Sometimes you don’t know what you’re looking for till you bump into it. This happened to me once. It happened during my senior year of high school, and it changed my life forever.
At the time, I was an angsty 17-year-old, alternating between heavy metal and emo as fit my mood. I pursued unhealthy relationships to chase away loneliness. I pursued athletics to win attention. I picked up hours at work and side hustles to see what happiness money could buy. I was looking for everything and nothing all at once, and none of it satisfied. I was on the path trod by so many—a path of selfishness, a path of sinful self-destruction.
Around the same time, a few of my friends had become rather enamored with Steubenville Youth Conferences. They were Young Apostles who did hand motions and listened to Righteous B. (Am I dating myself!?) Most importantly for me, they had encountered Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament, and they were persistent evangelists. They had convinced the parochial vicar to have a holy hour for high schoolers on Sunday nights. There was no youth ministry, no youth minister, no live worship band. Just time in adoration with a boombox belting out the latest and greatest worship tracks of the early 2000s until there were no more. Then it was silent.
My friends asked me to come week after week. Worn down by their persistence and hoping that if I showed up once, they would stop bothering me about this, I drove my sketchy 1991 Mercury Topaz over to St. Mary’s church, sauntered down the sidewalk between the church and rectory, and slunk into a back pew on the right side. The Holy Hour had already begun. Teenagers sprinkled around the church had assumed all sorts of postures, some standing and singing their hearts out, others sat, knelt, and even lay prostrate. As I got my bearings, I realized they were all looking at something. Following the sight lines, I saw what they were seeing — Jesus in the Eucharist, exposed in the monstrance on the altar.
Though I faithfully attended Sunday Mass, I had a lackluster faith in the Real Presence at the time. I had even been to Eucharistic adoration before, back in my grade school days, but that seemed forever ago. My problems had grown bigger over the years as Jesus’ role in my life diminished. But as I sat there, as a stranger in a strange space, just looking at the Eucharist, something happened that changed my life forever: I became peaceful.
For the first time in a long time, I felt at peace. Right there. There, in front of the Blessed Sacrament, with Michael W. Smith singing out “Let It Rain” from a CD player somewhere nearby, I sensed Someone present to me. Someone was there, looking at me, seeing me, noticing me, caring for me, listening to me, and loving me. I didn’t know what I was looking for until I bumped into him, into Jesus. I was looking for an answer to my heart’s ache for the infinite. I was looking for authentic friendship. I was looking for peace, the peace of his presence — a peace only Jesus, and a relationship with him, could give. And, there, in that church, in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament, I found it.
Week after week, I returned to the church and just sat there in his presence. Week after topsy-turvy teenage week, this was the only place I felt at ease. Week after week, my faith in Jesus grew stronger, and the other things that once seemed so important faded.
I didn’t know what I was looking for till I encountered him.
I believe this story indicates something of Eucharistic life. To live Eucharistically means to be transformed by the Eucharist and to live accordingly. And in the Eucharist, Jesus is present. Being present means being in a certain place, being there. But not just physically there. Being present connotes being psychologically or spiritually there. Intention and attention are involved. The Holy Spirit is involved, too. Someone who is present is present for a reason and present with his whole heart, soul, and mind.
In Eucharistic adoration, I sensed Jesus attending to me. The word “attend” comes from the Latin word attendere, which literally means “to stretch toward.” I sensed this in adoration. Jesus was there, really and truly present in the host situated on the altar, and he was stretching toward me. In and through the Holy Spirit, he encountered me. I bumped into the Hound of Heaven who had been coming after me and was now, sacramentally, here in the Eucharist.
Those of us who have been encountered by such a presence as Jesus in the Eucharist, we are called to be present in response — present to others and to the world around us. In his apostolic exhortation, Sacramentum Caritatis, Pope Benedict XVI exhorts us “to find ever anew in the sacrament of Christ’s love the energy needed to make [our] lives an authentic sign of the presence of the risen Lord.” (1) One’s Eucharistic mode of living acts as a sign pointing to its source, to Jesus, to the presence of the risen Lord.
Our culture, so dominated by distraction, makes carrying out this element of Eucharistic life difficult, but more necessary. I am convinced Jesus needs agents of attention. He needs people to be present to those who have deficiently received attention, and who have consequently pursued disordered affections. He needs agents of attention who greet people face-to-face, as opposed to marketers who never show their faces and objectify our minds with pervasive and well-targeted attention-getting techniques, and who treat our attention as a resource “to be harvested by mechanized means.” (2)
Jesus needs real people to really attend to others — stretching toward them and meeting them where they are. He needs those of us who have been encountered by this Jesus to love them where they are like he did to me, and like my friends did in making a simple invitation to come and encounter the Source of their peace. They were living Eucharistically. They were present to me, attentive to the deep ache in my heart, and diligent in their invitation. They knew I could find what I was looking for in the person of Jesus, who bent down, heard my cry, and drew me up from the pit of my own self-destruction (see Ps 40:2–3).
Brad Bursa is director of evangelization for the Stella Maris Family of Parishes in Cincinnati, Ohio. He is the father of eight children and the author of Because He Has Spoken to Us.
1. Benedict XVI, Sacramentum Caritatis (Citta del Vaticano: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2007), no. 94.
2. Matthew Crawford, They World Beyond Your Head (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), 13.
