Restoring The Sacred Looking Into The Eyes Of Christ In The Holy Eucharist

By JAMES MONTI

“Where are you?” (Gen. 3:9). It was with these haunting words that God first confronted Adam after he had sinned. By his sin Adam had lost for the entire human race the privilege of attaining to the beatific vision, the privilege of beholding God face to face in Heaven. By His sacrifice on the cross, Christ has restored for mankind this supreme gift. It is a privilege man has always yearned for: “My heart says to thee, ‘Thy face, Lord, do I seek.’ Hide not thy face from me” (Psalm 27:8-9); “When shall I come and behold the face of God?” (Psalm 42:2). The nearest we can come to a foretaste of it here on earth is in the Holy Eucharist.
When we find ourselves alone or almost alone with our Lord in a beautiful church or chapel, we instinctively feel drawn to rest our eyes upon the door of the Tabernacle. There is more to this than simply the obvious, that we want to fix our attention upon the very place in the church where the Blessed Sacrament is located.
On a deeper level, our eyes go there because we want to look directly into the eyes of Christ, “to make eye contact” with Him as it were, albeit in a totally insensible and symbolic manner. In his writings on love and marriage, Dietrich von Hildebrand speaks time and again of “the unheard-of gift of gazing into the eyes of a beloved person,” the “interpenetration of looks” (“ineinanderblick” — Aesthetics: Volume I, Steubenville, OH, Hildebrand Project, 2016, p. 5; The Nature of Love, South Bend, Ind., St. Augustine’s Press, 2009, pp. 126, 130).
How much more so is this with God? It brings to mind the words that a peasant of Ars spoke to explain what he did while praying before the Blessed Sacrament, as recounted by St. John Vianney: “I look at the good God, and the good God looks at me” (“J’avise le bon Dieu et le bon Dieu m’avise” — Abbé Francis Trochu, The Cure d’Ars: St. Jean-Marie-Baptiste Vianney, Rockford, Ill., TAN Books and Publishers, 1977, p. 184).
In those moments when we face a great trial, we can imagine our Lord, on the battlefield of life with us, looking deeply and earnestly into our eyes and telling us, “I need you to do this for me, to undergo this for me.” Of course, as God He needs nothing from us, but He does have a loving plan for us and for all mankind for which there is a need of our participation and cooperation.
There is a particular place in the vineyard of the Lord, on the battlefield of salvation, where just at that moment we are needed most, and it is to that battle-station that Christ lovingly summons us.
By way of a slight digression here, it is worth noting that this consideration likewise provides an additional reason for the use of religious images in Catholic worship. Here too, von Hildebrand’s insight about “the blissful glance of mutual love” (Jaws of Death: Gate of Heaven, Manchester, NH, Sophia Institute Press, 1991, p. 97) applies: our desire in prayer to communicate our love, our aspirations, our hopes, our supplications directly to our Lord, our Lady and the saints prompts us instinctively to yearn for “eye contact” with them, to look directly into their eyes to communicate heart to heart with them.
So our prayer yearns for some sort of physical “directionality.” The religious image gives us a way symbolically to direct our gaze into theirs, to feel their gaze upon us as we feel ourselves gazing upon them.
This “directionality” while at prayer also focuses and intensifies our attention, our attentiveness to whom it is we are addressing. Even in natural conversation we know from experience that looking directly toward the person speaking to us makes us much more attentive to his or her words. What inattentive child hasn’t heard from his parents sooner or later the reprimand, “Look at me when I’m talking to you!”
Directionality in prayer also serves to protect us from the heinous error of pantheism, from the error of thinking that the whole universe is God. Directing our prayer toward our Lord in the Tabernacle, on the altar or in the hands of the priest, or toward a crucifix or other image of Him reminds us that although it is absolutely true that God is everywhere, He is nonetheless a personal God utterly and totally distinct from and infinitely transcending the universe.
It is this “directionality” that underlies the practice of celebrating the Mass “ad orientem,” for in the latter it is likewise a matter of “facing the Lord,” with the east symbolizing the coming of Christ, both His First and His Second Coming. We might also add here that with us not seeing the face of the priest for much of the sacred rite celebrated ad orientem, we can better envision that the celebrant is indeed Christ Himself.
