When you take part in the Eucharist at an important and popular destination for pilgrims and tourists on a Saturday afternoon, you don’t actually expect to see God, even if it be the grandest sanctuary in the United States of America. Too much is going on. To some degree you might experience God, maybe, emotionally; or be overwhelmed by the beauty of the liturgy, perhaps; deeply moved by the preacher’s words, not necessarily.
The Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception resonates with splendor—inside and out, yet none of the above triggered my “vision” on that hot afternoon during the National Cherry Blossom Festival.  I have been in the church several times in my life; in fact, my seminary classmates and I were was taken there for morning Mass almost seventy years earlier, the very  minute we disembarked from the “B & O”— the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad trip from Chicago. It was only a crypt then, and you had to try your best to envision a beautiful and imposing House of God shimmering above it.
Today, the Shrine-Basilica stands as the largest church in the country, but would remain a lowly crypt long after the cornerstone, which we young seminarians saw in 1953, was laid in 1920. During decades of depression and war as the enormous funds required did not come flowing in. At last, an imposing neo-Byzantine-Romanesque edifice arose atop a hill beside the Catholic University of America as the tallest building in the Capital District, and was solemnly dedicated in 1959 with not all of the ornamentation completed.
The American hierarchy’s dream in the late 19th century of building the noblest and most splendid monument honoring the mystery of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary, official patroness of the Church they served, did not acquire its ultimate touch until the 21st century. Its expansive inner dome has a diameter of 89 feet and rises 159 feet from the floor. On December 7, 2017, Cardinal Donald Wuerl officiated at the dedication of the heralded mosaic decoration that now fills this central dome with 14,000,000 particles of Venetian colored glass.
On April 14, 2018, I took my place under that same Dome of the Trinity to be ready for the Mass of the Second Sunday of Easter. Though it was over 80 degrees Fahrenheit outdoors, air-conditioning had reduced the indoors to what felt like 66 degrees. I was really cold.
At last, the organist struck his keys and pedals to produce bursts of sound that could be heard throughout Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware. The procession to the altar was perfectly executed; the clergy ministered with reverence and dignity—but—the hymns were drowned by the decibels of the organ. Yet nothing could numb my experience of the icy environment.
Then, Just as the procession began, a man in his thirties and a boy, about nine years old, both casually dressed, took their place a couple of pews in front of me. The child appeared to be an All-African-American boy with a high-skin-fade style haircut, I think it’s called; and the gentleman was a white-skinned and plain looking, All-American man. In this 21st century, it is hardly unusual, even in the Deep South, to see European-American parents with adopted children of another race, or bi-racial couples with their children of mixed races.
It was plain to see that both man and boy interacted as father and son and, moreover, that the energetic youngster had been adopted.
The interaction of this particular father and son began to tell of a profound bond between them. It was the love and tenderness they were showing one another. It could hardly be disguised. In fact it manifested itself in the unique way in which the boy clung to his father. They seemed bonded together and embraced repeatedly. The adopted son caressed and held on to the father throughout the entire ceremony. Their body language candidly delivered a poetic narrative of Agape and Eros. Agape—the sacrificial love for the other, and Eros—an unspoiled human affection.
“Weren’t you distracted, Father?” you might ask. No! I was learning what it means for all of us to be, in absolute reality, an adopted son or daughter of the Heavenly Father. By the grace of God this was a Theophany. I was elated even in the midst of suffering hypothermia and the organ blasting my tender hearing. Regretfully, many of us never had even the slightest bit of the closeness with our fathers as this father and son.
As I gazed up at the mosaic image of the Heavenly Father in the central dome high above the anonymous father and son in front of me, the contrast was crystalline. The proficient mosaicists in Italy had tragically failed by depicting a pious repetition of the Grand-Old-White-bearded God of romantic times. Sorry to be so critical of the acclaimed “Crown Jewel” of so grand a monument,
To support this opinion, I refer to the ancient Byzantine Genesis mosaics depicting the Lord Creator in Monreale and Palermo in Sicily and other places. God the Father resembles the Son, and Adam resembles them both! God does not age.
On the night of the Last Supper, Jesus revealed to his disciples both the selfless love and boundless human affection He felt for them—and—for each one of us if we pause to think—when he said: “I have so long desired to share this Passover meal with you before my passion” (Luke 22:15). The original Greek text reads: epithymía epithýmesa—which is often rendered: with desire I have desired.
The mystery of our “adoption as sons” in St. Paul’s letters is an expression habitually read, heard, and taken for granted. For The Apostle, it was an astounding realization, not uttered in the Hebrew Bible. It is not unlikely that Jesus, the Only-begotten Son and Heir of the Father had made known this teaching to Paul, and the Holy Spirit had authored the expression of it in the letters. We might even say that adoption as sons is the heart of hearts the Gospel. It was preconceived for us in the heart of God:
He chose us in him before the foundation of the world…In love he predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will… (Ephesians 1:4).
Again, in the Letter to the Galatians:
But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts crying, “Abba, Father!” for you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir (Chapter 4: 4-7).
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During almost six decades as a priest, I came to know some exceptional adopting parents and their children. The realization of how emotionally and spiritually demanding is the real-life experience of these families has been brought home to me profoundly. And what I am writing at this moment has been influenced by it. Whenever in the Scripture and texts of the Liturgy the mystery of our adoption as God’s children was mentioned, it would prompt me to reaffirm the Gospel Truth:  “We are ALL adopted!”
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And now think of how the Heavenly Father had to surrender his beloved Son to very wicked men. And then, this Christ, the Anointed One, had to drink that chalice of cruel suffering and death, and thus put to death our curse of death in order to give birth to us in the wondrous mystery of our adoption by the Father.
The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him (Romans 8: 16-17).
In the Letter to the Romans we find the sublime expression of this:
You did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” (Chapter 8:15).
After my initiation into monastic life in 1957, I began, with my fellow novices, to study the works of the leading exponent of  our adoption as Christians, Abbot Marmion. He died in 1923 and, as of 2000, he is Blessed Columba Marmion. As a monk, priest and preacher, Marmion became increasingly affected and consumed by the inspired treasures of the Bible. He first perceived and then propounded the mystery cradled in its heart of hearts: the adoption as sons.
Here is just one golden kernel of all he had to say on the topic; it is found in Christ in His Mysteries (Herder, 1919, p. 49):
The marvels of divine adoption are so great that human language cannot exhaust them. It is a wonderful thing that God should adopt us as His children; but the means that He has chosen to realise and establish this adoption is more wonderful still. And what is this means? It is His own Son: In dilecto Filio suo (Ephesians 1:6). I have exposed this truth elsewhere, but it is so vital that I cannot forebear returning to it.
Dear friends, despite all the years of reading Saint Paul’s Letters and of being exposed to and meditating upon Marmion’s favorite teaching: the truth of our Divine predestination as sons and daughters in Christ Jesus, it was not until I saw how the Father’s love and fondness for each of us singly was vividly manifested through the father in the pew in front of me. Moreover, it was the young boy next to him, who manifested to me how we really need to respond with reciprocal love, fondness, and affection to the stupendous love that is Our Father’s for us.
⁓Father Augustine H. Serafini