The incarnation brought forth the reality that “God became flesh” – a physical and earthly event. Fr. Rolheiser writes that this shows us that everything physical is potentially a sacrament. But we struggle with this. Our daily lives are often so distracted and fixated upon things that seem unholy that the idea that everything is a sacrament can appear more like wishful thinking than theology. Christian belief is that the universe shows forth God’s glory, that each of us is made in God’s image, that our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, that the food we eat is sacramental, and that in our work and in our sexual embrace we are co-creators with God. There are many reasons, mostly rooted in the fact that we are human, that life is long, and that it isn’t easy to sustain high symbols, high language, and high ideals in the muck and grime of everyday life. Eating, working, and making love should be holy, but too often, we do them more for survival than for any sacramentality, and “getting by” is about as a high symbol as we can muster on a weekday. I say this with sympathy. It isn’t easy, day by day, hour by hour, to experience sacrament in the ordinary actions of our lives. But there’s another reason we have lost the sense of sacramentality in our lives: we have too little prayer and ritual around our ordinary actions. We seldom use prayer or ritual to connect our actions – eating, drinking, working, socializing, making love, giving birth to things – to their sacred origins. I’m not sure where we should go with all of this. Unless we find prayer and rituals to connect our eating, working, and making love to their sacred origins, ordinary life will remain just that, ordinary life, nothing special, just the muck and grime of slugging along.