Divine Intentionality

Sacramentality Reveals Our Relationship with God

“Thou hast formed us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless till they find rest in Thee.”

St. Augustine’s beautiful exhortation has achieved immortality not because it speaks to the presence of desire, but because it exposes the true nature of human longing — and with it, our inborn purpose as created beings. This divine purpose, or telos, is more than an attribute: it is a deep-seated and essential aspect of our human identity. We can ignore it, we can resist it, but we cannot help long for that inescapable end God has instilled so deeply inside of us. 

Indeed, Pope Benedict XVI (Ratzinger) was right to warn us of the dangers we face as a result of our own undoing. We have lost — no, we have abandoned our appreciation for the sacred. This neglect no doubt stems from a related abandonment of the sacramental worldview. If the world is innately sacramental, insofar as it exists in God, who is not only holy but the Source of Holiness, then we must view the world through a sacramental lens or risk obscuring reality. Both divine revelation and religious experience support this conclusion, which can be drawn from either end point.

Ratzinger’s emphasis on reclaiming the sacred grows deeper roots when embedded in the sacramental worldview of Louis Bouyer’s Cosmos. These two planes of existence, if you will, reinforce each other, distinct yet bidirectionally linked. Much of our investigation into the sacramentality of the cosmos, then, is a matter of zooming out and then zooming back in, speaking in terms of perspective. To zoom out is to focus on the broader cosmological and metaphysical plane of reality. To zoom in is to trace those cosmological realities all the way down to their tangible expressions. The further we go, the narrower the scope of application. Zooming back out again, we can identify the metaphysical roots of these tangible expressions. Eventually, we come to see them as two aspects of — two approaches to — the same truth, inextricably bound together by divine purpose. My examination of their relationship can be more easily understood when framed as such. That said, it’s important to remember that we lack the ability to see both planes at once. Our perspective is necessarily limited.

Our human experience comes into focus only when presented in its sacramental context. For the context extends beyond abstraction to absolute reality: the existential framework underlying the sacraments is as real as the tangible symbols we taste and feel — realer, in the sense that the metaphysical reality precedes the physical. The two realities are inseparable, at once parallel and interwoven. Christ, the glorious Sacrament of all Sacraments, perfectly embodies this multilayered reality in the Incarnation. Going back to our example from Augustine, we can observe the faint outline of this sacramentality even in the truncated quotation above. We notice a merging of the divine and the human, the visible and the invisible. We also see the direction this motion takes. In aggregate, these observations highlight the sacramentality ingrained into existence itself.

The choice that now demands our attention is whether we will remain restless or whether we will fulfill our human desires as God intended. The Sacraments not only remind us of this deeper intentionality: they help lead us “back” to it. Both the sign and the significance reinforce the reality that we were indeed formed by and for God. When we resist our divine purpose, we do so at our own peril. Without it, we lose our footing. With it, we regain a sense of harmony between heavenly and earthly purposes, between the physical world around us and the metaphysical reality that gives it shape and meaning. This dialectic serves as a foundation for our exploration of sacramentality as the framework for understanding our relationship with God. 

This portrait of life takes on more color when viewed through the sacramental lens of Bouyer, whose “Cosmos” grounds human experience in divine purpose by fixing everything and everyone to God’s thoughts. This key unlocks more than an appreciation for God’s creativity: it opens the door to understanding why the Sacraments are a profound and essential manifestation of God’s love. In fusing intentionality with sacramentality in the human experience, Bouyer’s divine thought theory demonstrates the indivisible nature of the spiritual and the corporeal. Perhaps most importantly, it shows us the path to realizing our divine purpose by means of the tangible, through the sacramental. Understood this way, the tangible and the temporal cease to be merely tangible and merely temporal — for those attributes reflect but one facet of their broader placement within existence.  

The theory also helps to explain sacramentality in terms of its divine purpose by accentuating the way it flows outward from its divine origin. This points us to our telos, the ultimate end for which we were created — that wondrous feast we long for by design, whether we realize it or not. Reminiscent of the trinitarian relationship upon which all true communication rests, this displays not only the origin and end of our festivity, but the divine intention present in the fact that this relationship, like the creation that proceeds from it, is one in motion (I’m not speaking of motion in terms of speed or direction, but of interaction and interdependence). The “trinitarian motion” I’m referring to here is deeply relational, interpersonal, and participatory. It comprises the interplay between worlds, that which binds them together. Such motion emulates and reflects the Triune God, representing the multilayered interaction between God and reality. 

Sacramentality defines our existence, giving it shape and purpose. Indeed, sacramentality makes visible God’s intentionality. These tangible expressions of a broader reality, as I’ve described them, culminate in the Holy Sacraments here on earth while pointing back to Christ, the incarnate Sacrament, who is both the source and end of the human experience. When we participate in the sacramental life, we ground ourselves in reality by recognizing God’s intentionality and by cultivating his will for our lives. By partaking of the Sacraments, we truly participate in the Sacred. We remember our divine origin and recall our divine end. In exploring how Ratzinger’s reminder of the sacred is both illumined and bolstered by the sacramentality of Bouyer, we see that our two planes of existence are bonded together by God’s intention. A beautiful thought, indeed!

Only by embracing this sacramental relationship with Christ will our hearts find rest.