To really see someone, especially someone who looks up to you, is to give that person an important blessing. In a gaze of recognition, of understanding, in an appreciative look, there is deep blessing.

Often times, it is not so important that we say much to those for whom we are significant, but it is very important that we see them.

Let me try to explain:

A couple of years ago, a family that I know had a painful incident with their 13-year-old daughter. She was caught shoplifting. As things, turned out, she was stealing things that she neither needed or wanted.

Moreover, in her case, her stealing these things was not, as it often is among teens, something intended to impress peers, a little rite of passage necessary for acceptance into a group of friends.

No, without her saying so, she was stealing to get her father’s attention. Her father, struggling in his relationship to her mother, was not around a great deal and didn’t give a lot of attention to his daughter. So she forced his hand.

It was he that she demanded come to the police station to pick her up and settle things with the police. In doing that he had to give his daughter his attention. He had to look at her. Her shoplifting was a way of forcing her father to see her.

There is a deep longing inside of us to be seen by those to whom we look up—our parents, our elders, our leaders, our teachers, our coaches, our pastors and our bosses. It is important to us, more so than we generally imagine, that those who are above us, look at us, see us, recognize us.

We see this acted out ritually, for instance, when someone has an audience with the pope. In such an audience, not a lot of meaningful words are exchanged. The idea is not so much to have a deep conversation with the pope as it is to be seen by him.

It is important that the pope sees you, that he recognizes you, that his appreciative gaze falls upon you. There is a certain blessing imparted in that and, contemporary cynicism notwithstanding, those who have had an audience with the pope—or with the Queen or some royalty—have some feeling for what this is.

Blessing by seeing is one of the deep archetypal functions of all royalty, of all parents, and of all who lead others in any way. Thus . . .

Good Kings and Queens see their people; good parents see their kids; good teachers see their students; good pastors see their parishioners; good coaches see their players; good executives see their employees; and in really good restaurants the owner comes around to the tables and sees his or her costumers—and the customers are, without being able to explain why, grateful that the owner took the time and pain to see them.

We are blessed by being seen.

At a primal level we see this need to be blessed by being seen acted out in every playground on earth. The little child is playing at something, but he or she is constantly looking about for the parent and saying: “Mummy, watch me!” “Daddy, watch me!”

As well, more than one is the mother who cannot get any work done because her toddler is demanding every minute that mummy look at her or him.

And so, what’s my point?

My point is that today the young are not being seen enough in this way. Our youth, much like the 13-year-old girl referred to earlier, are acting out in all kinds of ways as a means of getting our attention. They want to, and they need to, be seen by us—parents, adults, teachers, priests, coaches, leaders. They need our blessing.

They need to see, right in our eyes, the radical acceptance of their reality and they need to read in our eyes the words: “You are my beloved child, in you I am well­pleased.”

Youth need our appreciative gaze; mostly they simply need our gaze—period. One of the deepest hungers inside of young people is the hunger for adult connection, the desire to be recognized, seen, by a significant adult.

The surface often belies this. We can easily be fooled and put off here. Our young people will, precisely, tend to give us the impression that they neither want nor need us, that we should butt out and leave them to their own world.

Nothing could be further from the truth. They desperately need, and badly want, the blessing that comes from our gaze and presence. They need for us to see them.

In the end, more than they want our words, they want our gaze . . . and so much of their acting out, the shoplifting, the drugs, the insolence and the absence, are little more than an attempt to force our hand, to demand and beg: “Mummy, Daddy, someone significant and adult, watch me!”

In his latest book, The Return of the Prodigal Son, Henri Nouwen suggests that one of the main things that has to happen in order for us to come to conversion and purity of heart is that we must move from being judge to being repentant sinner.

From judge to repentant sinner, what is being suggested here? Psalm 50 haunts the heart with the refrain: “A humbled and contrite heart you (God) will not spurn.” Our problem is that, despite considerable sincerity, our hearts are rarely humble and contrite. The norm is judgment of others, anger at them, and a certain moral smugness and self-righteousness.

Rarely are we on our knees with our heads against the breast of a forgiving God, contrite about what we’ve done and left undone—our betrayals, our sins, our inadequacies. Most of the time our posture is that of the judge. Our own faults are rarely at issue as we adjudicate others’ need for contrition and pronounce judgment on their faults.

