Beholding Christ in Mukono

He ushered us into the sanctuary, to a reserved section up front, smiled warmly and gestured with his hand for us to be seated. It was our last Sunday in the city of Mukono (Uganda). Our flights would depart that evening to return to the States. So one final worship service at St. Phillip’s and Andrew’s Cathedral, nestled right up next to Uganda Christian University.

This was the section in the sanctuary where they wanted us, their honored guests, to sit for the service. All seven of us squeezed into the row, our lily-white faces standing out.

A large teen choir from a nearby Christian high school was leading the singing. Oh, were they singing! Two students with gorgeous voices–a male and a female–led the choir and the entire congregation in exuberant praise. The choir dipped and swayed and danced rhythmically to the music bursting from their hearts and lips. Your own body couldn’t help but move, swept into the pulse of their praise.

I loved sitting there with my team, sharing this experience together. But instinctively I wanted to go out and sit among the worshippers, to be fully submerged in the sea of these sisters and brothers. Not wanting to offend our usher, I asked for permission to go sit in another place in the sanctuary. He smiled and gestured again: “Oh yes, please!”

So I shuffled out of the pew and walked further back, into the very heart of the congregation. Now here is where my words fall short. I can’t explain to you the beauty of this experience, the wondrous mystery of being enveloped in the worship of this beloved people. The closest I can come to describing it is something like St. John being transported from the dusty island of Patmos into the throne room of heaven–the veil pulled back to reveal the truest reality.

“Lift up your hearts,” we hear from our ancient liturgy (the sursum corda). “We lift them up to the Lord,” we reply. My eyes are closed. My hands are raised. My heart is lifted up. My entire being is enraptured in this moment.

I open my eyes. And there in the row ahead of me, a teenage girl has turned around and is looking at me. The backs of everyone else are still turned, facing forward. But this girl stands there, facing me.

She is wearing a festive African dress, patterns of bright yellow and vibrant shades of blue. Her hair is cut short. She is holding a handkerchief and occasionally dabs at the drool sliding from the corner of her mouth. She appears to have some form of cognitive and physical disabilities. She looks right into my eyes, a radiant smile exposing a couple missing teeth.

And then she reaches out takes my hand. Her gaze stays fixed on me, as if she is peering deep into my soul, her face alight with joy.

There are very few moments in my life where I felt seen in the way that I did in the presence of this teenage girl, this beloved daughter of God. Do you know what I mean? Have you ever felt this too?

Again, it’s so hard to describe. But the way she looked at me, the way she smiled, the way she took my hand, it was as if I was encountering the very face of the living Jesus.

And I believe I was. “Christ plays in ten thousand places,” the poet Hopkins brilliantly wrote so long ago, “lovely in limbs and lovely in eyes not his, through the features of men’s faces.”

In the face, the bodied presence, of this girl…I saw Jesus. I experienced being seen and loved by Jesus. Beheld by the One I was beholding. The Word made flesh.

Once, when a student said to the late Henri Nouwen that spending time in his presence felt like being in the very presence of Jesus, Nouwen tenderly replied: “That’s because the Christ in you recognizes the Christ in me.”

That’s it right there. That’s what I experienced at St. Phillip’s and Andrew’s Cathedral, in the city of Mukono, among God’s people there and in the presence of this remarkable young woman:

The Christ in her recognized the Christ in me.

We have a word for an experience like this: theophany.

And leaving the sanctuary that day, getting on the plane and returning home, I couldn’t help but feel my face flushed, perhaps aglow, and my heart quickened and a bit more alive, the joyous words of the women who returned from the tomb on the first Easter morn resonating in my soul: “We have seen the Lord!”