By Michaelyn Hein
Months have passed since I last wrote a single word. I have struggled to name the reasons.
Despite searching for a thread that would enable me to string together meaningful sentences, my hands have remained empty. Which is, after all, not surprising – because such has been the state of my heart.
I write about all things God. I am filled with awe and wonder at the way He remains beautiful in sorrow and in joy, in our best days and our worst, and on a plethora of pages, I spill that out.
But lately, I have been starving for words because I have been starving for Him. And one who is starving has no food to give.
How does one write about God when one feels so separated from Him? This distance is not without seeking a remedy. I attend Church every Sunday. I constantly seek His Mercy in the Confessional. And, though my prayer life is far from perfect, He is woven into my heart and mind every single day.
Yet, for endless weeks my soul has lamented along with David: “Why do you hide your face from me?” (Ps. 88:15)
Because most days it seems as though He is gone, as though there is this great chasm between us that I cannot figure out how to cross. That pit that divides us is daunting and deep, and like the psalmist, I have felt “like a warrior without strength.” (Ps. 88:5)
But here is what most confounds me. The One I long for and who appears impossibly distant has, all my life, been impossibly close. It is the paradox of God, is it not? He is unreachable and yet always giving Himself to each of us in ways that require us not to reach at all, but only to receive.
He has deigned on so many occasions to do exactly this. He has allowed me to know Him in the most intimate and personal ways. As such, perhaps the more appropriate cry is this: “Why are you cast down, my soul, why groan within me?” (Ps. 42:12)
For the truth is that I am not David; I do not need to wonder when I will see the face of my Creator. I do not need to lament the dearth of an answer to the question, “Where is your God?” I do not need to subsist on “tears for my bread.” (Ps. 42) Although I live in this exile from Him, at the same time, and in perhaps the most baffling way, I am invited daily to be more intimately united with Him than spouses are to each other.
Because for all that David had, he lacked one gift that is daily offered to us in the Church: the Eucharist.
David painfully wondered when he might enter the “house of God”. These past months, I have pondered the same. But then last night, as I sought to fill time while my son practiced at a nearby facility with his volleyball team, I drove to my old parish and slipped into the fold of the dozens there celebrating Mass in Spanish.
I don’t know Spanish. I could have given into the feeling of being an outsider. I might just as easily have gotten up and left. But there, in the confusion of the language, in my own Babel moment, existed a Tower that is constantly in the vista of my life but that I ironically have not really been seeing. It is the Tower that at church last night held all of us in attendance together. It is the Tower that is elevated high above our heads at every Mass with the words, “This is My body, given up for you.”
And there is the impossible Mystery. The One who felt incomprehensibly distant, in the moment I knelt and received Him, became incomprehensibly close.
It is a Mystery that I have lately overlooked – and one that is too easily disregarded by us all. Because some of us neglect to attend Mass, and so we forget how available our God chooses to be to us. Or we attend Mass regularly, and our familiarity births indifference to this miracle. Or we simply struggle to comprehend the truth of this Mystery, and so it is easier to go through the motions of our lives and not think of it at all.
And in our forgetting, we come to feel parched in this dry and weary land – and to, ironically, think that we have been forgotten by the very One who created us. We feel akin to David, who sang his sorrow in the psalms. We feel like Adam and Eve, who were banished from the Father’s sight and destined to wander the earth in agony of losing Him.
But because of Jesus, we are not David. Because of the Cross, we are not Adam. Because of the Resurrection, we are not Eve.
We have a beautiful Savior who allows Himself to be exposed to us – on a Cross, on an altar, in a monstrance. We believe at times that He is unknowable, unseeable, untouchable. But there He is in the bread turned Body and the wine turned Blood, more knowable and seeable and touchable than any of our Old Testament forefathers imagined.
It is inevitable that we will so often in this life feel like those lost Israelites, wandering the desert, desperate for food from heaven. But if we remain starved today, in this era in history in which our benevolent God has chosen for us to exist, then starvation is of our own choosing. Because just as He fed His children then, He offers us sustenance in an even more powerful way now.
We need not be the lost children of Israel. We can choose to be numbered among the 5,000 who were hungry, whom Jesus pitied, and whom He commanded His apostles to feed.
Because somewhere nearby is a Catholic Church, and in that house of God, Jesus Christ awaits us, offering Himself as our nourishment in the gift of the Holy Eucharist, longing for us to remember Him there. And if we are ready for that moment, then He is always ready for it, too.
Michaelyn Hein is a Catholic writer, wife and mother, who resides in Hopewell, New Jersey.