Our own judgmental attitude and self-righteousness is, most of the time, hidden from us. In our own eyes we are never the hypocrite, the one sitting in judgment on somebody else’s life. No. We are the honest ones, the compassionate ones, the humble ones.

Yet, that is rarely the way we are seen by others, especially by those closest to us. Almost always they feel judged by us and almost always they see in us a self-righteousness and a moral smugness that offends them. People around us are only too aware that we are much more the judge than the repentant sinner, even as we ourselves are little aware of it.

Thus, for example, if our temperament puts us at home in liberal circles, there is a good chance that we nurse a fair amount of anger against our more conservative and traditional brothers and sisters. Invariably they will appear to us as morally smug, holier-than-thou, complacent, timid, rigid, dogmatic, fundamentalistic, power-hungry and intellectually backward—and yet as claiming the moral and religious high ground.

Moreover, we feel that they are judging us, believing that we no longer pray, that we have sold out in terms of sexual morality, and that we are not really Catholic and Christian in the true sense.

And this double awareness—of their hypocrisy and of being judged by them—will dominate our self-awareness much more than will any self-criticism or awareness of our own duplicity, sin and betrayals.

Little are we aware that they, the conservatives, feel judged by us, that they feel us as intimating that they are stupid, backward, sexually hung-up, racists, sexists, blind to justice, legalistic, naive of real human experience and fundamentalistic. Little are we aware that they, whom we label as holier-than-thou, consider our attitude as “holier-than-thou.”

The converse is just as true: If we find our home among those of a more conservative mindset, there is a very good chance that we harbor a lot of anger against our more liberal sisters and brothers—against feminists, against social justice groups, against a lot of artists and against theologians. Invariably they will appear to us, precisely, as morally smug, as posturing (more-sensitive-and­inclusive-than-thou), as intellectually arrogant and bullying, and as claiming, in pharisee fashion, the religious and moral high ground.

And we will feel them as judging us, believing that we are intellectually backward, fundamentalistic, unenlightened, hung up on sex, insensitive to the needs of the poor, a racist, a sexist,, a dinosaur from another age.

Little are we aware that they, on their part, feel so judged and put down by us. That they perceive us as the bully, the power to be feared, the person who is anti-life, the dealer of unfreedom and death.

Strange how each of us so clearly sees the judgmental attitude in the other and yet is so unaware of how brutally judgmental we ourselves are. One man’s prophet is another man’s fanatic; one woman’s freedom fighter is another woman’s terrorist; and one person’s pro-life struggle is, for another person, the dealing of death!

What is true here in terms of the self-righteousness and self-blindness that exists within our ideological circles is perhaps even more true within the ordinary give and take of our daily lives. We are invariably judge, never repentant sinner.

Conversion begins when we stop standing as judge in order to kneel as sinner. When we are humble and contrite of heart we will not be spurned by God—nor by each other.

Twenty five years ago, Philip Rieff wrote a very important book entitled The Triumph of the Therapeutic. In it, he argued that widespread reliance upon private therapy arose in the Western world mainly because community broke down.

In societies where there are strong communities, he contends, there is little need for private therapy—people can more easily work out their problems through and within the community.

If Rieff is right, and I think he is, then it follows that the solution to many of the things that drive us to the therapeutic couch lies as much, and perhaps more, in a fuller and healthier participation within public life, including ecclesial life, than it does in private therapy.

We need, as Parker Palmer is so fond of suggesting, the therapy of a public life.

What is meant by this? How does public life heal and strengthen us?

In caption, public life—life within community, beyond our private selves and private intimacies—is therapeutic because it draws us beyond ourselves into the lives of others, because it gives us a certain rhythm and because it connects us with resources beyond the poverty of our private helplessness.

To participate healthily in other people’s lives takes us beyond our own obsessions. It also steadies us. Most public life has a certain rhythm and regularity to it that helps calm the chaotic whirl of our private lives which are so often racked with disorientation, depression, psychological impotence, paranoia and an almost infinite variety of obsessions.

