1
" Sacraments and the rituals surrounding them are not harsh burdens placed on humans by God—rather, they are manifestations of God’s abundant grace. To put it simply, the sacraments are not for God; they are for us. Sacramental worship exhibits a deep understanding of our nature as human beings: our dependence on the senses, on food and water for sustenance, our need for tangible signs. What better way for God to supply us with sanctifying grace than through these signs made alive?
In contrast to the onerous rites of the Old Testament, which signified a divine reality without actually transmitting it, the Christian sacraments are signs that effect what they signify. We can discern, in a shadowy, inchoate form, the body of Christ’s church in the people of Israel, just as we can see in Israel’s sacrificial worship an anticipation of our sacramental worship—but the sacraments, as extensions of the Incarnation, are not just symbols. They are alive with Christ’s power, which is Life itself. To quote Vonier once more: “Sacraments are, then, truly an energy that comes from Christ in person, a radiation from the charity of the Cross; a stream of grace from the pierced side of Christ. "
― , Into the Deep: An Unlikely Catholic Conversion
3
" ...So many of these encounters are with people who, like all of us to one extent or another, have unruly bodies and desires: the woman at the well, the bleeding woman, the harlot, the adulterer, the demoniac, the leper, the blind, the crippled, the corrupt tax collectors. In these encounters, Christ affirms their humanity and dignity, restores wholeness, and calls them into a harder, holier way of life. And lest I forget, when I cast myself into these stories, I must remember that I am the crippled man, I am the harlot. I am the one being healed. "
― , Into the Deep: An Unlikely Catholic Conversion
4
" In those first months of discernment, I became captivated by the Catholic imagination, with its double vision. My taste for paradox, for mystery, had been an anticipation of this and found new completion there. Metaphors still flourished, but what they revealed was real, not simply creative human conjurings. God has etched into the created order echoes and figures that signal a divine reality. Nothing is ever simply itself, but is also a mirror of God. While the Protestant imagination can be said to be dialectical, thinking in terms of either-
or and stressing the unlikeness of things, the Catholic imagination is analogical—incarnation-seeing things in terms of likeness and unity, welcoming paradox. There is no schism between faith and reason, between the sacred and secular, between the natural and numinous; God, the ground of all Being, inhabits each of these realms. All of reality is engraced. "
― , Into the Deep: An Unlikely Catholic Conversion
5
" In truth, submission should be the spiritual posture of every Christian. Receptivity, obedience, surrender—these are not weaker, delicate traits best left to the ladies. These are the lifeblood of spiritual vitality. Mary, in her yes to God that broke open our world, her yes that became an eternal bridge between God and humankind—in this self-abandonment to the divine will, we find the pinnacle of human becoming, the perfect response of creature to Creator. This surrendering of the will does not obliterate it, making us some kind of automaton—no, it sharpens it, heightens it, by redirecting it toward the good, the beautiful, the true. "
― , Into the Deep: An Unlikely Catholic Conversion
6
" Even if I wanted to appeal to some objective ground for womanhood, I was being trained to think in a strictly secular, postmodern mode—a mode that favors the particular over the universal, that denies the existence of any objective ground from which to approach this question. In this understanding, all of our conceptual categories, our entire sense of reality, is fundamentally created through language—our words make the world, rather than express it. Any meaning we ascribe to bodily realities is arbitrary and ultimately fictitious.
There is no room in this worldview for a sacramental understanding of maleness and femaleness. The cosmos has been flattened; there are no natural signs of divine realities, because there are no divine realities. There is no givenness to our bodily nature at all, no grand order to which we belong and through which we come to understand ourselves. Sexual difference itself is reduced to mere
biology, something we can manipulate at will, rather than something that is intrinsic to our being, that concerns the whole person, not merely chromosomes or body parts. I turned to feminism to discover the significance of my womanness, and I was initiated into an ideology where womanness itself is ultimately renounced.
What I was unknowingly seeking, and unable to find in either secular or evangelical feminism, was the understanding of woman as a sign. It is not merely the priest who serves as an icon during the Mass; every man and every woman is a living icon, carrying in his or her body a divine sign that reveals the sacred bond between God and humankind. "
― , Into the Deep: An Unlikely Catholic Conversion
7
" This is why priests must be male; not because men are smarter, or better leaders, or more spiritual, or fill-in-the-blank, but because of the iconography of the male body. This is not something earned or chosen but given. There is a givenness to our bodies that makes present the realities of God, and the intricate nexus of these images, that sacred web, has become far more precious to me, far more beautiful than a flattened, bland gesture toward earthly equality. Sacrificing the embodiment of these metaphors to satisfy some modern egalitarian sensibility would be, to me, a tragic desecration, a calamitous loss. "
― , Into the Deep: An Unlikely Catholic Conversion
11
" Venturing into Catholicism, I began to understand what is most unique about Christianity, most essential, is its strangeness. Its improbably, radical story that confounds the mind and refuses to contract into mere metaphor. The wild mystery of the Incarnation, the holy paradox that rushes past the furthest ends of reason and cuts through the polarities that structure and divide our world. It is not enough to say "be just"; it is not enough to say "love" - not when love and justice are uprooted from the narrative that explains WHY we must love, a narrative that makes the startling claim that every human being burns bright with the spark of God...
The Incarnation - ah, a mystery I could never quit. Or perhaps it's the other way around; The Incarnation never let go of me...And now, through Catholicism, the Incarnation came alive again, was made flesh again, mere symbol no more - how, after all, could incarnation ever be just a disembodied symbol? It is Catholicism, I realized, more than any other form of Christianity, that fully celebrates this mystery that is the heart of the faith. "
― , Into the Deep: An Unlikely Catholic Conversion
12
" The Church, in her human dimension, will always be battling sin; there will be schisms, scandals, abuses of power until the fullness of time, in the hierarchy, and among the laity. But the divine dimension of the Church, and her fortification by the Holy Spirit, ensures that she won't be overthrown. When Christ gave St. Peter the keys to the kingdom of heaven in Matthew 16, naming him as the foundation of the Church, he also promised that the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. Human sin won't win. "
― , Into the Deep: An Unlikely Catholic Conversion
