Core Rituals Writers Take A Refreshing Approach Toward The Seven Sacraments Of Catholicism

“Signatures of Grace: Catholic Writers on the Sacraments” edited by Thomas Grady and Paula Huston (Dutton, $23.95)

In 1998 in the United States, 161,578 adults became Roman Catholics. Corner any one of them - or, for that matter, any “cradle Catholic” - and pop this question: What do you like best about being Catholic?

Almost invariably, the answer you get will have something to do with affection for the sacraments, the seven rituals that form the spokes in the wheel that is Catholicism: Baptism, Reconciliation (sometimes called “Confession”), Eucharist, Confirmation, Matrimony, Holy Orders and Anointing of the Sick.

If there is anything that characterizes Catholicism and distinguishes it from other Christian traditions, it is these seven ritual actions.

The editors of this book - one a lifelong Catholic, the other a recent convert - invited seven prominent contemporary writers, who happen to be Catholic, to write about one sacrament each. The result is seven essays, plus a preface by the editors and an eighth essay on sacraments in general, that are imaginative, honest and sometimes humorous.

What comes through, above all, is each author’s genuine affection for the sacrament he or she writes about. Not one is a professional theologian, and only one is a priest (appropriately, the author of the essay on Holy Orders).

Typically in a collection of essays by different authors, the quality varies from one essay to another, sometimes widely. In this book, however, I found not a single dud.

Styles vary, and each reader will have his or her favorites, but all the essays in this book are lively, written with a poetic spirit and an intelligence that has no belief in “blind faith.”

The authors - including novelists Mary Gordon and Ron Hansen, as well as a genius of short fiction, the late Andre Dubus - all call themselves “practicing Catholics.” Each also takes for granted the importance of being able to distinguish between the Catholic Church as an imperfect human institution and the living Catholic tradition that cannot be separated from that institution.

Thus they are able to write about their experience with one of the sacraments with both brain and heart in gear.

A few samples illustrate the creative spirit each writer quietly revels in.

Ron Hansen comments that “in this extravagant gift of the Eucharist we are, as St. Augustine wrote, receiving ourselves, for our Baptism formed us into the body of Christ and his members.”

Mary Gordon explores the Anointing of the Sick: “The sacrament of Anointing touches that part of the broken body that doctors, social workers, and loving family and friends cannot approach, the part that, in order to be healed, must acknowledge its despair and travel from it to a place of hope.”

On the sacraments in general, Andre Dubus wrote: “A sacrament is an outward sign of God’s love, they taught me when I was a boy, and in the Catholic Church there are seven. But, no, I say, for the Church is catholic, the world is catholic, and there are seven times seventy sacraments, to infinity.”

Readers, Catholic and otherwise, will find in this compact volume delightful, sometimes startlingly delightful, investigations of the seven sacraments of the Catholic Church.