Participation in public life gives us clearly defined things to do, regular stopping places, regular events of structure and steadiness, a rhythm. This is a commodity that no psychiatric couch provides.

Then, too, public life links us to resources that can empower us beyond our own helplessness. What we dream alone, remains a dream. What we dream with others can become a reality.

But all this is rather abstract. Let me try to illustrate this! While doing my doctoral studies in Belgium, I was privileged to be able to attend the lectures of, and to have frequent conversations with, Antoine Vergote, a renowned doctor of both psychology and the soul.

I asked him one day how one should handle emotional obsessions, both within oneself and when trying to help others. His answer surprised me.

He said something to this effect: “The temptation you might have, as a priest and a believer, is to too simplistically follow the religious edict: ‘Take your troubles to the chapel! Pray it all through. God will help you.’ It’s not that this is wrong. God and prayer can and do help.

“But obsessional problems are mainly problems of over-concentration . . . and over-concentration is broken mainly by getting outside of yourself, outside of your own mind and heart and life . . . and room!

“Get involved in public things—from entertainment, to politics, to work. Get outside of your closed world. Enter more public life!”

He went on, of course, to qualify this so that it differs considerably from any simplistic temptation to simply bury oneself in distractions and work. His advice here is not that one should run away from doing painful inner work, but that solving one’s inner private problems is dependent upon outside relationships, both of intimacy and of a more public nature.

As a corollary to this, I offer too this example: For 16 years I taught theology at a seminary college. Many is the emotionally unstable student, fraught with every kind of inner pain and unsteadiness, who would show up at our college and slowly get emotionally steadier and stronger. . . and the strength and steadiness came not so much from the theology courses, but from the rhythm and health of the community life.

These students got well not so much by what they learned in the classrooms as they did by participating in the life outside of them. The therapy of a public life helped heal them.

More specifically for us as Christians: The therapy of public life means the therapy of an ecclesial life. We become emotionally well, steadier, less obsessed, less a slave of our own restlessness, and more able to become who and what we want to be by participating fully and healthily within the public life of the church.

Monks, with their monastic rhythm, have long understood this and they have a secret worth knowing: Program, rhythm, public participation, the demand to show up, the discipline of the monastic bell have kept many a man and woman sane—and relatively happy besides.

Regular Eucharist, regular prayer with others, regular meetings with others to share faith, and regular duties and responsibilities within ministry not only nurture deeply our spiritual lives, they keep us sane and steady.

Private therapy can sometimes be helpful in supplementing this, but public, ecclesial life, with its peculiar rhythms and demands, is what, first of all and most of all, keeps us steady on our feet.

Recently I read an article within which a fairly respected Catholic moralist commented that the church is too hung up on sex. It has, in his words, an obsession with the pelvis—”everything below the waist is a big deal!”

That is the stated opinion of one man, a moralist no less, but it is also an expression of how, in fact, many others feel.

Among a certain circle of Catholics today there is almost a positive disdain for the church’s traditional teaching regarding sex. What is novel about this is not that people are challenging the church’s age-old insistence that, morally, sex is a big deal. This has always been challenged.

What is new today is that the major practitioners of this criticism are Catholics, within the church. More and more common is the Catholic who believes that the church is unhealthily obsessed with the question of sex, hung up with what’s below the waist, to the detriment of what he or she believes to be the more important moral issues.

We see this expressed in some liberal and social justice circles. There is a Catholic here, often about my age or older, who is coming out of an experience wherein the church was indeed too hung up on sex. For example, a number of old moral manuals, some of which were seminary textbooks, taught that all sexual activity, including masturbation, outside of marriage was a mortal sin. Talk about high symbols around sex!

As well, in those manuals and in many others of the past, sex was unduly singled out, as if it was the only sin. You could do horrible things with your temper and /or totally ignore the demands of social justice and still go to Communion, but you couldn’t transgress any of the church’s sexual laws and do the same thing.

Given this background and the human proclivity for over-reaction, there is, among a good number of Catholics today, the reverse attitude: sex is now unduly singled out as the one moral issue that is not important. Often times, in fact, the impression is given that any moral energy spent in sexual issues detracts from what is of more critical importance, social justice.

