The Visible and the Invisible
If Christianity is about a person, then our relationship with that person directly influences our faith. Say, for instance, that a man and a wife live across the country from one another and speak only on Sundays. Would we suppose their marriage is thriving? Then what of our relationship with Christ?
Immediately, all sorts of thoughts may rush to our heads. “I do my best”, “I try but I’m just so busy”, “I pray a rosary most days on my commute to work”, “It’s not my fault if God doesn’t reveal himself to me.” It’s the latter sentiment that I aim to address, for to see Christ is an essential work of faith,1 and seeing the person of Christ illuminates him in a way that makes a real relationship seem much more attainable. I tread a bit lightly here as of course we cannot make demands of Our Lord, and to be able to see Him requires grace. We can, however, make demands of ourselves, and we can wait expectantly for what we know to be true.
In 2016, I spent two months in Calcutta with the Missionaries of Charity. My aim on the trip was asking Mother Teresa to help me see Christ in the poorest of the poor as she herself so beautifully did. Inclined to pessimism and no stranger to darkness, I admit with some shame that I expected to find the suffering Christ in the suffering of those we served. To my surprise, it was not in the hardships of these people but in their joy that I most vividly experienced Christ. And not Christ on his Cross, but the redeemed Christ. In retrospect (or to others wiser and better versed in optimism than I), perhaps this seems obvious, and I am gladdened to have my perception adjusted. Attempting to sort through this new outlook led to plenty of questions I continue to explore.
First, had I been looking at the world all wrong? The pinnacle of Christianity lies somewhere around Christ’s suffering on the Cross, does it not? I understood this to be at the center of our faith, and Christ is with us in our sufferings so isn’t it here that I should find Him in others as well? But if we look only at the suffering and fail to pierce more deeply into it, we stop short of the reality that is God who is Love; as a professor in grad school so profoundly summarized, it is not the suffering of Christ on the Cross that redeemed all of mankind, but the love of Christ on the Cross that redeemed all of mankind.
We’ve all had the experience of dreading something but being willing to do it because it served the goodness of someone we love. Christ does this most deeply for us. God Almighty would not have allowed Himself to suffer the greatest of all sufferings at the hands of mere mortals except through his love. It is not so much suffering that the Cross represents, but God’s absolutely infinite love for each and every one of us that we find beyond the suffering. He enters into our suffering not only through his own suffering, but more so through his love. It is this love that He brings to our suffering, and it is this love that redeems it.
Had I been looking at the world all wrong? Yes. But how can a world as broken as ours still draw one into the mystery of God’s being? If Christ is present through love rather than through suffering per se, what of those who suffer deeply and rather than embrace the Cross and God’s love through it, reject him and live life out of deep wounds? How was I able to find his presence even in these people who were not joyful but miserable? Yet I was able to do so.
As creatures made by love and for love, our hearts at the core of their very being long for precisely this: love. If you’ve spent even a moment with the existential ache that is this longing for love, then you know it’s not just some love we want, but true love, real love, full love, and more, always more. The fulfillment we experience in this lifetime is ephemeral and we are greedy in our seemingly infinite longing for love. This craving informs the consciousness of our existence, it is the polarization of the compass of our hearts. To some extent or another, it is love that we seek in all that we do—that is to say, it is God that we seek—goodness, beauty, truth, love, and the fulfillment of all desire Himself.
Reflection of this reality in my own lived experience helped me recognize God even in those who are miserable, or fallen away, or want nothing to do with that someone called Christ. Even malicious actions are a cry for love, no matter how buried, overlooked, or distorted this cry may be. To say we are sinful creatures is simply to point out that we are creatures who are made for union with Love Itself and don’t have it. The pain of this separation is too great to bear (Hell being the extreme case of this). People deal with pain in any number of ways, one of which unfortunately is to act out and project it onto others. We also lack the full possession of this love to give in the first place. Thus, we see cycles of broken love within families, societies, and the world. Ironically, at the core of this brokenness is a great longing on the level of our very being for the exact opposite: love.
St. Thomas Aquinas reminds us that even when we sin, at the very least we seek a perceived good through our actions; that is, we seek some measure of the God who is goodness itself. We cannot run from this reality for it is Love who has made us, Love who holds us in existence, Love who informs the core of our desires, Love who rests at the core of our being, and Love who calls us to union with Himself. In my opinion, it is a relief to be celebrated that no matter how much trouble it may cause me, ultimately I cannot exile a longing for the good from my being; it keeps me searching. So even in the shortcomings, anger, apathy, and malice of others, God has allowed me to catch a glimpse of the presence of Himself that holds us in being. He has allowed me to catch a glimpse of the visible and the invisible: Christ in the poorest of the poor.
