It is Your Face I Seek, Oh Lord

The psalmist says: “Of you my heart has said, ‘Seek My face.’ Your face, my Lord, will I seek; do not turn away from me.” (V. 8) Here, we state clearly: God has no face. This term, face, repeated so often since Moses’ time, is an expression of the greatest of intimacy. It attempts to express, and refers, once again, to the Divine Presence, to the personal, living and true God, God himself, vividly perceived in faith and in prayer.

Once more, we insist: The Lord will conquer loneliness and liberate us from anguish as long as He remains the living God in the depths of my conscience. The single condition for God to be my liberator is this; that God will not be relegated to be a simple rhetorical abstraction, a set of logical ideas used for intellectual acrobatics, but that He will be, within me, a living person: father, mother, brother, friend, my true God. This reality, for lack of a better term, we call face.

The psalmist knows from experience that this face is the key to all good, the source of strength and transformation, as well as the fullness of existence.

From the book Psalms for Life by Fr. Ignacio Larrañaga