But that is only half of the story and not the important half at that. Where the church’s traditional teaching on sex is really being challenged is in actual life. Here the challenge expresses itself not in theory but in benign neglect. More and more common is the Catholic who simply sees no real moral issue whatever in ignoring the traditional teachings of the church on sex.

In a culture where, for the majority of persons, sex is a standard part of dating, more and more people simply see no moral issue in what they do in their private sexual lives, as long as issues such as abuse, incest and the like are not involved.

Thus things such as sex outside of marriage, living together before marriage, masturbation and a host of other things are no longer, for many people, considered to be wrong. Very rare today is the person who feels the need for reconciliation about things within his or her sexual life.

What’s to be said about this? Is this a moral growing-up? Are we freeing ourselves from an unhealthy fixation on pelvic issues? Was the church in the past wrong in surrounding sex with such high symbolism?

My own opinion is that we have gone too far in our reaction to our past. Statements like the one that I quoted above—”the church is too hung up on the pelvis”—betray a moral narrowness that can be positively harmful.

Morality is about both the private and the social, about sex and justice, about real big things and very small things. We are asked, always, to do both. To be involved in great causes does not grant one an exemption from even the smallest demands of sexual responsibility. Just as fidelity to the church’s sexual laws is not a licence to now ignore the demands of justice.

God gave us the rather astonishing capacity to walk and to chew gum at the same time. This should be reflected in our moral capacities. We need to take both justice and the pelvis seriously at one and the same time!

Moreover, in the end, pelvic issues are not of small consequence—dwarfed in importance by the bigger issues of justice and sociology. Irresponsible sexuality, at every level, seriously damages all of us.

The pathos brought into our lives by irresponsible sexuality may never be underrated. Many is the marriage, the family, the friendship, the life, the happiness, that has been wrecked by irresponsible sex. Analysts, for example, tell us that in nearly 80 per cent of teenage suicides some fracturing of the person’s sexuality lies at the root.

Pelvic issues are important. Our sexuality lies at the heart of our self-identity and dignity. We should be grateful to the church for its perennial refusal to trivialize that fact.

There is a story told about Francis of Assisi, perhaps more mythical than factual, which illustrates how touching the poor is the cure for a mediocre and dying faith:

One night prior to his conversion, Francis, then a rich and pampered young man, donned his flashiest clothes, mounted his horse, and set off for a night of drinking and carousing. God, social justice and the poor were not on his mind.

Riding down a narrow road, he found his path blocked by a leper. He was particularly repulsed by lepers, their deformities and smell revolted him, and so he tried to steer his horse around the leper, but the path was too narrow.

Frustrated, angry, but with his path clearly blocked before him, Francis eventually had no other choice but to get down off his horse and try to move the leper out of his path. When he put out his hand to take the leper’s arm, as he touched the leper, something inside of him snapped. Suddenly irrational, unashamed and undeterred by the smell of rotting flesh, he kissed that leper.

His life was never the same again. In that kiss, Francis found the reality of God and of love in a way that would change his life forever.

Today many of us struggle with the same issues as did the pre-converted Francis—a pampered life and a mediocre and dying faith. We know that our faith calls us to work for social justice and that this demand is non-negotiable.

We know too, as somebody once put it with a succinctness that is praiseworthy, that strength without compassion is violence; that compassion without justice is weakness; that justice without love is Marxism; and that love without justice is baloney!

What we often don’t know is that the preferential option of the poor is the cure for our mediocre and dying faith. We must kiss the leper.

Simply put, if we touch the poor, we will touch Christ. In this way, touching the poor can be a functional substitute for prayer . . . and given the power of Western culture today, we often need this substitute. Let me try to explain: Western culture today is so powerful and alluring that it often swallows us whole. Its beauty, power and promise generally takes away both our breath and our perspective. The lure of present salvation—money, sex, creativity, the good life—has, for the most part, entertained, amused, distracted and numbed us into a state where we no longer have a perspective beyond that of our culture and its short-range soteriology.

One way out of this, of course, is through prayer. A life of prayer can cure a dying faith. The problem here, however, is that what our culture erodes in us is, precisely, our life of prayer. The hardest thing to sustain within our lives today is prayer. Everything militates against it.

