In a life of faith an important meaning is reserved to the sacraments. It is difficult to imagine an alternative space apart from this one that allows one the direct verification of the cooperation between nature and grace. The truth that it is possible to perceive in sacramental life, gathers around this moment during which, within the creatural ambit it is placed and acts in the greatness of grace. The creature is carried as if above itself and begins instantly to share divine life. It is with reason that the brothers in the East call the liturgy "paradise on earth". In sacramental life we experience the peak of the practice of our personal freedom and at the same time, God’s gratuitous initiative that comes towards us in its freedom, opening spaces that appeared until now to be impossible.

The entire personal existence is risked on the sensible answer and this reaches its decisive stage at the moment in which each recognizes that they are touched by the ray of grace: "moment in which the light above all allows the untraceable uniqueness of the person to emerge". 1 Sacramental life is this ray of light that illuminates existence, allowing the historical understanding of a unique and singular relationship with the grace of God. The Trinitarian work that is present in the sacraments clearly proves how everything proceeds from the Father through the work of the Spirit in the Son incarnate. The redeeming economy finds confirmation and sacramental repetition in the eternal offering of Himself undertaken by Christ and given to the Father with the gift of the Spirit.

This dimension, however, clears the way for the discovery of yet another element of Sacramentarian theology: its eucharistic configuration. Each sacrament is impressed with the eucharistic mark of the offering undertaken by Christ. Within the Church, using the words said by von Balthasar, "nothing that is pneumatic may exist, that is not covered by the Christological dimension, that cannot be translated into the language of the Eucharist" ². Everything that is celebrated with the sacraments and each sacrament, is therefore "retrospective and proleptic" memory ³. Through the sacraments in fact we are taken once again to the unique event in the life of the Church that originates from the ribs of Jesus of Nazareth, but at the same time, the fertile announcement of His return in glory. Hence each sacrament is an act of obedience by the Son for the Father of the full and complete donation of Himself unto His will. Therefore each sacrament is "eucharistic", because it expresses always and everywhere the free and obedient offering of Christ to the Father in the presence of the Spirit.

Therefore it is possible in sacramental life to overcome Lessing’s dispute, because the time of the church is owed to its very nature, a time in which the human element and the divine one find common ground in that contemporaneity that does not remove the untraceableness of the "once and for all" (efapax) of the event that is Christ, but reproposes it intact in that peculiar space of those "forty days" during which Christ remains Risen among His disciples. The life of events therefore is impressed with the sacramental dimension. The eucharistic horizon within which we must return the entire sacramental life, is the conjunction between the uniqueness of the Paschal event of the death and resurrection of Jesus and its faithful and effective repetition in our history. For this reason, eucharistically, it is the effective mark of redemption, the prelude to a life of grace that always has been bestowed on those who believe.

Rino Fisichella