Jesus on a Screen

Years ago, I felt like I was losing myself. It seemed like my faith was slipping from my fingers and that all desire for God was draining away. I still prayed but I hardly knew who the Lord was anymore. He, who had once been my best friend, was now a stranger. I felt empty, weak, a failure.
 
I messaged my friend Heather. She has an incredible heart and to be around her is a breath of hope. I told her I was struggling and I asked her for advice. She told me of her conversion.

Growing up, she hadn’t believed in God. She had been hungry and yearning for something, but did not know for what or whom. One day she walked into a church and felt completely full, entirely at peace. All of that aching and longing was suddenly satisfied. She didn’t know it at the time, but she had found herself before the Eucharist in a Catholic church. Heather left, but craved that fullness again. It eventually led her to spending hours before the Blessed Sacrament and to Catholicism.
"I also feel weak," she told me. "It's especially in these moments I try to remind myself: Get yourself to an empty church!"

Heather's reminder to return to the Eucharist seemed almost too simple, but I dragged myself to a church and plopped myself down the way I used to do. And over the course of an hour, my soul grew lighter, my mind calmed, and the world suddenly found a new clarity. I felt like myself again. It was beautiful.

Not long passed before I realized I needed an hour every week with the Blessed Sacrament in order to simply function. I hired babysitters, I toted a baby with me, I even parked kids with headphones and a portable screen on the chairs next to me, but I made it happen. It was the difference between irritability and peace in the home.

Fast forward to 2020, when churches are closed, when I can no longer receive the Eucharist or even sit in a chapel with the Tabernacle before me. This week I felt that awful weight start to build in my chest. It had been too long. I grew anxious, impatient, frustrated. I had nothing left. Prayer didn’t  help, at least not significantly, and all my other tools for maintaining mental health were coming up short.
 
Finally, I simply told the Lord He needed to provide more. He needed to figure this out. And very gently, I was reminded about live streaming adoration. I’ve typically dismissed the whole idea because it seemed silly. How could being in front of my screen really provide that “ordering” that I felt when I sat before the Eucharist? How could it even compare?

But again, I listened to the all-too simple message, this time plopping myself down before my phone.
 
And it was the same as it always has been.
 
After about twenty minutes the weight eased from my soul, and continued to dissipate as I sat. Twenty minutes more and I was myself again. (I’m still a mess, of course, but not ready to bite everyone’s head off.) I grew peaceful, at ease, perceived things differently.

To be clear: it isn’t ever me. I often don’t have the right prayer or even more on my mind that what I ate for breakfast, but regardless, I always come out of adoration changed. Because being in His presence changes us. This, however bizarrely, was no different.
 
I share this with you in case you also are feeling the burden of this world right now. The suffering that surrounds us is real and I fear it will only intensify. We have so little control and we can hardly leave our homes. I’m not arguing that adoration or prayer will spare us the very real pain that is encircling us—that’s not how Christianity works. But perhaps the balm we crave and which will get us through the pain isn’t farther than a screen and twenty minutes with Him.