Fast forward to 2022. Just this month, I took a week out of my summer to spend time in northern Michigan with some most unlikely of friends. They are newly retired cheesemakers, one from France and the other from Detroit, married, twice my age, loving as can be and simultaneously as cynical as can be. From my perspective, true delights. We stumbled across one another in this great wide world in the most precarious of ways. We have remained in loving friendship in this great wide world in the most precarious of ways. In so many words, they are not fans of the Church. I love it. I love them. They love me. They couldn’t have children and call me the daughter they never had. For me, they’re like another set of parents (who are also great friends) that God bequeathed to me as a bonus, for fun, winking, with a twinkle in his eye, just because He could. They are family to me on a level I cannot describe. I do not understand it.
I wonder if some might question maintaining such a deep friendship with people who are not lovers of the Church, and more so not proclaimed lovers of Christ. At times, I have felt obligated to wonder myself. Yet God allows me to catch glimpses of the presence of Himself in them: Christ in the poorest of the poor. In their poor spirits, who love so well yet do not understand who God is; and in my impoverished spirit, whose heart is too small to comprehend his workings.
In the case of the cheesemakers, they are easy to love. For one, they love me, and deeply at that. Furthermore, they are more steeped in so-called natural virtue than perhaps anyone, and certainly any so-called rejector of Christ, that I have met. They are simple people in the most beautiful of ways. Anne spends her retirement working tirelessly at a soup kitchen and even her time relaxing at the beach collecting trash. She welcomes everyone she meets. She will help people who are homeless and people who are millionaires alike and to any extent she can. John is not far off, and, for example, will interrupt his entire morning to move so much as a caterpillar out of the street or create a pool for bees to drink water without drowning because the goodness of his heart is more than he can contain. For whatever misunderstandings they may hold against the Church, their active pursuit of the good in many ways puts my own to shame. It is not hard to find the Author of Love in hearts as grand as theirs.
But what of the restaurant cook who threw knives in the kitchen back when I was a waitress? What of the supposed best friend who out of the blue turned on me in cold betrayal? What of the family members who did not love me well, who abandoned childhood me in my needs because of vices of their own? What of the family members who all but spit in my face, and the face of my father, and the face of my mother, because we do our best to follow Christ? Those people are not as easy to love. Do I allow the Author of Love to reveal himself here as well? Not only in my suffering, but in them. For they too are signs of the living God, He holds them in existence and died for them as much as He did for me. Do I strive to serve them like the Missionaries of Charity serve the people in their care? Certainly, with forgiveness, resolve, and a lot of grace, I can choose to do so, but it seems important that I am able to catch a glimpse of Christ in them as well. The visible and the invisible, in the poorest of the poor. A Christ who is seen is a Christ who can be followed. What claim would I have to a relationship with a God whose presence I refute, in these cases or any?
Significantly, I cannot “force” Christ to “be there,” I cannot make him up or pretend to see him when I don’t. (Nor should I carelessly understand his presence, when I do find it, to condone evil.) For one, thankfully, we know he is somehow present in all things. And for as much as I cannot logically comprehend the glimpses I catch of him, he has given me some guidance on how to recognize his movements. I once asked a hobbyist sheep farmer I met at a Catholic conference what we miss in the Gospel being a society so largely removed from the metaphors of agriculture. “Sheep are entirely skittish creatures,” he mused. “Even a car passing slowly or a falling leaf will make them cower. But they know their master. Our herd can tell just by the sound of the way I open the door in the mornings whether it is me or my wife. From her, their impulse also is to cower, although they are learning. But from me, they will not leave my side.” Would if we could recognize the movements of the Spirit so keenly, and remain always by Christ’s side, following him instinctively as a sheep follows its master.
It is with this hope that I attempt to navigate a world of whose dark underbelly I’ve seen more than I care to admit. To “hope for what I do not see” because for God “even the darkness is not dark.” To open the space to listen (as his presence is not always so loud), to ask for grace, and to practice the art of “seeing” through him, with him, in him in all things, the visible and the invisible.