed to Saint Martin to help me find the way.

To my amazement, Saint Martin heard me. During my ministry in Allentown, I had become friends with some of the staff at the Jesuit Center in Wernersville, Pennsylvania. Having heard of my dilemma, they offered me a chance to take the 30-day Ignatian retreat during this time of tribulation. I gratefully accepted it and went on to Wernersville to rest from my struggles.

My first three days in Wernersville I slept. I was exhausted in body and spirit. When I finally regained some energy, I felt something odd. It was a feeling I had felt a long time ago but had long since forgotten. A profound and silent peace engulfed me. Now I heard another voice. It was a voice without sound, a voice that came not from the core of my being but from beyond the core, across that place where I ceased to be me.

The voice was calling me again--not to a place of abandonment but to the place of my Baptism, the place where I first had joined the community called the Roman Catholic Church, the place of my origins and formation. I began to hear the soft rushing sounds of the waters of my Baptism, dissolving the bindings on my spirit, becoming a siren song beckoning my return.

At Wernersville, I found my way back. God had been calling me back to the church of my Baptism. Today I am back in the Roman Catholic Church and a professor of theology. My doctoral thesis was on Saint Martin of Porres. I left the Lutheran Church, however, a small legacy of my Roman Catholic inheritance--the only Lutheran church named after Saint Martin of Porres. Just as one November 3 had taken me across the waters to a terrible abandonment, another November 3, Saint Martin's feast day, helped me cross other waters, the original waters of my Baptism, back home into the embracing arms of the fellowship of the Roman Catholic Church.

That fellowship is now my constant joy. Though, as a young boy, I had lost my way, I found my way back home. Oddly enough, this was possible through the loving understanding of my Lutheran wife and her church. My way back home had been a labyrinth. Yet such is the sacramental imagination, obstacles are reimagined so that crooked ways become straight and mountains are razed.

I am a professor of theology, but I cannot tell you what a sacrament is. I can only tell you why sacraments are. Saint Paul has written that "neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Rom. 8:38-9).

Saint Paul was talking about the power of the sacramental imagination, the power to reach across insuperable odds, to claim back God's own, to go back to the origins of all being to reimagine and re-create. Each of us lives with insuperable odds, inside labyrinths of our own making and some over which we have no control. For me, it had been the Cuban revolution, the Atlantic Ocean, and the spiteful heart of a young nurse at a Miami hospital. For Eva, it had been the effects of a terrible disease. For Angela, it had been poverty and the desperation of a panicked mother. We had all fallen victim to war, poverty, disease, or human hatred and pride. Yet none of us was left alone to lose the way.

Bread, wine, oil, and water became the elements for a new creation. The sacramental imagination changed the terms under which we exist, bringing innocence to a dangerous world, fellowship to places of abandonment, healing to the sick, and the way back for those who get lost in the complex and confusing world of the human condition.

Alex Garcia-Rivera is a professor of theology at the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, California and a frequent writer for El Momento Catolico.