By Gretchen Keiser

Contemporary Americans may have lost a sense of the sacred, but millions of them retain a fascination with the terrifying, the occult and the vaguely “supernatural,” said Cardinal James Hickey in a talk prepared for an Atlanta conference.

For a world caught up in Stephen King novels and nightmares on “Elm Street, the sacramental life of the Church mirrors a radically different, right relationship between earth and heaven, the cardinal’s talk said.

“In many popular portrayals, the world beyond is a bizarre and unfriendly place that only occasionally breaks in upon our everyday world … Troubles start when representatives of that world make forays to Elm Street or invade the office computer.”

Within the Church, however, the sacraments reveal a completely different relationship between ordinary life and the divine, his talk pointed out. “In the sacraments of the Church, what is human becomes the vehicle of the divine. Human words and actions as well as basic things such as water, wine, bread and oil become the bearers of divine life.”

The sacraments follow the “incarnational logic” of God’s redemptive plan in which Jesus took on human flesh to atone for sin, bodily and spiritually.

In addition, ordinary things are not overwhelmed or destroyed in the sacramental order, his talk pointed out. On the contrary, their natural properties, like water in Baptism, are used to communicate “the redeeming action of Christ in the Holy Spirit.”

In popular culture, on the other hand, “what is lacking is the Christian vision that the world and the human person who is the pinnacle of creation, can have a sustained relationship with the divine.”

Also lacking is an awareness of the need to acknowledge God as the Creator. Many people, he noted, are “almost unconscious of their role to offer to God the fruit of the earth and the work of human hands,” an unawareness that he called a “fundamental loss of the sacred.”

The archbishop of Washington, D.C., was scheduled to be keynote speaker at a Sept. 22-24 conference of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars in Atlanta on the theme: “Recovery of the Sacred: Catholic Faith, Worship and Practice.”

Unable to attend, his prepared talk was delivered by Archbishop Eugene A. Marino, SSJ.

The Fellowship, whose president is Dr. William E. May of Catholic University of America, has some 800 members concerned with interdisciplinary research and publications in accord with the magisterium of the Church.

Thirty speakers addressed the conference theme from the perspectives of canon law, the social sciences, spirituality, and the natural sciences, the behavioral sciences, literature and Catholic worship and practice.

Cardinal Hickey’s text noted that as a pastor he is concerned from a practical perspective. He suggested several ways that the church can approach a recovery of the sacred.

The first, he said, is to be aware that “we preach in a culture which is in many ways either hostile or insensitive to the relationship of the world to God. We need to impart to others a whole new way of looking at themselves and at the world.”

His second recommendation was to renew sacramental life. All preaching, instruction and private counseling must have as their goal to lead people to the sacraments” where the experience of the earthly and divine interacting can be gained and appreciated.

The cardinal also recommended rekindling and developing popular piety that connects the sacred with everyday events, such as the changing seasons, birth and death, holidays and holy days.