Given this, perhaps the only way we have of not letting ourselves be swallowed whole by our culture is to kiss the leper, to place our lot with those who have no place within the culture, namely, the poor with their many faces: the aged, the sick, the dying, the unborn, the handicapped, the unattractive, the displaced and all those others who are not valued by the culture.

To touch those who have no place within our culture is give ourselves a perspective beyond our culture.

Daniel Berrigan, who writes eloquently on this, describes in his memoirs how much his perspective changed when he began to work full­time in a cancer ward, ministering to the terminally ill.

When you walk home from work after a day of being with those who are dying, he says, your vision clears pretty well and what your culture offers to you no longer seems so overpowering and irresistible. Concrete contact with the poor is Christian contemplation. It knocks the scales off one’s eyes!

“Whatsoever you do to the least of my people, that you do unto to me,” Christ assures us. In the poor, God is ever-present in our world, waiting to be met. In the powerless, one can find the power of God; in the voiceless, one can hear the voice of God; in the economically poor, one can find God’s treasures; in the weak, one can find God’s strength; and in the unattractive, one can find God’s beauty.

The glory of God might indeed be humanity fully alive, but the privileged presence of God lies especially in and with the poor.

Thus, like Francis, we need to get off our horses and kiss the leper. If we do, something will snap, we will see our pampered lives for what they are, and God and love will break into our lives in such a way that we will never be the same again.

Faulty diagnosis makes for wrong prescription. Unless a disease is diagnosed properly there is little chance of effective treatment. These principles should be brought forth, front and centre, today regarding the issue of pedophilia.

Why? Because there is an extremely simplistic, erroneous, slanderous and dangerous identification being made today in the world and the church. When you say the word pedophilia, people automatically think of “priest.” It’s the first thing that comes to their minds. Common sense today spontaneously connects: pedophilia—priest.

It then compounds this misjudgment by making yet another erroneous connection: Celibacy, lack of sex, is what creates pedophiles. It is seen as a celibate sickness, namely, celibates don’t have sex, as normal people do, thus they are, obviously, susceptible to this kind of thing.

That is what passes for common sense today. Yet the facts so belie this that one can only wonder whether these equations are the result of simple ignorance or whether they are the product of malice. Let’s look at some of the facts:

Fact one: Less than one per cent, in fact a small fraction of one per cent, of all pedophilia and sexual abuse is done by priests or other consecrated religious. That, of course, does not excuse the number of instances that are perpetrated by priests and religious. One sexual abuse instance by a priest or a religious is already one too many.

This is not in defence of those priests and religious who have sexually abused anyone. Rather the point here is that common sense has identified the problem with priests and religious—when more than 99 per cent of this kind of abuse has nothing to do with priests.

Statistically, sexual abuse of children happens in one out of every three or four houses on every street in North America. (I don’t know the numbers for Western Europe.) Given those numbers, given the magnitude of that tragedy, one can only wonder why the issue is so constellated around less than one per cent of its perpetrators.

Fact two: Pedophilia has no significant relationship to celibacy. It is an indiscriminate disease. It makes no difference, at least so the statistics show, whether one is married or unmarried, has lots of sex or no sex at all, as to whether one is likely to be a pedophile or not.

It is ironic in fact that consecrated celibates are proportionately less likely to be pedophiles than other people. Bottom-line, your child is more likely, not just in terms of sheer chance, but also in terms of statistical proportionality, to be molested by some person other than a priest, brother or a nun. This fact has rarely been brought to the fore.

Moreover, pedophilia as a pathology, much like rape, is, in the end, not so much a question of sex as it is of something else. Rape, as we all know now, is ultimately not a question of unruly hormones but of power and hatred.

Pedophilia, under diagnostic scrutiny, is also seen to be something more than frustrated hormones. Pedophiles are drawn to children because they are looking for their own lost childhood. All pedophiles were themselves first abused. There is a clinical axiom: every abuser was, himself or herself, first abused . . . and this is true too for every type of abuse, far beyond sex. Given all this, it is very misleading to make pedophilia a celibate sickness.

But it is more than misleading, it is unjust and dangerous.

Where is the justice in tarring all priests and religious with the stigma of pedophilia when the vast, vast majority of them are totally innocent of the accusation, when proportionately they are less likely to be part of the problem and when more than 99 per cent of the problem is perpetrated by others?

