The Human Heart’s Hunger For Personal Piety

By JAMES MONTI

Many of our Wanderer readers are likely familiar with Caravaggio’s masterpiece, The Calling of Saint Matthew (1599-1600). While there is so much to reflect upon in this timeless painting, what is perhaps most remarkable is the commanding gesture of our Lord, who stands on the right side of the scene, His right arm raised and extended as if He were opening the Red Sea like Moses, pointing his finger directly at the bearded figure of Matthew, seated at a money table on the left side of the room. It brings to mind the right arm and hand of God the Father infusing life into Adam in Michelangelo’s ceiling fresco of the Sistine Chapel (c. 1508-1512).
And indeed our Lord is infusing life into Matthew, raising him from the dead, as it were, raising him from spiritual death. Matthew’s reaction heightens the drama of this scene, looking surprised and pointing at himself as if to say, “Who? Me?” Matthew’s eyes are revealing, for they are the eyes of a man who despite his surprise and reluctance knows already that he cannot turn away from that commanding hand and voice that is summoning him.
Each one of us has experienced the power of that commanding finger of the Lord, summoning us to arise from who and what we once were to follow Him unreservedly. And so it is that although our Lord died once and for all for the salvation of the world, it is also true that souls are saved one soul at a time in the sense that each of us is called and baptized individually, and each of us must individually respond and cooperate with the grace of God.
This appears obvious enough, yet we live in a time when there is such an incessant stress on the communal dimension of Catholic life and Catholic worship that the need for each of us to cultivate our own holiness and personal prayer life can get downplayed or even under-trodden.
A perusal of the Catholic periodical literature from the 1960s onward brings this problem to light. Many an article on the sacred liturgy dating from this period opines about how the opening rites of the Mass must be all about making the “gathered community” feel they are one. They go so far as to complain that the penitential rite is “problematic” and should be eliminated because it detracts from the “gathered community” feeling communal.
With the rite of Holy Communion as well, the talk is all about making the “gathered community” feel they are in communion with each other, relegating as secondary or worse the intimate communion of each individual worshipper with God Himself in the Holy Eucharist. I recall a pastor who on the Feast of Corpus Christi would preach that during Holy Communion no one should have their heads down having a private conversation with God but instead should raise their heads and look around at the other people in the church. Even the architectural design of all too many contemporary churches has been calculated to impede upon the privacy of the individual worshipper, with pews made to face each other rather than all turned in the same direction toward the altar.
I was quite surprised to discover a remarkably frank lament of this situation in the pages of a 1995 issue of the magazine U.S. Catholic penned by a professor from the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, Calif., Alex Garcia-Rivera. He recounts how on a Sunday morning when he was struggling to come to grips with the grim prospect of his family having to place his aged and failing father in a nursing home, the sterile and depersonalizing post-Vatican II architecture and vacuous hand-out sheets scripting the plan for that Sunday’s liturgy at his parish church left him feeling totally empty.
Describing a church with a horseshoe seating arrangement around an altar in the middle that forced everyone to look at each other, surrounded by walls bereft of any statues of saints or side altars, and a Mass in which everyone was expected to blurt out their private and innermost prayer intentions in public, Garcia-Rivera observes:
“Looking around, the prospects of finding a private nook or cranny seemed hopeless. . . . I stood up like everyone else and felt helpless and captive to some sort of tyranny that, for the moment, I could not name. Nonetheless, it was a tyranny that oppressed the intimate and the personal . . . this nameless tyranny chafed against my deepest instincts to kneel and lay my soul bare before the Lord” (Alex Garcia-Rivera, “Mass Should be a Come-as-you-are Party,” U.S. Catholic, August 1995, p. 32).
The only moment that provided Garcia-Rivera with the privacy and intimacy with God that he hungered for was during Holy Communion, and that because there were quite a few others in the congregation who rather than sitting and looking around chose like him to kneel and have their own private conversation with the Lord.
Garcia-Rivera then tells of being at a very different Mass and liturgical setting just a week later at a cathedral in Texas. What was especially different was the plentiful presence of saints’ images and side altars alive with shimmering votive candles and kneeling supplicants; these made him feel the Communion of Saints, the presence of the citizens of Heaven in the celebration of the Mass. The ringing of the cathedral’s bells for the consecration, commanding silence and reverence for what had transpired, also made all the difference. It was in this far more supernatural setting, a setting receptive to private prayer and an intimate encounter with God, that he was finally able to find solace in praying for his father.
Having come to a realization of just what that “nameless tyranny” was that he had experienced in his own parish church a week earlier, Garcia-Rivera explains how it stems from a postconciliar stress upon creating a misleading visible spectacle of happy unity that suppresses what is invisible and ignores both the reality of suffering and the fact that a truly happy unity won’t be fully achieved until the end of time: “…many post-Vatican II Eucharistic liturgies stress a happy, unified community, and, thus, a tyranny begins to form” (ibid., p. 34).
When one considers that this same no-room-for-private-prayer, no-room-for-sorrow, bright-sunny-skies approach to the Mass has often enough made its way into the postconciliar funeral liturgy, one must ask how many grieving families have been emotionally deprived of the “space” they need to grieve and bring their sorrow before the altar of God.
Our fathers in the faith understood the needs of the heart in this regard. In medieval art, the human soul’s longing for a very personal encounter with God and with the saints inspired an art-form known as the devotional diptych, a pair of paintings joined together usually by a hinge bringing together a depiction of Christ and/or the Blessed Virgin Mary in one picture and a portrayal of the owner of this object engaged in prayer in the second picture. When hinged at the middle, the diptych could be opened or closed; when opened, it could be placed upright with the pictures set at an angle to each other, and when closed, it could be carried from one place to another, especially if the pictures were relatively small, as was often the case.
For the devotee (usually a man) who would have an artist make the diptych, the religious purpose of pairing a portrait of himself with a holy image was to express the intimate relationship with our Lord and our Lady that he was striving to attain though his own spiritual life and prayer.
A particularly moving example of this is the Netherlandish master Hans Memling’s 1487 Van Nieuwenhove Diptych. In the left panel our Lady is depicted seated with a downward gaze, holding the Christ Child with her right hand while showing the Divine Infant an apple in her left hand. In the right panel is seen the 23-year-old patron, Maarten van Nieuwenhove, a young man with parted lips and an intense forward gaze, his hands folded in prayer over an opened book of hours from which his attention has been diverted by what he now beholds.
It is one seemingly inconspicuous detail in our Lady’s panel that reveals the inner reality of what is transpiring here. For on the wall directly over her right shoulder is a small mirror, within which can be seen the back silhouette of the Blessed Virgin seated upon a bench, with the patron kneeling closely at her side. In this mirror image he is just two feet or so away from her; the scene looks very intimate, suggesting that he is having a very personal audience and conversation with her and the Christ Child. Their silhouettes are backlit by two windows that lend a mystical beauty to the scene.

