“God sees me.” So read a plaque that looked down onto the community room of the Sisters of Charity retirement convent in Yonkers, N.Y., home of my dear friend, Sister Helen. The message struck me as odd and, tucked as it was amidst knickknacks from decades past, seemed a relic of an antiquated, gloomy piety. “Don’t do anything stupid, Stupid: God is watching!”
Ten years later, a similar plaque greeted me over a water fountain at the Jesuit school where I was teaching. Vocatus atque non vocatus, Deus aderit: “bidden and unbidden, God will be present.” I realized suddenly, standing there with my water bottle, that the same message now inspired entirely different feelings. God’s omnipresence had come to be a consolation to me, not a burden.
If we deem God merely a behavioral monitor, disconnected from our lives, then His gaze does discomfit us. But when we realize that He is “more intimate to us than our most intimate selves,” in St. Augustine’s words, that His love holds us in existence at every moment, then His gaze reassures us — calls us to conversion, yes, but in mercy.
If we deem God merely a behavioral monitor, disconnected from our lives, then His gaze does discomfit us. But when we realize that He is “more intimate to us than our most intimate selves,” in St. Augustine’s words, that His love holds us in existence at every moment, then His gaze reassures us — calls us to conversion, yes, but in mercy.
Genesis 18 recounts how Abraham lifted his eyes, as he sat at his tent’s entrance during the heat of the day, and saw — God! But long before he saw God, God was looking at him. From all eternity, God saw Abraham sitting there. From all eternity, God knew that, at this moment, He would promise the descendants who would bring forth the Messiah. Centuries later, the Messiah would see Nathanael sitting under a fig tree — and His gaze, and His knowledge of Nathanael, would prompt Nathanael’s confession of His divinity (John 1:45-41). Similarly, His gaze and His knowledge of the Samaritan woman set her free to acknowledge and repent of her sin (John 4).
To those retired Sisters of Charity, who had lived a spousal friendship with Christ for decades, His presence, bidden or unbidden, must have proven quite a solace, especially as they lost the gaze of friends who, one after another, pre-deceased them. He knew, even if the young nurses could see only an increasingly frail patient, that Sister Helen had been a tower of strength for generations of Sisters, had run circles around her young charges at the various schools where she served as teacher and principal. Now, in her weakness, she belonged more fully than ever to her Crucified Spouse.
Lent can be difficult. Superfluities are stripped away, and we are left face to face with our sins. Remember: God sees you. He knows all of your failures already. He is not surprised. He loves you. Do not give up.
On July 22, 2015, vision replaced faith for Sister Helen; she no longer has to trust that God sees her, because she herself beholds His gaze. And we are left here below to keep struggling. As one of the Sisters of Charity admonished me sternly when last I visited their convent before entering the postulancy of my religious Community: “Persevere!” Why? And how? God sees me.
Sr. Maria Veritas Marks is a member of the Ann Arbor-based Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist.
