An Excerpt from The Catholic Imagination by Andrew M. Greeley

Andrew M. Greeley outlines the basic lineaments of the Catholic religious sensibility. Here is an excerpt on grace.

"Catholics live in an enchanted world, a world of statues and Holy water, stained glass and votive candles, saints and religious medals, rosary beads and holy pictures. But these Catholic paraphernalia are mere hints of a deeper and more pervasive religious sensibility which inclines Catholics to see the Holy lurking in creation. As Catholics, we find our houses and our world haunted by a sense that the objects, events, and persons of daily life are revelations of grace.

"The assertions in the last paragraph are not statements of what Catholics should be, nor are they demands that Catholics return to earlier modes of religious sensibility. They are, as I hope to show in this extended essay, factual descriptions of Catholics, both practicing and supposedly lapsed, and the Catholic religious imagination that shapes their lives.

"The special Catholic imagination can appropriately be called sacramental. It sees created reality as a 'sacrament,' that is, a revelation of the presence of God. The workings of this imagination are most obvious in the Church's seven sacraments, but the seven are both a result and a reinforcement of a much broader Catholic view of reality. And Reality. Andre Dubus, who has an acute awareness of sacramentality, describes this perspective in his book Meditations from a Moving Chair: 'A sacrament is physical and within it is God's love; as a sandwich is physical, and nutritious, and pleasurable, and within it is love, if someone makes it for you and gives it to you with love; even harried or tired or impatient love, but with love's direction and concern, love's again and again wavering and distorted focus on goodness, then God's love too is in the sandwich.'

"The sandwich becomes enchanted because it is permeated by, dense in, awash with two loves — human and divine."

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