Hidden presence

As mysterious as this presence may be, it is real, alive and irresistible if we accept it!

Bishop Edward B. Scharfenberger

Like good wine, or a nice hot cider, God’s presence warms hearts. The Word made flesh is often a hidden presence, not noticed by all or even by us of the Christian faith much of the time. We need help in sniffing it out. Our noses, admittedly, are not our most developed sense. Cats and dogs far exceed us in that department. Our spiritual sensibilities also need some help. 

God’s hidden presence, imbibed, can indeed warm our hearts. That is the key. We cannot just look at and admire it. It must be consumed. During our recent Eucharistic revival, images of the sacramental presence of Christ, in the form of the pure white host encased in glorious golden monstrances were born, photographed and displayed throughout much of Catholic media. Many of us took part in those processions and hours of adoration from which we received, indeed were showered with abundant graces, like so many seeds sown by the divine sower in our hearts, many yet to sprout as they are watered by yet more actual graces.

I offer my own personal testimony of the supernatural power of Eucharistic adoration. For years I struggled with doubts and apprehensions that my prayers before the Blessed Sacrament were woefully inadequate or not even the right prayers. In one sense I was correct. Nothing I could say to God could possibly speak or express what needed to be said. Similarly, I wondered whether just saying nothing was the best way to “speak” to God, recollecting myself into a total silence, just breathing and listening. But listening to what? How could I hear God’s voice? How could anyone? What is the language of God? How can I hear it, let alone understand it? Then it began to dawn on me that such preoccupations about how God or I were speaking to each other — if we were speaking to each other — were secondary to the reality that by just being there in God’s presence was how God was being present to me. Wasting time with God, I guess you could say. Giving God the undivided attention that God deserves. 

I began to realize, in short, that every nanosecond of time given as a gift of time was a field to be showered with God’s grace. All God needs from us is the permission to let the seeds of grace fall on the soil of our hearts. Yes, they are God’s presents, the gift of God’s presence. Those seeds or rays of grace just penetrate the soul and sprout into the most surprising acts of patience, penitence, courage, wisdom, prudence, temperance and just about every act of virtue that we need to activate throughout the day. A golden spiritual treasury begins to well up within us, a fountain that can burst forth even in the moral and spiritual deserts we often find ourselves wandering in throughout the worlds in which we live.

This same contemplative experience that can come to us in moments before the Blessed Sacrament, whether in a church or a cathedral during Mass, or a little chapel somewhere in a quiet corner — this same spirit of openness to God’s presence can remain with us wherever we are, wherever we go. I had often heard of people who say they encountered Jesus in such and such a situation. Some have found a divine presence in nature, taking a hike in the woods, or climbing a mountain peak. Jesus himself often took time to do the same. I have imagined that he might even have made himself a raft to float out on the Sea of Galilee, as idyllic a setting as one could imagine for a quiet place to be alone with God. We know he crossed that lake with his disciples many times. 

Others have spoken of encountering God’s presence in the innocence and simplicity of children, the birth of a child, or the unmistakable purity of the joy of some people with severe disabilities who seem so unselfconscious, ready to dance and play with anyone who will return their smile and let go of their inhibitions. I have seen this quite literally in the moments between professionals from the New York City Ballet in the Saturday workshops in which the dancers engage with such beautifully and perfectly human partners in this “judgment free” zone who will not judge them as their audiences, managers and even they judge themselves. 

I have in these pages spoken of experiences with people in the most abject of places as the dump of Mexico City or our state prisons, isolated and abandoned, cast off from the connections we so often take for granted. The corporal works of mercy — to feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, visit the sick, visit the imprisoned and bury the dead — themselves bless us simply through the steps we take to be present to those we meet in the margins of society. They offer God the chance, through them, to be present to us.

As I reflect on these ways of encountering the hidden presence of God, I find myself thinking that the way to lead others “back to the church” is to bring the church to them, wherever we meet them. People often speak of a church with open doors that is more welcoming. The door of the church is more than the entrance to a building. It is the door to our hearts at which Jesus knocks every day through every person whom we meet. To be God’s presence in the world is to bear that presence with the awareness and gratefulness that God has chosen us to be tabernacles of the divine presence, radiating the graces that have been poured into our hearts. 

Radiant joy, which is another way of describing the effects of grace, is contagious. It brings hope simply by being present. Light shines in darkness, illuminating everything around it, even if it is only a small candle. One could almost lapse into poetry to describe in some way how the earth is charged with “God’s Grandeur,” the actual title of an ode to that ineluctable reality (Gerard Manley Hopkins), present to all who look and listen. It is this awareness that bursts into a joy that cannot be contained by sitting quietly in one space, even a holy place that is defined by the walls of a sanctuary. It has to be let loose, overflowing, even exploding into joyous acts of mercy, generously shedding and spreading its rich dew wherever it passes.

Something of this is described in the Pentecost narrative in the Scriptures. The hidden presence becomes visible in the glory of lives transformed by it. Though we may not always be able to name it, we can sense it is there. As mysterious as it may be, it is real, alive and irresistible. My prayer is that as we begin this Holy Year as Pilgrims of Hope, we may all catch this Spirit, not by worrying if we “have” it, but by accepting the gift of its presence.