The Eucharist: Being Seen

Sitting in a convent chapel I once read, on a scrap of paper, these words by Saint Thérèse of Lisieux:

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One of the greatest pains is that of not being understood.

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I wish I could tell you where in her writing that line is from. It had been translated from the French into Italian, and the English words that you read now are my translation. Who knows how much their meaning has shifted through all those languages and hands.

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The chapel where I sat that day was full of sunlight and shadows of branches on the walls. The only sounds were the sea hushing at the bottom of the road, birdsong—and a clatter of Italian voices as children burst out of school at the end of the day. I was supposed to be with the other mothers, waiting at the gate. But I needed to be here, looking at Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament exposed at the altar. I could not look away from the large white disc of the host. It was like an eye. It fixed me. Between “it” and me was the kind of gaze you fall into with a lover.

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I could not look away from the large white disc of the host. It was like an eye. It fixed me. Between “it” and me was the kind of gaze you fall into with a lover.

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But I knew I had to drag myself to the school gate where I would, like Saint Thérèse, not be understood. I spoke Italian, but I was different. As an Englishwoman I had different clothes, told different jokes, had different concerns. I knew exactly that flayed, uncertain feeling that Thérèse had written about, albeit in a different context. As a foreigner, what I said, what I thought, grated against the easy chatter of the locals. My consolation was sitting before that large white eye in the chapel and being seen and understood.

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I wasn’t always Catholic. As an atheist, in the absence of God  I had often pleaded, silently to family, friends, strangers: “Look at me,” or “understand me.”

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Then, at one point before my conversion a priest said to me, “God knows you better than you know yourself.”

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The decisive experience of conversion, I would say now, is being seen. The burden of atheism? Not being seen. Feeling, terminally, not understood. But even those who believe in God, who know that God understands them, share the invisibility that we all inherited from Adam and Eve when they staggered from Eden and could know God--then--only at what seems like an insurmountable distance, through a veil.

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Yet for Catholics, I say with some delight, there is a difference. These days, as I rush through traffic, lines at the post-office, squabbles on social media, the grey, sinking feeling when someone (a family member, a friend, even a barista) does not look at me, does not get me, I’m headed to a place that God set aside for us when mankind fell. In Mass I may be distracted. The elderly lady may sing in a different key to the nun on the guitar. The pink roses might be wilting. But when it comes time to not only behold Christ in the Eucharist with my eyes but to take him in my mouth, I know Him knowing me from the inside out. I know Him as he breaks open in me like a seed, sending shoots, veins, branches of divinity through my physical body, through my soul. This is something of heaven, I think, as I kneel in prayer. I am seen. I am understood in the way that Saint Thérèse also longed to be understood. My body, then, is a dark, enclosed room where God and I meet, and talk in whispers or in no words at all. And sometimes I say nothing, feel nothing. But he is closer to me than I am to myself.

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​When it comes time to not only behold Christ in the Eucharist with my eyes but to take him in my mouth, I know Him knowing me from the inside out.

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One day in the convent chapel, during those years when I felt such an outsider, one of the mothers from the school gate came inside and knelt near me before the Blessed Sacrament. Then another came in and stood at the back. They weren’t foreigners, but they too knew the necessity of being seen. For some minutes, each of us was at the center of that gaze. Each knew, in some measure, the gaffes, limitations, and wounds of any ordinary day dissolving in that vast comprehension that made each of us tiny, yet of the greatest importance. For those seconds or minutes of looking and being looked at we were all understood. It seems likely we were the best we could be on this earth.

 

Eucharist

 

If prayer is a night, it is cold and wet,

the last bus disappearing past the last set of lights,

and not a taxi to be had.

If prayer is a night, do you wonder

at my restlessness

as I kneel here, blind?

But you reach deeper in me to darkness,

to blood that’s more black; to my heart,

an unsteady metronome

that you rest your head on like a son,

like a child who stills storms with small hands.

You lead me further where no one can go,

climb down me so low

that all winking, watchful lights close,

and even thoughts, like voices, are lost

on the shore: we wave them goodbye, you and I.

Am I, now, your boat, the one where you slept?

I was unstable, skedaddling the jaggedest

waves, but now your fine body, lean and wild,

weighs me like fuel, like cargo.

I would carry you into the world, eyes shut,

like a lover not changing anything

that you last touched:

my ballast, my glory, my child.

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This poem originally appeared in Word on Fire’s “Culture and Evangelization”.