The author claims that she had a spiritual experience at the age of thirty-four that gave some unity to her life. She experienced the gaze of the Crucified Christ in a very powerful way. This is where the name of the book comes from. The book contains a theological reflection on the gaze of God, but it is also the autobiography of the author, and it includes references to the people, the music, the movies, the books, and the politics that made her life what it is. The author claims that, throughout her ups and downs, even in sin and illness, she has felt that Christ's gaze has stayed: loving, forgiving, and accompanying.
Pauline Dimech is a Catholic theologian, a catechist, and a religious educator. She was born in the sixties on the small island of Malta in the Mediterranean Sea. Like everyone else, she faced the mystery of life with a lot of anxiety but was also sustained by other people and by experiences that gave her hope. She is the author of The Authority of the Saints (2017).
“Like many young people in her community, at the age of seventeen, Pauline Dimech promised to fix her gaze on Christ crucified for the rest of her life. At the age of thirty-four, she experienced Christ crucified gazing at her. Through the narrative of her life story, Pauline’s book illustrates how the divine gaze, as in an icon, precedes the human gaze ‘in order to engulf it in an infinite depth,’ as Jean-Luc Marion would say.”
—Natalino Camilleri, former Superior General, Society of Christian Doctrine
“This is an autobiography of an individual born and raised on the island of Malta. It describes Pauline’s childhood and portrays her simple family background. Notwithstanding this, she flourished into an intellectual, a renowned Maltese scholar and indeed a theologian embracing the teaching of the Catholic Church through a feminist perspective. The journey toward her spiritual fulfillment is depicted in the chapters describing her experience with the crucified Christ gazing upon her.”
—Victoria Spiteri, Head of School, SGPC Valletta Primary School
“Dimech writes about growing up, discovering empathy, learning about Jesus and the saints, and noticing an insatiable thirst for knowledge and being of service. She writes with passion about political and spiritual awakening. . . . Christ told her to stay with him, and she did—despite the pain and joy of falling in love in a context of chosen celibacy, the cruel but liberating absoluteness of death, and the pain of illness. . . . An eye-opener of a book.”
—Jenny Zammit, Family Therapist and Counselor