But injustice to priests and consecrated religious is, in the end, not the biggest danger here.

As priests and religious we do, in fact deserve some brutal challenges to clean up our act. One instance of sexual abuse is one instance too many. It is time some veins were bled. Hence some of the rage directed against us will, despite its inflations and distortions, do us good.

The real danger here is faulty diagnosis. By seeing this as a celibate sickness, by scape-goating priests and focusing our primary rage on less than one per cent of the problem , we continue to avoid facing the magnitude and horror of the issue.

When one out of every three or four children in our society is sexually abused, it’s time for deeper resolve, deeper understanding, greater courage and more radical honesty in looking at this issue.

In late summer, 1968, Paul V1 released the encyclical, Humanae Vitae. Few church documents in recent centuries have caused the kind of stir that ensued. Almost immediately every kind of ecclesial, moral, and ideological tension constellated around it.

For conservative Catholics, it is all too often seen as the criterion of moral orthodoxy. You are a good Catholic only if you can live Humanae Vitae!  In the conservative mindset, Humanae Vitae is the last moral line in the sand, if Catholicism crosses this, if it allows contraception, then Catholic morality will have sold out. Liberal Catholics, conversely, tend to see it as the most serious mistake within recent Catholic history. For them, it has come to represent all that they feel is wrong within the church – flawed, outdated, medieval argumentation, brought down from on high by a celibate hierarchy which is speaking of something, sexuality, on which it has neither competence nor moral authority. In the liberal mind, Humanae Vitae is, singularly, responsible for the fact that the church as lost so much credibility and influence in the years since 1968..

What’s to be said about all this?  To my mind, these polarized positions are both unfortunate. The liberal temptation to see Humanae Vitae as a disaster that is best flushed away and the propensity of Conservatives to make of it the ultimate criterion of moral honesty are both wrong. Humanae Vitae is not an infallible church teaching which constitutes the dividing line between what’s moral for Roman Catholics and what’s not; nor is it the disastrous, backward, repressive document that liberals claim it to be.

What is it? It is, first of all, a call to conscience, not the criterion of moral orthodoxy. Like the social encyclicals, it presents an ideal – even if most people cannot meet it. Hence, the claim by liberals that it is wrong because the majority of Catholics have rejected it makes no more sense than to claim that the social encyclicals are wrong because most people also reject them. Conversely, Conservatives should only make it the criterion of moral honesty if they, too, give the social encyclicals that same status. As well, the liberal claim that the pope has no business in our bedrooms makes no more sense than the conservative claim that he has no business in our boardrooms. Held in parallel to the social encyclicals, one sees both the proper authority and the moral legitimacy of Humanae Vitae.

It contains a deep wisdom, enshrining three important ideals: 

• Married life must be open to bringing new life into the world and genital sexuality is, in the end, tied to both of these: marriage and the openness to transmitting new life. Humanae Vitae does not affirm that each and every sexual act must intend procreation and be open to it. It does affirm that there is an inbuilt meaning to sexual intercourse and part of that meaning is an openness to the transmission of human life. This, I submit, is a deep truth that, if ignored, wreaks a hidden havoc within relationships. Relationships closed to new life are like stagnant waters, eventually life within them dies.
• Sexual relationships should, ideally, regulate themselves from within, on the basis of the relationship itself,  without reliance on chemicals, rubbers, plastics, and the like. God told Moses: “Take off your shoes before the burning bush!”. Shoes are made of leather, rubber, and plastics. These, in the end, get in the way of naked encounter. I trust the metaphor is clear.
• In the ideal, it is better to regulate something naturally than artificially. For example, it is better, obviously, to handle hypertension, naturally, through physical exercise, than it is through sedation by drugs. However it is not a sin to take medication or to use chemicals and drugs. However, anyone taking drugs to regulate hypertension longs for the day when this is no longer necessary. To admit this is to admit the wisdom of natural law. Ideally, one does not use chemicals and plastics!

