I have previously written (in this space and others) about the Saturday night in late November 1986, the eve of the First Sunday of Advent, when I found myself walking the streets of Lansing, Michigan, through darkness and sleet and snow that reflected the state of my mind and my heart and my soul. A freshman at Michigan State, I had fallen away from the Faith, and I was hurtling toward the end of my first term dead set, it seemed, on losing my scholarship and not being able to return in January.
Head down, collar pulled up against the wind, I was barely conscious of where I was when I saw the golden rays of light reflected and refracted in the slush on the sidewalk at my feet. I looked up and barely registered the sign that read “Church of the Resurrection” and then continued on my way up Michigan Avenue to the state capitol building, where I wandered the grounds aimlessly before heading back down Michigan Avenue toward a dorm room that seemed to me, in that moment, no less inhospitable than that dark and stormy night.
By the time my eyes fell upon the pool of light once again, I was ready for a break from the sleet and the snow. I pulled on the door, not really expecting it to be unlocked, and entered into the vestibule of the church. I made my way to the sanctuary, headed to the last pew, and before I sat down, out of years of habit woven into the very fibers of my muscles and my bones, I genuflected.
And in that moment, I felt his presence and knew why I was there.
What all I prayed about that evening, I don’t remember, but I left the Church of the Resurrection with my spirits lifted and in the sure and certain knowledge that everything I had been looking for throughout that first term at Michigan State could be found in the tabernacle of that church. The next morning, I borrowed my roommate’s car and drove cautiously down streets covered with sheets of ice, back to the Church of the Resurrection, back to Mass, back to the Faith that I received as an indelible mark on my soul in my baptism.
“My heart is restless, O Lord, until it finds its rest in Thee.” Thirty-six years later, as a member of the executive team of the National Eucharistic Revival, I return to that night often and think of how differently my life may have unfolded had the church been dark and its doors locked. That moment of unexpected — and, to be brutally honest, unwanted — grace was not the end of my searching but the beginning, a seed that sprouted and grew and came to fruition again and again, in my marriage, in my family, in the course of my vocation, in the invitation to serve on the executive team of the revival, in my desire to invite others to that encounter with the Lord that changed my life in an instant and continues to change it today.
At our very first meeting, my colleague, Jason Shanks, president of the OSV Institute for Catholic Innovation, asked all of us serving on the executive team how we would know when the National Eucharistic Revival had run its course, whether it had been a success. The first thought that came to my mind was not of 80,000 people gathered at the National Eucharistic Congress in 2024, but that more Catholic churches would leave their doors unlocked for more hours every day, so that more people could spend more time in quiet encounter with Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament.
He waited for me on that November night, even though I did not know what I was searching for. And he waits still and always for each and every one of us, in every tabernacle in every Catholic church in our country and around the world. The only thing that keeps us from him are the chains on our hearts and the locks on our church doors.
Scott P. Richert is publisher for OSV.
