It is very easy to say that contemplation in the world can take a particular form of “seeing Jesus” in or behind our neighbours.
It’s true!
But it’s also, at times, too easy to say.
In reality, if one is in a room full of people, we might see this reality with the eyes of the mind, the eyes of faith, and the eyes of hope and love: Jesus is in or behind these people. But it’s beyond, truly beyond, the eyes of the imagination. How can the imagination imagine fifty Jesuses, or Jesus putting his hand on the shoulder of fifty people?
My imagination can’t do that.
Maybe it is my own particular weakness. In any case, I can’t do it.
What does my imagination do instead? (I shouldn’t force it to do something else. In contemplation, we don’t force things.)
My imagination goes to the Church of Heaven. Here it finds images and friends.
If my imagination wakes and, purified by God, is applied to the reality of Jesus in and behind our neighbours, it is saints and angels that my imagination sees placing hands on the shoulders of many. My imagination will not see more than one Jesus at a time. But it is OK, in the measure that it is purified by suffering and love, to see the realities that, in the same faith, we know pertain to the Church of Heaven: saints and angels helping, guiding, and being with us.
But, of course, a Christian never sees the Church of Heaven as an end in itself, separated from the Divinity and the Humanity of Jesus. That’s impossible! The Church of Heaven is gathered around Jesus. Seeing Jesus is linked to knowing about the presence of the saints and angels in the affairs of this world.
Sometimes, at least as far as my imagination and mind are concerned, there are “steps” to “seeing Jesus in our neighbours”. In faith, it is simple. But it is not all wrong that the other parts of us take an extra step, through the doors of the Church of Heaven, to faithfully join up to those realities.
Some related posts:
Contemplative in the Mud 