In the end, like the social encyclicals, Humanae Vitae is a prophetic document. It beckons towards the ideal, towards the high ground. It puts eros under a high symbolic hedge. It represents the road less taken. It is a challenge to not settle for second best. It should be seen as such, a beautiful ideal. It goes without saying that, given the pressures of contemporary life, millions of very good women and men, persons of real moral sincerity, will, for all kinds or reasons, be unable live that ideal. To not be able to live Humanae Vitae is no sin – but to ignore it as medieval casuistry is to cheat oneself.

Andre Dubus, in a beautiful essay on the Eucharist, makes the following comment: “My belief in the Eucharist is simple: without touch, God is a monologue, an idea, a philosophy; he must touch and be touched, the tongue on the flesh, and that touch is the result of monologues, the idea, the philosophies which led to faith; but in the instant of the touch there is no place for thinking, for talking; the silent touch affirms all that, and goes deeper . . .” (Broken Vessels, Godine Pub. 1991, p. 77).

Like Dubus, my belief in the Eucharist is also simple: the Eucharist is God’s physical embrace of us, God’s touch. Nowhere is the body of Christ so physical, sensual, carnal and available for deep intimacy as in the Eucharist.

Lest this type of talk scandalize, it might be well to read St. Paul’s thought on the matter. Speaking of our union with Christ and with each other within Christ’s body, Paul points out that it is as real, as physical and as sensual as is the union of sexual intercourse.

Today we do not take seriously enough this radical physical and sensual character of the Eucharist. Rarely do we risk understanding the Eucharist in the earthy terms which I will propose here. We are the poorer for it.

The early church was less reluctant in this than we are. For it, the Eucharist was a communion of such deep physical intimacy that they surrounded it with a certain secrecy and barred all except the fully initiated from being there.

They practised something they called the discipline arcani. Part of this discipline was the practice of never speaking about the Eucharist to anyone except to fully-initiated Christians and to not allow anyone who was not fully initiated to attend the Eucharistic celebration. Our present practice within the RCIA of asking catechumens to leave after the homily is based upon this ancient discipline.

This secrecy, however, was not an attempt to surround the Eucharist with a certain mystique so as to intrigue others to be curious about it, as is usually the case with secrecy of this kind. It was not an attempt to create some secret cult. No. The secrecy was a reverence.

For them, the Eucharist was such an intimate thing that one didn’t do it with just anyone nor did one talk about it publicly—akin to not making love in public and being too exhibitionist about your intimacies. In their view, in the Eucharist you made love . . . and that is done with the bedroom door closed.

The shrouding of the Eucharist with this kind of quasi-sexual reverence is in fact most proper. In the Eucharist, Christ touches us, intimately, physically, sensually, carnally. Eucharist is physical, not spiritual; its embrace real, as physical as the incarnation itself.

In this way, Eucharist is more radical than is the Word. Indeed the relationship of the Word to the Eucharist is most accurately and profitably understood within the metaphor of physical embrace and sexual intercourse (and this may be more than metaphor).

The Word is sacramental, but it is less physical than the Eucharist. The communion it creates is less physical than is Eucharistic union. In a manner of speaking, the Word is a preparation for, a readying for, making love. Its role is to prepare us for Eucharistic communion.

The Eucharist is the touch, the physical com­ing together, the embrace, the consummation, the intercourse.

I suspect that this kind of comparison might scandalize and upset some of you. Comparing the intimacy of Eucharistic communion to sexual intercourse, isn’t this going a bit far? It is going far, admittedly; but it errs primarily in the fact that it doesn’t go far enough.

The mystery of the Body of Christ—God becoming incarnate, Christ leaving us the Word and the Eucharist, and the intimacy and communion that we experience with Christ and each other in the Eucharist—can, in the end, not be exaggerated. Its reality, including its physical character, goes further than we imagine.

This is not wild new theory; it’s wild old doctrine. Pius XII said as much in Mystici Corporis.

A friend of mine, a recent convert, is fond of saying: “I became a Catholic because of the Eucharist. I don’t really understand it, but I feel, always, its reality and power. Nothing is more precious to me.”

The Eucharist is more than sufficient reason to become a Catholic or, indeed, a Christian of any denomination. To be embraced physically by God is, on either side of eternity, all that one can hope for. Like Andre Dubus I long daily for that kind of touch.