Our readings for this weekend begin in a very dark and lonely place. In 1 Kings we find Elijah the prophet on the top of Mount Horeb, in a cave, by himself. He could not be any more isolated than that! Elijah, of course, is there for a very good reason. The previous chapters of 1 Kings describe the epic struggle he had been engaged in with King Ahab and his wife Jezebel. The king, led astray by his wife, had forsaken the covenant with God and gone over to the worship of Baal. Ahab had commissioned 450 prophets to spread that idolatry throughout Israel. Elijah the prophet had stood before these false prophets and humiliated them. He extinguished them from the land of Israel. Jezebel did not take the defeat of her prophets lightly. She threatened to take the life of Elijah, and so for good reason he fled.
This morning he is in that cave, alone. What must he have been thinking? He had been faithful, seeking only to bring the people back into a right relationship with the living God. Yet suddenly, in his loneliness and isolation, God comes to him. That epiphany happens in a most peculiar way. At first there is a strong driving wind, but we are told that God was not in the wind. Next there was an earthquake, but God was not in the earthquake. Finally, there is fire, but God is not in the fire.
It is interesting to reflect on the fact that God is present, in a certain sense, in all three of these manifestations in the New Testament. When Christ dies on the cross, accomplishing our salvation, St. Matthew writes that “the earth shook, and the rocks were split” (Matthew 27:51). On the day of Pentecost, the disciples heard the sound of a strong driving wind, and saw tongues as of fire as the Holy Spirit descended upon them. But not here.
In the cave on Mount Horeb, Elijah hears only a tiny whispering sound. A whisper is intimate, close. We know well from Sacred Scripture that God is transcendent. He is totally other, and we could never reach Him or approach Him as He is. But in 1 Kings we are also reminded that God is imminent. He is as close as a still, small voice. St. Augustine, in his Confessions, reflects upon the God who is “intimior intimo meo,” more intimate to me than I am to myself. God comes to Elijah this morning in the intimacy of a whisper, and in essence tells him, “Do not be afraid. I am with you. I love you. You are not alone.
In the Gospel, we find Christ in perhaps one of the loneliest moments of His public ministry up to this point. He has just learned of the death of His cousin, St. John the Baptist. Having fed the people with the miracle of the loaves and the fish, we are told, “He went up on the mountain by himself to pray. When it was evening he was there alone” (Matthew 14:23). Very much like Elijah, He is there on that mountaintop by Himself. But also like Elijah, we know well that He is very much not alone. He is there with the Father. He is in prayer and He is intimately near the Father and the Holy Spirit. Because He is so close to God, He is also even closer to the disciples than if He were only physically in their presence. Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, in his second volume of Jesus of Nazareth, writes about how Jesus is able to see these disciples through the eyes of the Father while He is up on that mountain. He sees them struggling against the wind and the waves and so He comes to them. He was already spiritually close, but now He will draw physically close, because He loves them.
One of the great challenges of the current global pandemic is that we are often socially distant. In fact, we are governed by laws that ensure that social distance, and for our own health and wellness we abide by those laws. But even though we are socially distant, as a Church we can be, and should be, spiritually close. As Bishop Michael Burbidge of the Diocese of Arlington has said, “we are socially distant but our goal is to be spiritually close in the Eucharist.”
There is a beautiful story about St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein), a Jewish convert to Catholicism who died a martyr in Auschwitz in 1942. When she was still a young convert, and before she entered the Carmelite monastery, Edith Stein was living with Dominican sisters in a convent near where she was a professor. She was fond of a small niche not far from the tabernacle, where she could remain in prayer and adoration of the Blessed Sacrament in relative isolation and privacy. One Christmas Eve, when the Mass had concluded, she was in that little space and praying her thanksgiving to God for the gift of the Eucharist. Unseen by those who were responsible for closing the Church down for the evening, they unintentionally locked her in! Early the next morning, when one of the sisters came in to open the doors and turn on the lights, she saw Edith kneeling in adoration before the Christmas creche. Thinking that perhaps her mistake of the night before had been a difficult experience and ruined a night of peaceful sleep for the young professor, the sister apologized. Edith replied, “Who can sleep during the night that God became man!”
St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross had been socially distant from that religious community all night, but because she was with our Eucharistic Lord, she was spiritually close. She reminds us this morning that we are never closer to God and to each other than when we are united in the Blessed Sacrament of the Eucharist.
In these days of adjustment and even sacrifice of many things while we continue to face the COVID-19 crisis, we remember that the Eucharist is the place where we experience the intimacy of God. As Churches begin to open, and that Gift becomes more and more available, we do well to make the Eucharist the center, font and culmination of our entire lives, as the Church has always taught us.
