There is a Face behind the silence of the Eucharist; a Face behind the veil of suffering; a Face behind the hiddenness of love.
Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen once said, “The world’s greatest need is to rediscover the true image of Christ’s Face—a Face of mercy, not judgment; of tenderness, not wrath.” He also believed that the greatest crisis of the modern world was the loss of the sense of God’s presence. We live distracted, scattered, and spiritually fatigued. He believed that before we strive to reform the world, we must first look—silently, lovingly—upon the Holy Face of Jesus. And before we preach, we must first adore the Face that, from His crib in the manger, looked upon man with pity.
Fulton Sheen saw the Holy Face as the antidote to superficial religion and the doorway to profound renewal, a road to travel if one is to take the journey to become Christ-like. He often said that the greatest tragedy of modern times is not rebellion, but forgetfulness. We may not have outright rejected God, but we have ignored His Face.
He warned that when man loses the sense of sin, he loses the capacity to recognize the sacred. The Eucharist becomes a symbol; the Cross, a decoration. And the Face of Christ remains hidden behind the veil of indifference.
This is why Sheen was drawn to the mystery of reparation: that the greatest love we can show to God is not in words, but in willingly standing beside Him in silence, when others flee. Each day, we can contemplate the Holy Face of Christ and become a new generation of Veronicas in a world that spits and turns away from Jesus. We can wipe the Face of Christ by acts of love, adoration, sacrifice, and fidelity.
Sheen often spoke of the power of contemplating Christ’s Face. For him, the Christian life began not with activity but with adoration. He believed that the world’s deepest crisis was the loss of the sense of God’s presence—and that the remedy was to rediscover the Face of Christ through prayer, silence, and Eucharistic adoration.
Apple FaceTime vs. Holy FaceTime
When Apple introduced FaceTime in 2010 with the iPhone 4, it was all the rage. If Fulton Sheen were alive today, he would quickly remind us that authentic FaceTime is not looking at a computer screen or a cellphone, but rather time spent looking upon the face of Our Blessed Lord in a sacred image or in the Blessed Sacrament.
Living in a noise-filled age of distractions as ours, screens and noise clutter our minds, causing our thoughts to wander away from spiritual realities, as we cater to the demands of worldly affairs. Archbishop Fulton Sheen repeatedly taught that “We become what we adore.” In other words, we become like that which we spend our lives looking upon, which is a very sobering thought in today’s age of media proliferation.
Fulton Sheen understood this concept better than most. For over sixty years, he had spent an hour each day before the Blessed Sacrament. Day after day, year after year, he gazed upon the face of Christ hidden in the Eucharist. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, he became more Christ-like in his thoughts, his words, and his actions. Will we do the same?
Why spend time looking upon the Holy Face? Because the Face reveals the Person. And the bruised Face of Jesus reveals the cost of love, the depth of mercy, and the grief of forgotten intimacy. The more we look upon His Holy Face, the more we will be Christ-like in thought, word, and action.
Why this devotion today? Because the world has forgotten how to blush. Archbishop Sheen wrote, “The greatest loss of our time is the loss of the sense of sin.” And what restores it? A Face that suffers silently. A Face that absorbs hatred without retaliation. A Face that still looks upon us with love.
Devotion to the Holy Face of Jesus is not sentimental. It is not sweet. It is soul-rending. It asks us to look upon what we have done to Love—and to make reparation not out of guilt, but out of a desire to console, to remain, and a desire to love more purely in a world that loves too little.
Which Face Will We Choose? (For Eternity)
Every family has stories passed down from one generation to the next, many of which offer a good lesson in living more cautiously. As children, we likely found the warning and the consequences made a stronger impression than the moral of the story itself.
Besides being a confessor, Fulton Sheen was also a keen observer of human psychology as it played out in everyday life. Occasionally, he would preach by painting a vivid picture that startled his listeners, not because he wished to frighten them, but because he loved them enough to remind them that life has eternal consequences. One of his most memorable reflections concerns the Face we will encounter at the end of our earthly journey.
In one of his memorable programs, he said:
There are 10,000 times 10,000 roads, down which any of you may travel for a lifetime. And it makes no difference which road you travel. At the end of all of these roads, you are going to see two faces. Either the merciful face of Christ, or the horrible face of Satan.
And either one, at the end of your life, will say, “Mine!”
One could not be faulted for being unsettled by those words. But notice where Sheen places the emphasis. He speaks first of the merciful face of Christ.
God’s desire is not to condemn us but to save us. The warning is really an invitation: to spend our lives learning to recognize His love, and to seek the Face of Christ now, so that when we finally behold Him in eternity, we will be looking upon the face of a beloved Friend and Savior, who will recognize His own likeness in us.
Lord, show us thy Face, and we shall be saved.
Author’s Note: For over ten years, I have had the privilege of writing books and speaking about two of Fulton Sheen’s favourite devotions: the Eucharistic Holy Hour and the devotion to the Holy Face of Jesus. One of these books, titled Lord Teach us to Pray, contains some of Sheen’s most sound advice on making a Holy Hour. And my most recent book, titled The Soul of a Disciple, offers readers a series of reflections on the Holy Face of Jesus in a retreat-style format.
Editor’s Note: This article is a part of a CE original series, “Cultivating the Soul of a Disciple with Blessed Fulton Sheen,” in celebration of and preparation for Archbishop Sheen’s beatification this September.
Image from Wikimedia Commons
