“Why do I need this?” an elderly women asked me after receiving communion one day. Why Eucharist, she might well have asked. When we read in St. Paul that Jesus broke bread and announced, “this is my body”, a response to my communicant begins to surface. It is my contention that the sacraments say something (they symbolize) and God uses what is said to say something at a deeper level (to communicate God’s very life, the life of grace). I take as a starting point Thomas Aquinas’s teaching that the sacraments are bodily signs of the holy - the divine - in human life. For the church, the sacraments are an essential answer to the pastoral question: where can we find Jesus? This project will focus on the sacraments as the sharing of a life, the life of Christ, who is the source of human unity. To address the focus of this project, attention will be given to how the church’s practices of washing (Baptism) and eating together (Eucharist) communicate the human body of Christ. The goal of this project includes publication, the development of local practices associated with sacramental unity, and teaching of a class on sacramental theology at the Diocese of New Jersey’s Ministry Institute.