Roberta and I just returned from the French Alps, where we celebrated the wedding of her son Nick and his bride, Sunny. It was a week-long party, culminating in a beautiful ceremony (which I was honored to be asked to officiate) with Mont Blanc as the backdrop. In breaks from the festivities in the charming mountain village of Megève, I found myself drawn to a little 16th century chapel next to the onion-domed church in the center of town. On my first visit, I joined a handful of people gathered to adore the blessed sacrament, housed on the altar in a golden sunburst monstrance with a mirror in its center, behind which the "host" or communion wafer was held.
This old Catholic Christian practice came about as a way of participating in the eucharist between masses. In the mass, the wafer of bread is said to be transubstantiated into the physical body of Christ. To consume it is to be joined with the divine presence. But to gaze at the container in which it rests is another way to participate in the sacred mystery.
"Adoration" in this case is more like contemplation. You can see the monstrance, but you can't see the host it contains. So as you gaze, you contemplatively imagine seeing the host behind the mirror on the monstrance. You imagine receiving it and tasting it and letting it melt on your tongue and then swallowing it and then mindfully and gently examining the thoughts, sensations, and emotions that follow. You observe your inner experience meticulously, to the point where you realize that what you are observing cannot be who or what is doing the observing. You then contemplate the monstrance itself, with its golden rays emanating from a round mirror, an image that resonates with your awareness that God is the one doing the reflecting at the center of your being.
You imagine Jesus with his disciples at their last Passover meal, and you imagine Jesus taking the bread and saying "this is my body". You imagine yourself receiving the bread from Jesus and eating it and then contemplating your own body from head to toe, and saying, yourself, "this is my body". You have become the mirror image of the Christ.
You look at the other people adoring the blessed sacrament around you, and contemplate how very many different circumstances brought them here, and how many very different experiences they may be having right now. And you awaken to the full range of human passion, in struggle and suffering and hope and joy and gratitude, knowing that all of it has come to the table, concentrated in a little wafer. To receive the host is to receive the whole human condition, elevating it, divinizing it.
There is a lot going on behind that little mirror in the monstrance on the altar. In my very short time in the chapel, I got a taste.
The monstrance stands on the altar below a big image, painted on shining brass, affixed to a wall of rounded rocks like the ones over which the mountain rills tumble through the town. No reference in the chapel is made to the artist. The image portrays the Christ in glory, surrounded by the traditional totems of the four gospels: an angel for Matthew, a lion for Mark, a bull for Luke, and an eagle for John. The totems are whirling around the Christ, light as air. You contemplate these images and consider that the the biblical gospels are swirls dancing around a center figure whom the authors could not capture fully in words on paper, any more than the artist could capture fully in paint on metal. The icon in the chapel can be read as the Christ blowing through and past the four gospels, through and past all the dogma and structure of the church, right up to and into us.
And the river-rock backdrop of the image had its own sermon to deliver. The image bursts out of the very stones from which the chalets and streets of Megève were built. One exits La Chapelle Sainte-Anne and wonders: what else might emerge from these stones surrounding me? As Jesus entered Jerusalem in humble triumph, someone objected to the joyful yelling of the crowd. Jesus said: "if these were silent, the stones would shout out." In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus said: "Split a piece of wood; I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will find me there."
I am a devotee of Simone Weil, the 20th century French Jewish philosopher/theologian. I could imagine her sitting next to me, at the back of that gorgeous little chapel, adoring the blessed sacrament, and gazing at the image of the Christ. It was the only way she ever engaged with it, after all: she fell in love with Catholic Christianity without ever being baptized and physically receiving the elements. Clearly she found what we might now call a "virtual" way to take communion. Her words give a hint of what she might have experienced while gazing at the monstrance:
"The beautiful is something on which we can fasten our attention... The beautiful is that which we desire without wishing to eat it. We desire that it should be."
And I could imagine her then gazing contemplatively at the image on the wall: "A work of art has an author and yet, when it is perfect, it has something which is essentially anonymous about it. It imitates the anonymity of divine art. In the same way the beauty of the world proves there to be a God who is personal and impersonal at the same time, and neither the one nor the other separately. ... In everything which gives us the pure authentic feeling of beauty there is really the presence of God…. Hence all art of the highest order is religious in essence."
With gratitude, nodding to Simone Weil, and then bowing toward the beautiful, I took my leave of La Chapelle Sainte-Anne.....