Autumn is a sacrament — but not a Sacrament

I sometimes joke that I sin less in October. But it might actually be true. God seems to be more on my mind during the fall, and, therefore, it seems easier to seek out and cooperate with his grace.

Part of it are those mornings of low-hanging mist that make me think of how close God is to mankind through Christ’s incarnation, when heaven came down to earth. It’s also the longing for the Source of all beauty stirred up by the spectacular explosion of color in the changing fall foliage. And how the fact that winter lurks behind every picturesque fall scene prompts me to think of the end of mortal life and the Love that overcomes even death.

Taken altogether, the quintessential elements of the fall season work together to lift my heart and mind to spiritual things in a way like no other time of year. Because of this, I can sincerely say that for me, autumn acts as a kind of sacrament.

This kind of language may seem wrong, even heretical to our ears today. Sacrament, after all, refers in a strict sense to the seven sacraments of the Church, such as baptism and the Eucharist. These are grace-affecting signs instituted by Jesus, that make Christ present to us and communicate divine life. And as great as a beautiful autumn day may be, it is utterly and absolutely not a sacrament in this sense.

But there is a broader sense of the word sacrament that was once more common in Catholic usage. For instance, in his section on the sacraments in the Summa Theologica, St. Thomas Aquinas says that “a thing may be called a ‘sacrament,’ either from having a certain hidden sanctity … or from having some relationship to this sanctity,” such as being a sign of it.

This means that there are multiple ways that we can use the word sacrament to refer to realities that are absolutely distinct, but are nonetheless both related to sanctity in some way. In other words, sacrament is a word we can use analogously. For instance, we use the word “healthy” analogously, to convey not only the actual state of being in good health, but also signs of it, like a “healthy” heart rate.

It is in this latter sense, the sense of a sign, that I speak of autumn as a sacrament. It’s a natural reality that serves as an occasion for me to think about God, redemption, and eternity.

(Someone might object that, in the next article of the Summa, St. Thomas seems to deny that we can call something strictly natural a sacrament, but it seems clear that he’s already shifted to talking about sacrament specifically in the sense of the grace-affecting seven sacraments.)

Again (because it can’t be said enough!) this broad usage of the word sacrament is not the same as the seven sacraments, which St. Thomas defines as “the sign of a holy thing so far as it makes men holy.” The seven sacraments actually make me holy by communicating the sanctity they also signify; natural sacraments like the beauty of the fall (or the grandeur of a mountain or the vastness of an ocean) merely call God to mind through his creation, as “the invisible things of God are clearly seen being understood by the things that are made” (Romans 1:20).

There are two ways to get this analogous relationship between the sacramentality of the created world and the sacraments wrong.

The first is to collapse the two into each other, and to deny the uniqueness and significance of the seven sacraments instituted by Jesus Christ as places of his presence that incorporate us into divine life. This line of thinking is perhaps encapsulated by tired and trite expressions like, “I don’t need to go to Mass, because the woods are my church.”

This approach is wrong, because although God is the creator, he does not incorporate us into divine life through creation; he does this through the sacraments, which Jesus instituted and commanded us to partake in. “Do this in memory of me.” In fact, we only have the sacraments precisely because creation, due to sin, has been cut off from God’s graces; in a sense, the seven sacraments are the means by which God redeems a fallen world. Failing to recognize the singular significance of the sacraments is a deep mistake, and no amount of sitting in the woods can ever be compared to even a single reception of the Eucharist.

But there’s also the danger of denying any sacramentality in the natural world. This posture can come out of a well-intended concern over downplaying the distinctiveness and importance of the seven sacraments, but it can lead to a kind of desacralized imagination that fails to see that, in the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins, “the world is charged with the grandeur of God.”

Someone with this attitude may partake in the sacraments with great reverence and devotion, but when they leave church, they leave behind any attentiveness to the signs of God in the world he created. A desacralized imagination can lead to a lack of gratitude, or even a degrading of the created world as a merely trivial matter.

Instead of collapsing these two senses of sacrament into each other, or of eliminating any sort of connection between them, it seems to me that the mature Catholic thing to do would be to integrate them. The sacramentality of the world should lead us to seek Jesus in the sacraments. And our encounter with Jesus in the sacraments should, in turn, prompt us to go back out into the world with eyes opened anew to how creation, as a gift from God, can point back to him.

A melancholic fall morning won’t forgive my sins, but it can prompt me to think about my own weakness and God’s merciful love, inspiring me to receive the gift of sacramental confession that he’s given us. Likewise, taking part in the Eucharist draws me more deeply into the life of God by communicating grace, renewing my ability to see the beauty of the changing leaves as a sign of the God who I can actually encounter in the sacraments he’s given us.

Liedl, a Twin Cities resident, is a senior editor of the National Catholic Register and a graduate student in theology at The St. Paul Seminary School of Divinity in St. Paul.