Born from the Gaze of God

A homily for the 24th Sunday of Ordinary Time

I am going to be so bold this morning as to offer a remedy for what I understand to be the fundamental illness that infects us human beings. I am going to suggest we all, in some way or another, and to varying degrees, suffer from a deep sense of being Unseen — Unloved — Unsafe. And these three, of course, are intimately intertwined together: If I feel unseen, then I believe I am unloved and if unloved then I am unsafe and if unsafe I live a life always trying to stem the onrush of the chaos and the uncertainty that threatens my existence.

And what follows if we live feeling fundamentally Unseen — Unloved — Unsafe is that we each take up the posture of the unmerciful servant in our gospel today and we live life, and we live in relationships, driven by that same singular demand: “Pay back what you owe!”

So what might this look like? Well, if we live Unseen — Unloved — Unsafe we live with an existential conviction that God, the world, or other people, have stolen something from us that was rightfully ours and now they must pay us back. We look for payback in order to self-medicate the painful effects of the deficit we suffer. We put the full weight of our need on our spouse, on our children, on our job, on this or that title or accomplishment, on this or that political agenda, church agenda, or other ideologies. And what inevitably happens is they break down, because they cannot bear the weight of our need and they certainly cannot pay us back for what we feel we’ve lost. But the more they break down the more we desperately daily grasp at something else and our demands grow more intense and our fear, that we’ll never find what we need, delves ever deeper in us and our lives dwindle into delusions and deep dissatisfaction, and we wind up indifferent, if not completely deadened.

So then what is the remedy? Well, there really is only one remedy that can meet the depth of this deeply felt human deficit. We must expose ourselves to the Gaze of God.

Back in the mid-1990s you may recall the story of the seven Trappist monks kidnapped from their monastery in Algeria and later found beheaded by religious extremists. In 2018, these 7 monks were beatified and declared martyrs by Pope Francis and the youngest of them was, now, Blessed Christophe Lebreton. After his murder there was found in his cell a journal he kept that was eventually published under the title: Born from the Gaze of God.

In reading this journal I patched together a prayer, made up wholly of Lebreton’s own words that I think gets to the heart of the matter and provides the path for us to break out of the cycle of “Pay back what you owe!” And the prayer goes like this:

“I must believe that you (God) love to look at who I am becoming.

I must believe your eyes; the nakedness of your ‘I love you,’ that

strips me naked. Just like Jesus on the cross; surrendered to your gaze

alone and trusting desperately.

Certain he is being sought. Certain he is being found.

I must believe another view of me exists — the profile you see.

I am learning this!”

If we truly want to get free from the addiction of cherishing our own anger and hugging tight our own wrath, then we need to expose ourselves to the Gaze of God by which we are reborn. Because when Christ sees us, he both knows us fully and loves us unconditionally. And when we come to be Seen and Loved in that way then we are not just Safe, we are eternally Safe. So safe that even in the midst of a precarious and chaotic world, or in the midst of our own human diminishments, we stand in a place not even death can destroy.

So let us pray in our Eucharist today that we might expose ourselves to the Gaze of God, the only gaze by which we can be seen, loved, and safe to the depth we most deeply and desperately desire. Only by committing ourselves to that path of daily coming to believe I am fully seen, I am fully loved, and I am fully safe can we break the hold that the “Pay back what you owe” mentality exercises over us and over all our brothers and sisters. So, we pray that our lives might be transformed from “Pay back what you owe” to “Receive freely what you always most deeply longed for.” And our world, in turn, will become a very different place.