An 8th Grade Awakening
I was in the 8th grade. I’d been a Catholic all of my life and went to Mass every Sunday with my family faithfully. It was the feast of Corpus Christi, when the Church celebrates Christ’s gift of Himself in the Blessed Sacrament, and I went into Mass that Sunday like I did every Sunday: believing God existed but believing the only place I’d ever really meet Him would be in Heaven. The Mass began like any ordinary Mass and continued as such right through the Gospel. Then the sermon began.
Because it was the Feast of Corpus Christi, the priest began to preach on the real presence of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament. “This is not a symbol. It is Jesus. The Jesus who is present to us in the Eucharist is the same Jesus who was born in Bethlehem and died in Jerusalem 2000 years ago. He’s right there.” Glancing over at the tabernacle, something hit me. It was Jesus! I had always thought the Eucharist was merely bread because it looked and behaved like bread. But now as I gazed at the tabernacle, whatever was inside there wasn’t behaving bread anymore. Wave after wave of amazing joy seemed to radiate out from the tabernacle and hit me deep in my soul. Nothing in the natural world that I could think of compared to this. The joy I felt wasn’t entirely natural, it overwhelmed me, drew tears from my eyes, and made me feel like I was practically floating off the pew. No, something more than bread was present here.
For the next few weeks I turned it over in my head. Could I have been imagining this? Could the sermon have stirred emotions in me that were strong enough for me to mistake for a supernatural experience? But something about this seemed to be much more than an emotion or a feeling. I knew what it was to have feelings and this didn’t compare to any of them. Further, if I was imagining this, I would have to draw off prior sense experiences. I can’t imagine what I don’t know. There was no doubt about it, I had never seen or in any way thought of anything like this before. Moreover, there was no other proximate cause I could think of for this. This experience correlated directly to my recognition that Christ was in the Blessed Sacrament: nothing else had changed. There was no way around it: what I experienced at Mass was caused by the Eucharist and made possible by the fact that the Eucharist was the divine Son of God.
I began to think: if the Eucharist is Christ Himself standing before me, then I should be able to kneel before the Blessed Sacrament and have a conversation with Christ. It seemed like a bold idea but it was worth trying out. So I did. When I was in His presence, I spoke to Him and to my amazement, He answered. After all, Christ was present before me, why wouldn’t He answer?
But now this poses a problem, or perhaps more accurately a question. I received my First Holy Communion in the 2nd grade. For six years of my life I received Jesus, body, blood, soul and divinity, into myself in the Eucharist every week. And yet for six years, I never guessed for a moment that I was receiving anything more than a piece of bread. How is it that one moment I could be completely ignorant of Christ’s presence right in front of and the next moment be overwhelmed by Him? Perhaps Christ simply chose to be silent for those six years. But that didn’t make any sense. The more I prayed before the Blessed Sacrament, the more I realized that Christ was constantly reaching out to me and trying to guide me. He loved me too much to remain silent all that time. Christ was constantly trying to reach me and speak to me, so it couldn’t be that something changed on His end. Instead, something changed on mine. So what was it that changed in me to allow me to see Christ in the Blessed Sacrament and hear His voice? On reflection, there were three factors that kept me from being able to hear God’s voice.
Factor #1: Faith
As I mentioned earlier on, in many ways this Sunday was no different from any other. My family was going to the same parish, with Mass said by the same priest, at the same time we went every other Sunday. The only thing different was the sermon. But it wasn’t just the fact that someone had told me that Jesus was present in the Eucharist. I had heard that before but had excused it as symbolic language. After all, bread turning into God Himself? It defied all logic, that simply wasn’t the way the world worked. It didn’t matter how many times I heard it said that the Eucharist was the Body of Christ, I had already dismissed the possibility that it could be really Him.
But the sermon at that Mass caught me off guard. Fr. Ted didn’t allow me the usual wiggle room to excuse the real presence of Christ as just another metaphor, and for a moment the full force of what he was saying hit me. Had it been at another time and place, I might have even found a way to excuse his very direct claims, but in that brief moment that I was able to let go of my preconceived notions about what was possible and impossible, Christ was able to enter into the picture and show me Himself. I was like a man who was trying to walk through the world with his eyes closed. I kept denying that Christ was in front of me in the Eucharist and it was true, I didn’t see Him, but it was because I refused to open my eyes and look. During Fr. Ted’s sermon, curiosity got the best of me and I opened my eyes just a crack and in opening my eyes just that little bit, I was able to catch a glimpse of Christ and chose to open my eyes all the way.
I’ve often thought that this was Christ’s meaning when he told Thomas, “You have believed because you have seen. Blessed are those who have not seen, but believe.” Christ doesn’t mean it’s impossible to see Him, or that He’s lauding perfectly blind and irrational faith. Instead He means that faith is a necessary prerequisite to seeing. To give an example from St. Augustine, I have never been to Carthage. The only evidence I have that it exists is on someone else’s authority. The map makers tell me that Carthage exists, travelers tell me that Carthage exists, photographers tell me that their pictures are from Carthage, but in all these cases, my belief in the existence of Carthage depends on their testimony. I don’t know that Carthage exists, but I do believe it. What if I didn’t believe them, though? Then I would never see Carthage, because I would never get on a boat to go to a place that I refused to believe existed. Even if I got there and saw signs that said “Welcome to Carthage” I would believe it was all a ruse to make me believe in a place that in my mind might as well be northeast of Neverland. The same is true of God. My belief in God began with someone else’s testimony. But if I refuse to believe them, I will never know God or hear God’s voice. Faith, the ability to believe and open one’s soul to the workings of God, is a necessary step before God can be seen.
