The Sacramental Imagination

I grew up in a neighborhood parish of the nineteen thirties and the nineteen forties, more progressive than most because we had the dialogue Mass. I lived each year through the cycles of the liturgical seasons and devotions to the saints. I knew the warmth and comfort of this environment long before I went to school. While the Catholic school which I attended celebrated both community and story (sometimes better than other times) there seemed to be little connection between the religious environment and the doctrines I learned from the catechism. We lived the sacramental (incarnational) imagination, but we really did not know what we were doing or why. Only later when, heavily influenced by David Tracy and John Shea, I began my several decades of sociological and later story telling work on the religious imagination did I begin to grasp what we were doing and why, and the enormous appeal that the sacramental imagination possessed.

It is why people like being Catholic and stubbornly refuse to leave. When I explain my theory to the laity they are rarely surprised. Of course that's why we stay, they say. Have you just figured that out?
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Catholic stories are incarnational, they speak of God incarnate in the human condition at Christmas time and God going down to the valley of death with us and returning alive with us on Easter. They speak of a community of the followers of Jesus bonding with one another to pass on the heritage which is formed by the stories. The doctrines are latent in the stories. Both are necessary, but the stories come first. Alas, for much of which passes for Catholic religious education, the stories are discarded in favor of the doctrines. All the Trinitarian and Christological controversies in the early Church, as important as they may be, do not have the appeal or the value of the image of Madonna and Child.

(As the Orthodox seem to know better than we do, the story of the Trinity is the story that God is a relationship and that is our task to reenact for those around us, the mystery of the Love that binds God together. It is not an optional and unintelligible story for them, as it seems to have become for us.)

The doctrines help us to stay in the Church when we find ourselves reflecting on religion (as least when the doctrines are properly explicated), but the stories make us want to stay in the Church.

I'm "still" a Catholic because of the stories I heard while I was growing up in the nineteen thirties and forties in St. Angela parish on the west side of Chicago. I have reflected on the stories and on the doctrines which I learned in my various educational endeavors and, with the help of Fathers Tracy and Shea and my theory of the sociology of religion, I see how the stories (now embraced in what Paul Ricoeur calls the second naivete ) and the community still drive my religious life and underpin my religious faith.

The only difference between my experience and that of most other Catholics who are "still" Catholic is that my various professions (priest, sociologist, story-teller) have forced me to make more explicit the link between St. Angela in 1934 and the present than has been necessary for them. They also tend to think that my explanation when I offer it is self-evident.

Where does the institutional Church fit into this paradigm of why I am a Catholic? Do I think that the stories are more important than the Church? That is a foolish question. The Church exists to tell the stories (and, as Father Shea says, to break the bread, to preside over the community). It also exists to protect the stories from misunderstanding and distortion down through the years and the centuries. It is not an option, it is essential.
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We worship the God we encounter in the stories, the God we reflect on in our doctrines, we do not worship our institution or our leaders. We acknowledge the necessity of the former and the modest respect due the latter.
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There are problems with the Catholic imagination. Precisely because it believes that God lurks everywhere, that everything can be a sacrament, and that all is grace, it is prone to superstition, folk religion, idolatry, and institution worship.
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Doctrine never exhausts the truth and the beauty of story. Thus, if I am asked whether I believe in the Madonna and Child or the Incarnation, my answer is that they are one and I believe in both. The doctrine of God become human is surely true, though it is an abstract statement of the truth contained in the story which begins with a journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem.

It is worth noting that it took four centuries to make the doctrine reasonably precise while the story was there at the beginning. Both require one another, but it is the story that appeals to the total human. It is the beauty of the story which holds Catholics to their heritage.

I'm still a Catholic because of the beauty of the Catholic stories. So are most of us Catholics.

An appeal to beauty may seem a weak argument; surely it will seem weak to many of the Catholic conservatives who write in this book. Again I remind them that we were Catholics for several centuries before the doctrines acquired some precision. It was the beauty of the stories and the lives inspired by the stories, particularly the Christmas and Easter stories which appealed to those who heard them. Whatever appeal our idiot leaders have left us is still to be found in the beauty of the stories.

Beauty is not opposed to truth. It is simply truth in its most attractive form.