I Look at Him and He Looks at Me
There is a chapel I run to, not walk to run. When the weight of everything I cannot control presses in at once, my work, my marriage, my children, my own quiet sense that I am not where I thought I would be by now, I get in the car and drive to the perpetual adoration chapel in Natick, Massachusetts. I rarely know what I will say when I arrive. Most of the time I say nothing. I sit down in front of the Blessed Sacrament and try to be still and listen.
For a long while I thought that was not enough. I am someone who solves things. I am used to walking into a problem with a plan and walking out with it handled. So, when I first started coming to the chapel with empty hands and a racing mind, I felt as though I was failing at prayer. Shouldn’t I feel peace? Shouldn’t I, by now, be able to say the words I had been taught, that God has a plan, that this season has a purpose, that something good will come of it?
We are taught to embrace our cross. We are told that God writes straight with crooked lines, that he will not waste our suffering, that His time is perfect. These things are true, but they are not always things we can feel. It is hard to believe something is true when you do not feel it. That gap, between what you are supposed to feel and what you actually feel, only makes things heavier.
It helped me to learn that the saints knew this gap too. When Mother Teresa’s private letters were published after her death, the world discovered that the woman who radiated Christ to the poorest of the poor had spent decades feeling that God was silent, even absent. She kept going to him anyway. She kept serving, kept praying into what felt like an empty sky. Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, near the end of her short life, was visited by real doubt about whether heaven was even there, and she chose to keep believing in the dark. Saint John of the Cross gave that experience its name, the dark night, and insisted it was not a sign that God had left, even though it felt that way.
Which brings me back to the chapel, and to why I keep going even when I leave with nothing solved. I go there to look at Him. That is what I think I am doing when I drive to Natick to sit down in front of the Blessed Sacrament. I am coming to find Him. Yet, somewhere in the quiet, it turns around. I am not the one doing the looking. He is looking at me. I came to visit Him, and He is looking back, the way you look at someone you love and have been waiting for.
That is the part I did not expect, and it is the part that comforts me most. I do not have to perform. I do not have to arrive with the right words, or a neat account of my faith, or a plan for how I am going to fix my life. I can come with empty hands and a heart full of worry, and He simply looks at me. He sees all of it, the parts of my life that feel like they are coming apart, the fear I cannot reason my way out of, the places where I am not the wife or the mother or the woman, I want to be, and He does not look away. I am seen, exactly as I am, and I am not turned away.
I cannot promise myself that things will turn out the way I am praying they will. What I have is not optimism, the easy confidence that everything will work out the way I want. What I have is hope that God is present and good even when I cannot see how, and that He is holding my future, whatever shape it takes.
The peace I find in that chapel is not the peace of having things resolved. Nothing gets resolved while I am sitting there. It is the peace of being with Him, and of letting Him be with me. It is the difference between being alone with my fear and being accompanied in it. So, I keep going. On the hard days I still run. I sit down, I go quiet, and I let myself be seen. I came to look at Him, and the gift is that He is looking at me.
Maria Eugenia grew up in Caracas, Venezuela, raised in a Catholic family of three sisters and one brother. She currently lives in Framingham, Massachusetts, with Alex, her husband of 24 years, and their French Bulldog RoRo. They have twin sons, 21 years old, Carlos and Luis, who are about to graduate from the University of Wisconsin and Boston University respectively. Maria Eugenia and Alex are active servers of Build the Faith, and practice their faith with the support and inspiration of a close group of friends, and guided by the example and legacy of Christina Dangond and her family.
