Frederick Buechner defines sacrament this way:
A sacrament is when something holy happens. It is transparent time, time you can see through to something deep inside time.
Generally speaking, Protestants have two official sacraments (the Lord's Supper, Baptism) and Roman Catholics have these two plus five others (Confirmation, Penance, Extreme Unction, Ordination, and Matrimony). In other words, at such milestone moments as seeing a baby baptized or being baptized yourself, confessing your sins, getting married, dying, you are apt to catch a glimpse of the almost unbearable preciousness and mystery of life.
Needless to say, church isn't the only place where the holy happens. Sacramental moments can occur at any moment, at any place, and to anybody. Watching something get born. Making love. A walk on the beach. Somebody coming to see you when you're sick. A meal with people you love. Looking into a stranger's eyes and finding out they are not a stranger's.
If we weren't blind as bats, we might see that life itself is sacramental.
The thing about a sacramental theology is that God doesn't wait for us to be in the right place to break through to us. God doesn't live in houses (of worship or otherwise), or bread, or water, or books, or candles...but, at the same time, God lives in all of those places at once and, indeed, is confined to none of them. When sacrament happens to us, we might mistakenly believe it was because of where we were or what we were doing...and we are wrong, but even then we are ok, we are not lost. For even while we are thinking those things and boxing God in or coming up with a way for us to act first so that God will respond, God is always somewhere else too, waiting on no one to act first. God is always reminding us and surprising us that sacrament is God's doing--the work of Divinity meeting us in the most basic, fundamental signs and symbols...so that we are never confused to think that it was the water, or the words, or the bread, or the building, or even the person. "No," we say in these moments, "It was more than that." The "unbearable preciousness and mystery of life"--I love that quote. When the life that wears us down and runs us ragged is somehow, out of no where, lifted up and elevated to the heavenly...Where the gulf we mistakenly sense between the natural and the divine becomes so very thin that we could almost reach through and redefine "natural" altogether...that redefined "natural" where God exists so close to you that you can feel God's breath almost sighing into you...That Reality? That moment? That sacrament? We call that "Grace." If only I could always live and breathe into that...how different my life would be.
