Christian contemplation is an eye to eye affair. That is what the wonderment in a child's eyes at Christmas manifests. The tree lights and candles with which their eyes shine tell of profound and exciting mystery that they believe that they have found. The glimmer in those glances witness that there is something worth seeing that we want to see too. The confidence and trust that their smiling eyes express tell us about how we ought to see the world if we are to see it rightly.
The Christian faith looks out on this horizon and invites a whole way of life that proceeds from it. Not the faith of experienced old men but of a virgin who delights in what no one has ever known before. Not in the tired calculations of the cynic, but in the gaze of a baby who smiles with divine delight for the first time. The children see and delight over the virgin-mother and her newborn son - and they readily accept that the Son of Mary is the Son of God. As in the Drummer Boy carol, they are not afraid of the silent vigilance of St. Joseph but share in it themselves - because, often without knowing it, they have drawn close to him as they draw close to the Babe who smiles on them. This is why they are great in the Kingdom of God. To believe requires opening the eyes of our hearts with the vulnerable trust of a child - no matter our age, our faith disposes us to salvation only to the extent it is child-like in its wonder over the wonders God has done.
This is no mere enchantment, no feel good narrative. It is about joy of discovering what we know was lost, welcoming a new era in which discord ends, taking hold of the final victory of life over death. Something new has happened in this old dying world and throughout the Christmas Season, we are constantly reminded of this. From the first manifestation at his birth in Bethlehem to his Baptism in the Jordan, God shows Himself the center of all human history in a manner that transforms time itself. For with Him the immeasurably eternal entered into the measurably temporal and particular, and unveiled itself as the inexhaustible source and highest summit of every moment, in every place, for every heart.
This means for those who will choose to believe no passing moment can be ordinary ever again. There are no chance encounters. Every moment is ordained to a new inflow of grace, a new manifestation of Divine Presence, an new awakening of God in the world - through every concrete circumstance, through all that is hidden from the wise and clever, through the deepest secret hidden in the soul.
To speak of opening the eyes of the heart means to be ready to receive the extraordinary gift contained in what reason, by itself, cannot see. By faith, the deepest center of one's own person has its reasons that reason cannot know. By faith, one opens the deepest movements of our being to God's perspective on things and to His movements. To believe is to allow Him to show us how He sees us and the world in which we live, and even more - to believe is to allow Him to show Himself to us. The tender and mighty mystery He manifests in this great self-disclosure changes everything because it is beyond everything, other than everything the ego tries to grasp for itself, including itself. No self-made projection. No Fata morgana enchantment. What He reveals in fact helps us to forget ourselves and our own pre-occupations until we find that peace and joy we were meant to know.
How do we know the truth of this? The Lord offers faith to us through a myriad of witnesses that make of the tradition of the Church, the great "handing on" of the Christian faith. Among the witnesses God sends, the Bible is the first. Proclaimed most fully in public worship, the liturgy, inspired by the Holy Spirit, this ancient library of sacred texts is the source of inerrant saving truth. This grounds Christian contemplation in the prayer of the Church - for the Church at prayer proclaims what contemplation strives to see, to feed this effort, to give its strength, to sustain it with the courage it needs to find rest in what it finds. The contemplation of faith, the opening the eyes of the heart, needs to be fed with the words of the Word - for each of His words witnesses to all that He yearns to share about the Father. Yet, as at every feast, one does not rudely grasp for what one wants, but patiently waits for it to be served. The Church at prayer feeds us the words of life in due season.
Through the ministry of the Church, the language of the Bible becomes the native tongue of the heart that believes - a language that all the saints speak together to encourage one another. Indeed, St. Athanasius learned from St. Anthony that their wisdom is simply putting into their own words what the Bible already makes known. Yet, woe to those who will not make their own what God has revealed for what He declares should never be kept secret but must be made known with our own words too. Such is the nature of the conversation that the Bible opens up when we enter its stories through the proclamation of the Church. In a way no other book can do, the Bible puts the reader in conversation with the source of meaning, eternal life and unending love. Drinking from this font, the believer comes to see the One who makes Himself known and felt in those holy pages. On this point, "If [Christ's] message is in vein when we interpret it without him, his presence is illlegible when we see it without the Scriptures." Fabrice Hadjadj, The Resurrection: Experience Life in the Risen Christ, trans. Michael J. Miller, New York: Magnificat (2016) 101.
