The Face of Christ

More from Fr. Jean LaFrance's Give Me a Living Word:

"27. The face of Christ must become alive for you: it must have eyes that see, lips that speak and a heart that loves. This is a gift of God and there is no trick to it. Nevertheless all spiritual masters testify to it: you must seek to have the face of Christ become alive for you and that can only be the work of the Holy Spirit.

28. At one time, you felt this breath go by in your life and your eye meet that of Jesus, otherwise you would not be here. From that day on, Jesus Christ ceased to be an abstract entity for you and you had but one wish: to find him again in contemplative prayer.

29. But after that, the sea ebbs away and you are cut short! As the Fathers say, grace abandons us. Your situation is then very painful, for you are yearning for Christ like Adam when he was chased from the Garden of Eden. At certain moments, contemplative prayer may even have lost all its meaning for you or at least most of it. How can you prevent this encounter from falling into oblivion, not in the manner of Proust's "madeleines", but in the biblical sense: "Remember all that happened to you when the face of Christ took flesh in your sight." St. John Chrysostom says that at the moment of baptism, we are enlightened by the grace of the Holy Spirit, but that grace very quickly disappears into the depths of our being and we hasten to forget it. A catechumen recently made the same remark to me," Give Me a Living Word, 9.27-29.