In Desperate Need Of A Friend

Each morning my wife and I have been praying and reading Carmelite meditations on the interior life. Since the Feast of Corpus Christi, the meditations have been focused on the Real Presence and the Eucharist miracle.

It was on Monday early this week that I realized the little chapel near us--a historic mission church, the oldest in our state--had Perpetual Adoration on Mondays. We had just gotten home from the beach that day, where we were blessed with the opportunity to have a similar kind of "mission Mass" at the home of a couple downstate in the country on Sunday not unlike this first mission near our house that was started at a family's home in the 18th century. A priest came to offer Mass and a handful of faithful families attended. It was good to be around our people, and we had a potluck afterwards as the kids ran around teasing the sheep in the adjacent field. The weekend prior I was in St. Louis and got to attend High Mass three days in a row for First Friday, First Saturday, and Trinity Sunday at the magnificent St. Francis de Sale Oratory. I felt spoiled almost, this being the first time since the pandemic I had been able to freely attend Mass. Whether we are in a magnificent cathedral or worshiping with other families on a sheep farm, Jesus is truly present in the most Blessed Sacrament of the Altar.

But it had been months since I was able to go to Adoration, and I wasn't sure what to expect. Would the chapel be overflowing with people who had so desperately missed being near our Lord and able to gaze on His Face that there would be no available pews? Would parking be an issue? Surely the months of being separated from Him physically would have created in people a hunger for spiritual bread with the need to be sated.

I should have laughed at my idealism. When I arrived at the small chapel, it was completely empty save for one woman in a pew. I entered through the back, and dropped to both knees at the sight of the Lord in the monstrance on the altar. I took a seat in a pew where I would spend the next hour.

Adoration is my favorite type of prayer, because I am not scripted by nature. To be able to be myself, with all my sighing and gesticulations and to be able to collapse and be myself before the Lord of Hosts is a great source of comfort. When I lived in Philly and would visit the Lord in Adoration in my poverty of spirit, I would lie on the pew, though completely undignified, since I would spend sometimes the better half of a day there. I was once taken for a vagrant. "I look at him, He looks at me," as St. John Vianney recalled a peasant telling him. This is the essence of Eucharistic Adoration, distilled.

When the only other person present left after about twenty minutes and I was now alone in the church, I moved to the Prie Dieu near the altar, a few feet from the Lord, to get closer to him. I couldn't believe the privilege--a private audience with the King of Kings, undisturbed before His Majesty, with no one around or waiting even to take my place.

And then I became sad thinking of the Lord left alone were I not there.

For more than three months, we have hardly had access to the sacraments apart from a few exceptions. Where are all the people? After the French Revolution had gutted the life of faith in France in the 18th and 19th century, the Cure d'Ars upon arriving in his new assignment found the little church "cold and empty as the hearts of the worshipers." Has the pandemic made our hearts cold? Fearful? Has Satan sifted us even now? Even after taking for granted what we have had for so long within our means, there was no line to get in the church, no overflow or standing-room-only. I was alone in a church with the Lord in his poverty.

As a newly assigned parish priest, St. Manuel González García dreamed of how welcoming and communal the experience of being a pastor on his first assignment would be, “of having a Church full of souls eager to listen to his sermons, of people fervently praying the Rosary with him each day, and of organizing a beautiful procession in the streets. He pictured crowds hastening to Sunday Mass.”

The reality when he arrived, was a Church poorly attended, where only those getting married or baptizing their children came, and a population that was not a community, but a cluster of human beings who worked side by side, and never invested in the Church or each other. The building itself was dirty, almost abandoned, and the altar cloths torn and burnt. The neglect included the tabernacle covered in dust and cobwebs. He considered begging for a different assignment, fleeing. He wondered how he could fulfil a mission, any mission in such a place, but kneeling before the tabernacle, pondering how impossible the task before him, he felt someone looking at him “in desperate need of a friend.”

He writes,

"The Evangelists are the ones who taught me the word “abandonment.” I decided to use this word, not to speak of the hatred, envy, or persecution of the enemies of Jesus, but rather in reference to the disloyalty, coldness, ingratitude, inconstancy, insensitivity, indelicacy, and cowardice that Jesus experiences from his friends. This leaving him at the moment when they should all have been with him, this failure to assist him with their presence and their unconditional loyalty when he needed it most is what the Evangelists call abandonment and flight. “And they all forsook him, and fled” (Mark 14:50). 

There are two ways in which the tabernacle is abandoned. One, exterior: the habitual and voluntary absence of Catholics who know Jesus but do not visit him. I am not speaking of unbelievers, or of the irreligious, or of uncatechized Catholics, from whom Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament will feel persecuted, hated, slandered, or unrecognized, rather than abandoned. I am speaking of Catholics who believe and know that Our Lord Jesus Christ, true God and true Man is really present and alive in the Blessed Sacrament. But they do not receive him in Holy Communion, nor visit him, nor have a friendly relationship with him—even though they live close to a Church, and otherwise have time and energy for recreational activities. 

The second way is by interior abandonment. It is to go to him but not to really be with him. It is to receive him with the body, but not with the heart. It is to go to him saying words, bowing our heads, kneeling down, but not performing these acts of piety with our hearts. It is when we do not meditate on what we are receiving. It is when we do not prepare ourselves to receive him with a clean heart and with great spiritual hunger. It is when we do not taste and give thanks for the Food we have received. It is when we do not talk to or listen to the Guest who is visiting us. It is when we are not open to receive and keep the graces he brings us, the warnings he gives us, the example he teaches us, the desires he reveals to us, the love he shares with us. How many times will the Master have to repeat to some communicants and visitors to the Blessed Sacrament: “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me” (Mt 15:8). 

Jesus, alone, abandoned in the hearts of his friends! Jesus visits souls and lives in the “homes” of his friends (through Holy Communion) without being understood or listened to or assisted or asked his opinion or even taken into account! This interior abandonment is repeated in alarmingly great proportions."

The empty church, the foot of the cross at his death, the garden in which he sweat drops of blood--these are the places his friends go to meet him. The masses jeer before his trial and drop branches of palms upon his entry into Jerusalem and are nowhere to be found in his hour of need. And yet for these masses He came too, longing to gather them under his wings..."and you were not willing" (Mt 23:37).

Will the many be saved? How few the saved. How empty the churches when men's heart grow cold in those last days. It is these moments when I am alone with the Lord offering this small gift of an hour when I cannot hide anything, that I recognize my own poverty. I have nothing to bring, nothing to give, but a contrite heart and a broken spirit.

We must console the heart of Jesus. Our audience before the Lord is an unspeakable privilege, one that we even now can do at all hours and days. If we cannot, we can make a tabernacle for him in our hearts upon receiving Holy Communion--room at the inn for him to dwell in our impoverishment. We can come to him, see him, whenever we want. And yet we don't. We find something of more importance. But "The time is coming when you will long to see one of the days of the Son of Man, but you will not see it" (Lk 17:22). Go while you can, to sit at his feet, to learn his commands, to listen in the privileged silence of empty churches and neglected tabernacles. Console him while he is still able to be found.