In a sense, what happens at a priestly Ordination is as remarkable as what God wrought in first creating man. For by the bishop’s imposition of hands and the consecratory prayer of priestly Ordination, Almighty God fashions out of the “dust from the ground” (Gen. 2:7), from a frail and sinful creature prostrate before the altar, a “new creation,” an “alter Christus,” that in this man transformed by Ordination Christ may walk the Earth anew.
Recently I had the privilege of attending a private low Mass in the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite at a small private altar — I was the only congregant present. There was something almost mystical about experiencing the Mass in this intimate manner, kneeling just a few feet away from the altar, the outside world seeming to fade away, with the silence and stillness framing the whispered words and quiet gestures of the celebrant.
There was something about the setting that made me feel as if I had been taken back to the age of my favorite saint, Thomas More, when such private Masses were commonplace. Particularly palpable on this occasion was the dimension of the Mass as the priest’s “face to face” dialogue with God on our behalf, like Moses in the Tent of Meeting. There was a profound solemnity that permeated the Mass, but in that very solemnity there was no feeling of “remoteness” — God felt so very close.
What also became more vivid for me personally from the experience of this private Mass was the tremendous power of each and every Mass. This is especially important to remember when we grow discouraged by the seemingly impossible odds that faithful Catholics find themselves facing in fighting present-day evils.
The Enemy, the Evil One, may have at his disposal the outlets of mass media and the social media, the vast wealth of the rich and famous, a huge talent pool of entertainers, artists, writers and musicians, politicians and businessmen willing to do his bidding, and the winning numbers in public opinion polls and legislative votes. But he does not have the Mass.
For each time a priest goes to the altar to undertake the Holy Eucharist, an event like no other begins: “Who has believed what we have heard? / And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?” (Isaiah 53:1). It is here, in the celebration of this infinitely sacred act, that by the power of Ordination a frail, sinful, and mortal man has been given the power to command his very own Creator to come down upon the Earth: “Bow thy heavens, O Lord, and come down! / Touch the mountains that they smoke! / Flash forth the lightning and scatter them, / send out thy arrows and rout them! / Stretch forth thy hand from on high” (Psalm 144: 5-7).
At the words of the priest, God descends upon the altar to enter the battle of salvation anew.
Just a day before this, I had been to a solemn high Mass in the Extraordinary Form, with four priests and an army of altar boys on the altar, with splendid sacred music and vestments, in a parish church packed with over a hundred congregants. We have a God of infinite glory and majesty, to whom we fittingly offer our very finest treasures as did the Magi, yet who is also so utterly close to us and intimate with us, attentive to even the tiniest details of each of our lives, as if each man and woman was the only soul in the universe He had to save, sanctify, and draw to Himself.
The power of the human gaze is of such a nature that it additionally possesses a second dimension likewise deeply expressive of the innermost secrets of the heart. It is the averted gaze, the lowering of our eyes out of reverence. In the Mass it comes almost instinctively at the consecration, when at the moment the Host is raised by the priest (and likewise afterward at the raising of the chalice), our eyes look upward to adore, but then immediately turn downward, in humble deference, acknowledging our unworthiness before our God. Closely related to this is the veiling of what is sacred, the veil meeting our gaze with the beautiful message that what lies beyond it is so sacred that we must symbolically put off our shoes, for we are standing upon the threshold of holy ground (Exodus 3:5).

The Bliss Of Heaven

Recently I found myself in a beautiful high-ceilinged chapel, the tabernacle of which was totally covered with a veil of rich, heavy fabric. The thick veil spoke powerfully and irresistibly of the infinite majesty of Him who lies beyond it. Through the chapel’s opened stained-glass windows, the refreshing scents and sunlight of a fine June day drifted in.
When the breath of early summer blossoms mingles with the air of a beautiful church or chapel, it creates a fragrance like no other that inebriates the soul. The silence of the chapel was likewise eloquent in testifying to a Presence that leaves mortal man speechless.
At such moments, the bliss of Heaven isn’t so hard to imagine. It’s astonishing just how much a veil reverently set over what is sacred can unveil to the soul what the eye cannot see: “‘What no eye has seen, nor ear heard…what God has prepared for those who love him,’ God has revealed to us through the Spirit” (1 Cor. 2:9-10).