No one can see God face to face. God is a god in hiding. Our task is to search for God as he /she reveals himself to us. We most commonly identify God as male, but we are very often surprised by the feminine face of God.
Too many of our born Christians do not accept that everything we say about God is always limited. We can only try to picture certain aspects of God – but there is so much more to knowing the very person of God.
Remember the great joy we had as children when we played hide and seek in that big farm yard. I remember fierce races across that big farm yard to touch home base. It was always enjoyable to go looking for one another and discover the ingenious places my playmates could hide. The old farm yards offered infinite possibilities for hiding. We did not have to stretch our imagination to find a place to hide.
The learned spiritual teachers (a learning that came from the rough and tumble world of serving God on a daily basis) of our Christian history tells us that we will often have our strongest encounters with God in and through the faces of the poor.
Jesus has taught us that the final judgement will consist of recognizing that whenever we gave food to the hungry of this world, we were not just doing a good human act, but we were actually sharing our food with Jesus himself. Jesus clearly identifies with the poor of this world in a very personal way.
I meet so many people who limit the God-horizon: they can only encounter Jesus in the parish church or in the time of personal prayer. They limit the presence of Jesus to specific religious activities.
Surprise! God come in ways we least expect – and ways that we can never control the divine power.
The poor are very close. It may be your accountant who cries every night that her husband has stage four cancer and will probably only last another six months. It is certainly your aged mother who is collapsing into her dementia. She no longer recognizes anyone familiar. No matter what age we are today, we are destined to poverty in our old age when almost all our functions have quit, all our friends have died and we need to have our basic hygiene needs meet by a care-aide in the nursing home. Our poverty then will be summarised in three words: loneliness, uselessness and boredom.
The poor have many faces. Poverty is not limited to an extremely weak cash flow. We are poor in so many ways.
This is where the Gospel gives us clear insights. When you see poor people who are so close to your house, look for the very face of Jesus. Ask the Holy Spirit to give you the insight you need to recognize the suffering of Jesus in the suffering of the poor, right here, right now.
When believers draw closer to the risen Jesus, they also draw closer to the presence of Jesus in the faces of the poor who live right around them. Just keep your eyes open. God will find you in the faces of the poor who live very close to you.
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