Two Worlds

Art scholars point out that the image in the mirror doesn’t fully “match up” with the apparent orientation between where our Lady is seated and where the patron is kneeling in the foreground. Was Memling simply a bit careless or perhaps insufficiently skilled to work out a precisely oriented mirror image of the scene? Or was there a purpose and meaning behind this modest incongruity?
There is good reason to believe the discrepancy was intentional. For Memling was bringing together two worlds as it were, the realm of Heaven inhabited by Jesus and Mary, and the realm of Earth inhabited by the patron still on his earthly pilgrimage. So in the foreground, the space inhabited by the Madonna and Child and the space inhabited by the patron are not fully joined together.
By contrast, what is represented in the mirror is what is wrought by the patron’s earnest supplication. By his prayer, he is transported in spirit to Mary’s side, kneeling beside her and the Christ Child. His parted lips suggest at one at the same time his prayer and his breathless awe in being transported into her presence. Mary’s downward glance suggests that she is attentively, thoughtfully listening to him.
For decades now, we have had to deal with those who see personal devotion as a troubling and baneful “cause for concern.” It is not a “cause for concern” to God. Our Lord longs for the deepest and most intimate encounter with each human soul He has created.
This goes to the heart of the debate as to what “active participation” in the sacred liturgy truly means. It is within the private chamber of the human heart that “active participation” in the liturgy is most fully realized: “I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in me, and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit” (John 15:5).