Every Christian has learned something about the “sacred” implications and meanings that surround the sacraments. But few have given much thought to the possibility of there being deep and expressive human meanings involved in the sharing, giving, and receiving of sacraments. In Sacraments for Secular Man Father McCauley uncovers and explores precisely this secular dimension of sacramental action. He elaborates upon each of the sacraments as an event meant to touch men in deeply human and sensitive areas, and meant to bring these areas into the openness of Christ, hopefully and without pretense.
In such a light baptism becomes a rich affirmation of the possibilities of life penance an opportunity to talk about and share the reality of sin, confirmation the assuming of shared responsibility, the Eucharist a reminder that if men cannot break bread together, their divisions will surely undo them…and so on. The result is a book that literally “fleshes out” traditional sacramental theology by providing the reader with a familiar and personal framework in which to experience the sacraments as genuinely related to his deepest efforts to be part of human society.
Written in a style free of theological jargon, but richly scriptural in reference, Sacraments for Secular Man is ideal spirituality for an era rightly impatient with the intellectualizing that has often passed for spirituality in the past.