Factor #2: Silence
At this point in my story, four months have passed since first encountering Christ in the Eucharist. During these months, I continued to make visits to the Blessed Sacrament as often as I could and each time these visits were as powerful (or at least nearly as powerful) as that first encounter in June. But over time, this initial burst of spiritual consolation began to wane. There were days where I would kneel before Jesus and have trouble hearing His voice. At first, I thought the problem might be with faith. Perhaps the problem was that although I was acknowledging Christ’s presence before me in my head, it wasn’t translating to my heart. Thus I would try to regroup and realize that Christ was present the Eucharist not as some abstract proposition, but from the very depth of my being. Sometimes this worked, but not always. There was something else at work.
At the time I was reading a book by Mother Teresa called No Greater Love. Her first chapter was on prayer. Her major theme was silence. “Even God cannot fill what is already full,” we have to empty ourselves to let God in, and that included emptying my mind during prayer. There were days when I was coming to pray before the Blessed Sacrament, to speak with Christ, but there was too much noise to have a conversation. Sometimes the problem was that I was trying to do all the talking. At other times, I simply had too much that I was turning over in my head and it drowned Christ out. If I was to learn to hear God’s voice, I had to learn to cultivate interior silence.
Factor #3: Sin
But even when I gazed on the Blessed Sacrament with the eyes of faith and cultivated interior silence before Him, there was one more block between me and Jesus: sin. I knew Christ was speaking to me, but there were things I didn’t want to hear from Him and wasn’t about to listen to. One of these cases involved the question of charity: I didn’t like the idea. In reading No Greater Love, Mother Teresa had moved on from the topic of prayer to the topic of giving to the poor. She insisted that as Christians we were obligated to care for those who were poor, unloved, unwanted. As the good American I was, I saw no reason why I should be giving to those who squandered their God given talents and opportunities. I had worked hard for what I had. While my classmates were goofing off, I was studying, working hard in swim practice, drilling pieces on the piano, and when all that work translated into a high paying job, there was no way in heck I was handing any of that wealth over to slackers. As I worked my way through the rest of Mother Teresa’s treatise on charity and the poor, I muttered to myself all the way. I told myself that Jesus would never be so unjust to demand from me what I worked so hard for. But I had to admit, it seemed strange to think that I should know more about God than Mother Teresa, so I brought my case before Jesus.
At this point I was a freshman at a Catholic high school. I went to the school chapel, knelt before the tabernacle and began telling Jesus all about my hopes and dreams for the future and how Mother Teresa wanted to ruin it all. I told Him how He’d given all these gifts and talents to me, how I’d used them well and how I intended to reap the fruits from them. I told Him about how I wanted to achieve success by going to a good school, getting a good job, and raising a family in the lap of luxury and being happy. But when I told Jesus these things, the usual joy I felt before the Blessed Sacrament faded and it was replaced by a feeling of emptiness. Christ’s disappeared and I could hear only my own. I couldn’t hear Christ’s voice in those moments because I wasn’t willing to.
And so the conversation went on for months. When I said things that were in accord with Christ’s will, that feeling of joy was there: I was on track, in sync with Christ. But when I went off track, that joy was gone. I had wandered away from Christ. Back and forth it went. First I recognized that Christ genuinely was calling me to be charitable to the poor. I recognized that but I told Him the best way for me to do that was to make boatloads of money as a lawyer first so I had money to give them. Christ wasn’t having that. Then I recognized that maybe charity needed to happen in my life before I retired, so I told Christ I would do lots of pro bono work. That wasn’t enough for Him either. I told Him I’d be a deacon and do pro bono work. No dice. Finally, after oscillating between consolation and desolation this whole time, I realized that the only thing that really made me happy was being with Christ in that chapel. At that point I offered everything to Him: I would give up a family, my property, my very will out of love for Him and for the poor. It was in moments of complete abandonment to Christ’s will that His voice came through the loudest.
The Moral of the Story
So why am I telling you all this? I’ve posted all these reflections and analysis of my spiritual life at age 14. Why should you care? Because this ability to speak with Christ, to hear His voice, to know Him as well and concretely as you know your mother or one of your best friends is open to you too. We know that Christ loves us and wants the best for us. That means constantly reaching out us and trying to help us. We know that He’s truly present in the Blessed Sacrament, so we know it’s possible to come into His presence and be guided by Him. On Christ’s side of the equation, everything is set. The onus is on you: do you choose to listen to Him? If you can abandon yourself in Faith, let go of external noise, and let go of your own will enough to let Christ in, prayer no longer has to be so indirect. He is there.
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