Catholic Sacraments

[ByFaithAlone]

I'm a Protestant that only believes in the Sacraments to be...
-Communion (Eucharist)
-Baptism

My church (and many other Protestant churches) use the definition that a Sacrament is...
-instituted by God;
-in which God Himself has joined His Word of promise to the visible element;
-by which He offers, gives and seals the forgiveness of sin earned by Christ.

This definition was provided by Martin Luther and Baptism and Communion easily fall under this definition when looking at Scripture

As I understand it the Catholic Church has 7 Sacraments which are defined as "efficacious signs of grace, instituted by Christ and entrusted to the Church, by which divine life is dispensed to us" (Wiki, Sacraments of the Catholic Church)

I was just wondering how Catholics support the claim that "divine life is dispensed to us" through the following...

-Penance (Confession)
-Confirmation (Chrismation)
-Matrimony (Marriage)
-Anointing of the Sick (known prior to Vatican II as Extreme Unction (or more literally from Latin: Last Anointing); informally, the "Last Rites")
-Holy Orders (Ordination)

P.S. Please forgive my inadequate knowledge of all the additional books in a Catholic Bible as compared to NIV (Which follows the books of the Bible as determined by the Westminster Confession of Faith)

[Lemonboo]

Assuming these are metaphors or mystically understood.

What do you mean?

[Slopeshoulder]

Assuming these are metaphors or mystically understood.

What do you mean?

I mean that a literal reading of them (this happens, that happens, god does this, etc) is, in light of reason and modernity, not tenable. But nor does it do justice to the meaning of sacramants. I was clarifying to make sure you were not making this error, and also clarifying for readers.
This leaves two options, metaphor and mystical, the second of which I think is correct and intended anyway.

Metaphor: None of this actually happens really, in the commonsensical way, it's just our way of talking about ritual and marking the psychological processes that we consider sacred and affirm in the life of our community in relationship with our God.
Close, but no cigar. Too reductionistic, too concerned with what modernity thinks.

Mystical: while we do not know exactly how or why these things are said to occur, and we do know that our language and understanding are eternally inadequete, with literalism being the most inadequate of all, we name these rituals as sacraments because, first, we see them as sacred experiences where we affirm that (what we point to and name when we say) God is present; and second, because they are symbols that point to and participate in a divine presence, with each sacrament highlighting the short list of ways that we identify and experience as core in our tradition and community.
Our understanding is incomplete. Our words are symbolic, noumenal, and mimetic. And our experience is mystical/mysterious.
And whatever we say about them is based in faith and expressed in poetry/doctrine, not literalisms. To miss this is to miss what sacraments actually are, or to carry forward a childish understanding.

Understood in this way, we avoid problematic premodern literalisms, we avoid the reductionisms of modernity, and we use a postmodern framework to revisit the sacraments in a way that was intended by the church fathers and greats all along: symbolic/mystical. We can't put god in a box, nor the sacramants; we can't reduce them to formulaic cause-and-effect statements; rather they are symbolic language, understood inside a community that uses and pragmatically "knows" the (symbolic) meaning of that languauge. Sacraments are poetic acts that point to divinity while helping us participate in divinity (as we concieve it). They are not understandable, formulaic processes like something we'd experience in a lab.

FWIW, I LOVE sacraments, more all the time, but I no longer take them literally, as some sort of first grade level cause-and-effect dynamic that we somehow can speak about with certainty as if describing the merely phenomenal rather than the noumenal.

I hope that helps.

BTW, I read you wish to become a nun. On a personal note, when I was in seminary, I studied for 2 years with the great Sr. Margeret Farley. But I am ashamed to say that it was 25 years ago and I forget most of the detail. I love that woman.