Maybe it’s the family photo I’ve been using as my desktop background over the past few weeks, or maybe it’s this month’s Feast of All Saints… but I’ve been thinking about faces lately.
When we remember someone, either living or deceased, we usually picture their face, investing it with the memories and emotions associated with the particular person in our minds. But a face is also more than a symbol.
Arguably the most expressive part of us – and home to four of the five senses – a face draws our focus when we attend to another person: to listen, ask, or understand. In a sense, it incarnates a site of encounter; we might even call it sacramental. When I look into my brother or sister’s face, something is at work beyond just reading an expression or refining an image-memory. It is essential that this person in front of me is turned toward me as well: another person, vivid with distinctive selfhood, a Thou whose willingness to engage with me is, itself, a freely given gift. That the word “face” is both a noun and a verb seems particularly appropriate to the active and personal nature of the encounter it embodies.
So when the psalmist urges us to “Look to the Lord and his strength; seek his face always” (Psalm 105:4), this verse points to something beautifully intimate in the way God invites us to relationship with Him. And the mystery of His ineffable tenderness only deepens when we think that God took on our humanity – bringing His face to us in the human face of Christ – so that we could approach Him, encountering Him freely and humanly within our finite capacities, both in Himself and in us: all those called to be Christ to one other. To “seek his face,” then, is neither an abstract nor a purely metaphorical call. Certainly we rejoice in the way God’s image echoes throughout His creation, but “seek[ing] His face” invites us to much more than this. It invites us to personal encounter.
When we orient ourselves freely toward His face, both within our souls and within the mystery of His incarnate and sacramental presence in the world, we respond to this invitation to active and expressive encounter. We seek the face of God each day in the sensory immediacy of the Blessed Sacrament; in the faces of our brothers and sisters, our loved ones; in the Word; and in honest and vulnerable prayer. We seek because we know our God not only comes to meet us but also makes it possible for us to engage with Him, even when His ways are unclear to us. He meets our gaze and does not turn away.
This weekend, as we conclude a hectic and polarizing election cycle, let’s ask for the grace to seek and love His face anew in our neighbor, our community, and in all the circumstances of our lives. May He fill our vision with the truth of His loving presence.
