I’ve experienced the presence of Jesus several times over the fifty-plus years since the first time. The gifts of the Spirit and miracles are different from that sense of Jesus’ presence, so I won’t go into those now. Some experiences of Jesus’ presence were several years after the first, when we had moved to the country outside Dickson.

I woke up at about 3 am with a terrible pain in one eye. I had had five C sections by this time, so I was familiar with pain.  This was the worst I had ever had. It felt like I had cut my eye. It was the week before Christmas, and my husband was sick with the flu.  There were no Ophthalmologists in Dickson, so I needed to go to Nashville as soon as an office was open.  I decided to let Julian sleep and try to tough it out until time for him to drive me to Nashville. I lay down on the couch in the living room and began to pray.  Remembering a book about praising in all things, I began to praise God, as each sharp pain hit. I did this for a while, I’m not sure how long. All of a sudden, I became aware of a presence across the room at the window by a small table.  I cannot describe how I knew this. From this presence came a sense of overwhelming love. Although I was still in pain, I began to praise with actual joy. Compared to that love, the pain didn’t matter.  I praised joyfully for a while and then fell asleep.  When I awoke as the sun was coming through the window, the pain was gone. It never came back.

The next time I experienced the presence of Jesus was different.  I went to Mass every day, mainly in hopes of experiencing the presence of Jesus in receiving the Eucharist. My youngest was about four and had to go with me. This particular morning after I came back from receiving the host, I was focused on that, still hoping for that presence of Jesus.  My child was getting restless and pulling on my shirt, asking, “Is it over yet. Can we go?” My first reaction was impatience with him for disturbing my prayer. But then I thought about how young he was and how hard this was for him, so I turned to console him. When I did the presence of Jesus was next to Tommy with his hand on his shoulder smiling tenderly. I got the message. Jesus is about love. That is what spiritual experiences are about.  Knowing that love and passing it on.  I am a slow learner.

I didn’t grow up wealthy, but my mom always made Christmas special. We never lived near family, so mom always included either the elderly without family near or a young family who couldn’t afford to go see their family.  She decorated every inch of our apartment. There were visitors every day and out would come our one silver tray with a doily, and tiny, trimmed triangle sandwiches with parsley around them for decoration. There were plates of cookies and plenty of hot chocolate.  The presents weren’t extravagant, but they were decorated beautifully. After my father died, my mom and my brother would travel to have Christmas with us. I tried to keep up her traditions with five children and a large house. We cut our own trees on our land, an eighteen-foot one for the vaulted ceiling in the great room and a six-footer for the playroom.  Every inch decorated, days spent with the five children making presents for their teachers and friends. Christmas costumes for the play at church, an Advent wreath-making party for our youth group, etc., etc. I didn’t realize that I was trying to keep up with mom, but with a lot of extras. So, pretty much every year at some point near Christmas, I would overload and yell, “I hate Christmas!” Then take to my bed exhausted. One particular Christmas, after doing this, I awoke at dawn remembering that I was scheduled to drive to Nashville to give a talk to a Presbyterian women’s group about the Spirit of Christmas.  I thought of calling and claiming I had a broken leg, but it occurred to me that God might have ways to keep that from being a lie!  As I drove to Nashville praying, it seemed like God was telling me to be honest and share the struggles and failures. So, I did. And the women all seemed not only to understand, but to share the problem. As I was closing, for no reason I can imagine, I said, “I’m going to relax and celebrate the joy of Jesus coming, even if there’s a dirty sock under the Christmas tree.” 

Now seriously! A dirty sock under the tree? I have no idea why I said that. But finally, it was Christmas Eve. Once again, I was stressing and hurrying tensely to get the laundry put away when I heard my mother say, “Eileen, why is there a dirty sock under the Christmas tree?” I stopped with a shiver of remembrance and felt once again, Jesus standing beside me with his hand on my shoulder, very tenderly. But it seemed like he was shaking his head. So, I dropped the laundry on the bed and called to my mother, “Leave the sock under the tree. I’m coming to sit down with you and we’ll read the Christmas story and remember why we are celebrating.” For some years, I put a sock under the tree as a reminder.

Jesus is with us in the small and the large. In the happy and in the sad.  In our good moments and our bad.  It’s both personal and it’s universal.  Jesus is wherever he is needed and for anyone able to be open to that experience of him. Being open to that experience has more to do with inborn differences in personality than religion. Those differences may cause the timing in our ability to be open to these experiences to vary. If we deal with life primarily from logic, it may be more in the second half of life when we become open to them. A kind but extremely logical Engineer I knew came to a six-week class I taught on Mystical Experience. He only lasted for two classes.  But years later, he came to a prayer group exclaiming, “I was sitting on the couch praying and there was Jesus sitting next to me as real as you are!”   God is with us in different ways at different times in our lives. but He is always there whether we sense Him or not.