(New York: Dutton, 2000)

Sacramentum. From its roots in the classical Latin "solemn oath" to the early Christian connotation "spiritually significant object or action," the word stresses the relationship between the spoken word and symbolic action, and covenant and unseen verity. It was St. Augustine who most fully articulated the sense of the word "sacrament" as "sign," an outward manifestation of a hidden reality. The very title of this collection of essays, Signatures of Grace, both mirrors and amplifies the meaning concealed in the word "sacrament." For the word "signature" conveys both the idea of covenant/agreement, and the sign of such covenant. What the word adds is the materiality of writing, and in many ways this collection of essays is about how grace, through "sacrament" in both its narrowest and broadest senses, writes God into human lives and hearts.

Signatures of Grace contains eight essays: one on each of the seven sacraments of the Church, and a final essay on the myriad sacraments of God's grace that can occur during our lives. The authors, as the editors state in the introduction, were each to write on "the history and meaning of the sacrament as well as the writer's experience with it" (xi). These are all essays that bear repeated reading, with each reading revealing new layers of meaning and rich networks of connections between tradition and individual experience, and between sacraments as signs and the grace-charged moments when these signs disclose something of their mystery.

Katherine Vaz's essay on Baptism is a meditation not only on the sacrament itself, but on the many baptisms of love and enlightenment and even of death and loss that continuously re-initiate us into living. Patricia Hampl writes on Penance, starting from her experience in the pre-Vatican II American church, then taking us back through the history of the sacrament and the ways it responded to the different social and cultural situations of the Church in history, and ending with her own return to the sacrament. The final scene in her essay offers a profound insight into the relationship of the sacrament to freedom and to relief from hardness of heart. In his essay on the Eucharist, Ron Hansen takes a similar tack, starting from his first Communion and then stepping back to contemplate the sacrament from its institution to the present time. Along the way, Hansen provides a fine exegesis of the different stories of meals in the Gospels. Writing on Confirmation, Paul Mariani reflects on the nature of the work of the Holy Spirit, who works when and how he will. Paula Huston echoes this in her essay on Matrimony, although she also reflects on how we have to be open to the Spirit's entering and on how this invitation is part of what she calls matrimonial grace. Murray Bodo writes of Holy Orders from his perspective as a Franciscan priest. He documents the evolution of his understanding of the relationship between spirit and matter and ponders this relationship as it is signified in the sacraments that he administers. The essays on the Sacraments of the Church end with a piece by Mary Gordon on the Anointing of the Sick, the sacrament that integrates the bodies of the sick and dying into the community of the living just as it prepares their souls for the next life. Andre Dubus' epilogue entitled "Sacraments" caps the collection with an essay that pushes the meaning of the term "sacrament" to its limits by describing moments from his life that hint at the possibility of a sacramentality that transcends the institutional and is infused into creation and human experience.

These are deeply personal essays, and this is perhaps the most valuable aspect of the collection. I found that each of them contained profoundly moving moments, giving new insight into the sacraments. Some might quibble with the lines of argument taken in the historical parts of the essays; but the authors do not pretend to be experts, and each provides a bibliography so that the reader can easily identify the limits of their research. Others might take issue with the broadening of the term "sacrament" to include almost any meaningful experience. Yet these essays testify to the ways that the Sacraments produce meaning and coherence in the face of life experiences that can be fragmenting and isolating. They also testify that, as in the days of the early Church when the apostles spread the news of what they had experienced as companions of Jesus, the life of faith is nourished and communicated to others by our stories of how God has touched our lives. -- Mary Agnes Edsall, '99