To be a materialist is to believe fully in the Incarnation: that God so loved the world that God became the world, dwelling within it from the very beginning of creation, and that God delights in and sustains the cosmos at every moment. When you begin to see the world in this way it’s possible to make the leap from experiencing stuff as mere possessions, which implies zero-sum individual ownership and control, to experiencing stuff as sacramental. In the Catholic imagination, a sacrament is something perceivable to the senses—something material—that is at the same time a spiritual reality, opening a window into the presence of the divine. The Eucharist, for example, is bread and wine: fully material, fully the fruit of the earth and the work of human hands, but also shot through with spiritual significance. We know the official sacraments of the Church, but there’s also a broader sense of the sacred. Thomas Merton, the Cistercian spiritual master, captured it well in this simple phrase: “Everything that is, is holy.”
