Rare Gifts
God is revealed in his creation. God is revealed in his Church, in its Scriptures and in its Sacraments. Fr. Alexander Schmemann wrote that all things that exist, exist to make God known to man.
Yet the most common experience of mankind is that reality seems opaque. We do not see God in the created order. We do not see God in the Scriptures. We do not see him in the Sacraments. We listen to Science Culture as it speaks to us incessantly in every form of media; it tells us that there is nothing behind the curtain.
When the Roman general Pompey overthrew Jerusalem in 63 B.C., he entered into the Temple and into the Holy of Holies, which only the high priest was allowed to enter. The Holy of Holies was separated from the Holy Place within the Temple by a fabric curtain. When Pompey went behind the curtain into the Holy of Holies, the very heart of the Temple, he found nothing there. The Ark of the Covenant, where God’s presence had been manifested in the original Temple built by Solomon, was lost when the Babylonians destroyed the first Temple in 587 B.C.
Pompey’s experience is echoed by Science Culture. Nothing to see here beyond what can be physically observed. The curtain hides an empty room. Our anxieties and our fears, our grasping after meaning, are all maladjustments and are medicated away (or at least medicated to a lower key). If, in the end, we decide that this empty temple of the universe is too depressing to bear, Science Culture will medicate us out of it with expressions of compassion and sympathy.
This situation is really insane. The normal, everyday assumptions of our culture are not sane. Imagine people who had lived all their lives in a cave agreeing that there was no sky. We are like those people because our spiritual faculty was darkened when Adam and Eve turned away from God. The first thing that Adam and Eve did after turning from God was to attempt to hide from him. Fallen human nature fears God, because it identifies itself very closely with its sin and sin cannot endure the presence of God. It hides from him.
God, the lover of men’s souls, did not will this state of affairs and moved to remedy it. When we could no longer stand God’s presence, God chose to reveal himself in ways that we could endure. He called to us through the created order. He gave us the Scriptures. He spoke to us in a quiet voice (see I Kings 19:11-12).
Jesus, himself the very Son of God, did not reveal his glory openly. He spoke in a voice pitched to the register of those who had become hard of hearing. He veiled his glory so as not to overcome eyes that had grown weak.
All of this means that God hides himself just so that he can be found. He hides himself so as not to overwhelm us. He hides himself so that we will seek him for himself and not flee his power and majesty. And that means that he hides himself so that we will not hide ourselves from him, but seek him. And he leaves us notes, he leaves us gifts, in the created order and in the Church, as constant reminders that he is always there to be found.
St. John of the Cross wrote about this experience:
“Rare gifts he scattered
As through these woods and groves he pass’d apace
Turning, as on he sped,
And clothing every place
With loveliest reflection of his face…”
Our Lord walked in Eden with Adam and Eve (Gen 3:8). Now, because we have allied ourselves to death and cannot bear his unveiled presence, he (in St. John’s words) runs and doesn’t linger. But he leaves “rare gifts” as he goes so that we can find him.
Those gifts are reflections of his face. Here St. John is echoing the words of St. Paul: “For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Cor. 4:6). Christ reveals himself in all things if we will have eyes to see.
Christ comes to us most clearly in the Eucharist, where he hides his Body and Blood in bread and wine just so that we can receive him, and partake of his life. When we partake of his life in the Eucharist, we are given eyes capable of learning to see him as he reveals himself in all things. In this greatest and most rare Gift, we are enabled to receive the countless rare gifts he scatters for us to find, each of which is a reflection of his face.
The curtain that was hiding the empty room has been torn open, and now that room is a Tabernacle, where a Person waits to give himself to us. Here is where he does linger, because this is the garden of paradise he has never left, and into which he calls us. Rare gifts, indeed.