It is from the Bible that we learn how God chose to share His vision with us first of all as a baby. He gazed on us with wonder and relied on us in total trust before ever we contemplated Him or learned to trust Him. His infant gaze, the contemplation of a child, unfolds a truth living in the very structure of reality itself - mysteries the Bible reveals as the Beginning and the Word, the Father and the Son.
Something of this primordial and eternal trust is reflected in a child's eyes at Christmas as if a mirror of that Divine glance. The delight of children at Christmas reflect the delight that Christ first had when He gazed at His mother. Young children seem to still share the unconscious memory of what He saw and delight to share it with Him. It is as if they remember in some way how their own horizons expanded under the gaze of their own mother and so feel with Him what He felt in the arms of the Virgin as the whole world came into focus. The cold of a cave warmed only by the livestock who shelter in it with Him, the smell earth and living things, shadows of sunlight and the light of stars, the echoing voices of angels and shepherds, the resounding silence of Joseph -- through warmth in the cold, life in the earth, light in the shadows, voices in the silence, God shares His vision with us if we only dare to open our eyes with same trust in Him that He had in us when He opened His eyes as a babe.
The contemplation that comes from this kind of faith is a sort of gazing into the eyes of the Christ-child. This means, learning to meet God's gaze with the same wonder and trust that it bestows on us. To contemplate is nothing other than to see, to behold, to gaze upon the One who gazes at us first. He gazes with a love that will not hold back but freely chooses to see us in our poverty because He has made it His own. Having freely emptied and humbled Himself in the poorest of all life circumstances, He waits for us in our difficult circumstances until we see Him gazing on us. We feel alone but He is so very present to us. There He is, the Babe in Mary's arms, believing that we will open our eyes to Him to allow Him finally to share the confidence that we can only know when we gaze into His eyes. In such a vision, we realize that we are not alone but called into His love and with this awakening of heart, transformation unfolds. "Christianity is, above all, a way of seeing. Everything else in Christian lfie flows from and circles around the transformation of vision." Bishop Robert Barron, And Now I See, Park Ridge: Word on Fire Academic, (2021). xi
How do we find those eyes that gaze with that same wonder we see in the eyes of children at Christmas? Some rely on techniques and methods. But mastering a technique will only yield a passing state of consciousness or else a kind of enlightenment that, at the end of the day, cannot really see beyond death. Too sophisticated for a child's smile, such a results oriented approaches to prayer yield only the non-personal absolute they strain for. Technique and method are only as helpful as they support the right kind of faith. For to believe in Him comes down to a choice, a decision to bind ourselves not only to the fact that He exists or what He has taught, but also and first of all we bind ourselves to HIm Himself for His own sake. And this, for no other reason than He loves us and He loves it when we allow our eyes to be caught in the wonderment of His loving gaze.
Not by spiritual feats, one finds the eyes that fulfill every desire by the humble decision to lower oneself into that out of the way place in which Baby Jesus has chosen to manifest Himself. The high-minded find a feeding trough hard to peer into. This trough can only be searched when one reaches beyond all transactional calculation. To cross such a frontier, knees must find the dirt on which oxen and sheep have trod in their own hunger. This means we have to accept the dirt and grit of our existence for what it is - because it is in this that we find Him. Only such truth grounded knees allow the head to be low enough to see that face that peers through those swaddling clothes. Only in this close face to face does one discover those divine eyes waiting to smile back. Faith yields a relationship with God who comes to us with all the delight and wonder of a child - and so true faith receives what it beholds.
This contemplation of faith opens up a whole new way of life. It disposes the soul to recieve, to drink in the eternal Light who is the Son of the Father. When something infinitely meaningful circumscribes the pain and ache of our lives, we discover that the evil that haunts our existence is not limitless. We are not left alone tormented by our own thoughts, but Someone has come to bear the burden with us. Messengers, prophets, and shepherds marvel over the new presence of Christ in the poverty of our hearts. Eye to eye contemplation of this mystery in swaddling clothes stands before the truth in order to fall into adoration, and in this adoration, to find itself lifted into the virginal faith of Mary and the silent vigilance of Saint Joseph.