S7 E4: The One About Sacraments

Louisa Jane Smith (0:05)

Welcome to The RE Podcast, the first dedicated RE Podcast for students and teachers.

Season seven, episode three, The One About Sacraments. My name is Louisa James-Smith, and this is The RE Podcast, the podcast for those of you who think RE is boring, which it is, and I'll prove it to you. But before I start, you may have noticed some advertising in my episodes. It would be really nice to balance out the cost of making this podcast, but I'm aware they may spoil the experience of listening to them. Drop me a message if you have an opinion on this on Twitter at The RE Podcast One or email me louisajames-smith at therepodcast.co.uk or insta at therepodcast.

Some of you have kindly brought me a coffee or five, which made my day. I also have a Patreon page, which I'll pop a link to in the show notes. I love doing the podcast and happily produce it for free, but some help with the running costs would be great. Or just ask Spotify to pay royalties to podcasters as well as musicians. Now, I want you to picture this. A parent holding a baby on an altar, and two and a half meters away, a priest stands side on, welding a water gun aimed at the child. You can probably guess what the priest was doing. This is one of my favourite religious pictures ever, and I project it on the board for when the children enter the classroom. It always gets a reaction as the children try to work out what's going on. Then a lesson on baptism begins. Now, I have to admit, I find baptism quite a difficult topic to teach, in particular how to make it engaging. The socially distanced baptism pictures helps, as does YouTube videos on the extreme Orthodox infant baptism. But the context of sacraments and the need for baptism linked to sin and forgiveness, and the symbolic nature of these rituals is not always accessible to children. So in this episode, I'm going to try and break it down a bit. We'll have a quick look at what sacraments are, and a quick look at all seven of them in the Catholic Church. But then we're going to focus on baptism and Holy Communion, because those are the two that are specifically mentioned in most exam specs. I think it's always quite handy to relate what we're teaching to things the children have experienced, so I'll give some examples of that too. I will do a second episode on marriage, which is one of the sacraments and comes up in the theme section of GCSE RE. But let's start with the word sacrament. What does it mean? To understand this, you need to realize that in Christianity, there is a physical world and a spiritual world. The physical world you can see and touch and taste and smell. The spiritual world you can't see or touch or taste or smell. Humans are part of the physical world, so we experience things through our senses. God is from the spiritual world, so Christians can't really experience God through their senses. Neither can they experience things that God does through their senses. You can't physically see God's forgiveness. So what Christians have done is create a physical action to represent the good things God has done. These good things are called blessings. So the definition of sacrament is an outward sign of an inward blessing. Sacraments are things you do in the physical world around you that represents something God has done spiritually inside of you. I know this sounds a bit complicated, but actually it's something that most of us experience all the time. Let's take marriage, for example, specifically the ring. Right, go and get a ring and put it on the fourth finger of your left hand, the one next to your little finger.

Are you now married?

No.

If you are married and you wear a ring, take it off.

Are you now not married?

No.

But when you get married, you place a ring on that finger, and subsequently, if you get divorced, you will take it off. The ring does not make you married. The ring is a symbol that you are married, but it is a significant symbol. I know this because taking my wedding ring off after my marriage ended was quite a difficult step.

In the same way, when you hug someone, the hug is a symbol of your love and care for that person. It is not the love or care itself.

Every day, we do something on the outside, which represents something going on on the inside. Smiling, laughing, and crying, for example. These are outside physical representations of emotions we are feeling on the inside that you can't see. They are not the emotion themselves.