One of my favorite scenes in nature is when the sun breaks through a cloudy sky and shines down on the earth. Probably everyone has seen something like it. The clouds are thick and slightly gray, but they part just enough to let golden rays of sunlight shine through. You can see the rays travel all the way from the sky to the ground, getting bigger as they get closer, where they illuminate a small piece of land like a spotlight from heaven. Few things could capture my attention more completely. And I think there is no more appropriate picture than this to capture the essence of what makes a sacrament sacramental.

By themselves the sacraments are actually pretty ordinary activities. Think, for example, what an outsider might see if they were to watch a sacrament without knowing anything about the church or the Spirit of God. They would see people eating bread and drinking wine—nothing out of the ordinary. They would see people being prayed for—a nice gesture. They would see two people getting married—it happens all the time. But we who know what’s going on—or what should be going on—know that it isn’t just the activity that makes a sacrament sacramental. It’s the presence of the Holy Spirit transforming it into something greater.

It’s this transformation from the ordinary to the extraordinary in a sacrament that makes me think of the sun breaking through on a cloudy day. Cloudy days, to me, are always dull and uninspiring. But when the sun shines through, that ordinary day is transformed into something extraordinary. Something normal becomes something beautiful.

Unfortunately, though, just as a cloudy day can go by without the sun breaking through, so can a sacrament without someone feeling the presence of the Holy Spirit. The only times I have had a truly sacramental experience is when I’ve invited and welcomed the Spirit to participate in that sacrament with me. If my mind is caught up in other things, like the business of the day, Communion will go by like a mid-morning snack. But when I eat and drink with the open invitation of the Spirit, the eating and drinking are transformed into true communion with the Lord. All it takes is an intentional invitation to the Spirit of God.

So, for me, the sacraments have become a sort of training for sacramental living, and vice versa. They are a call to bring our attention to the Divine and to let the divine Spirit mix with the physical world. When we do that, everything can be sacramental. It’s what transforms the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. It changes a simple meal into a call for justice and a reminder of our hope. It changes a prayer into a blessing, and the submerging of a person into the cleansing of a soul. The invitation of the Spirit can turn a smile into medicine, or conflict into growth.