Sharpening Our Vision of God

One big impediment to our desire to deepen our relationship with God is that we can’t encounter God face to face. When God’s intimate friend, Moses, begged God, “Do let me see your glory!”, God replied, “I will make all my beauty pass before you, and in your presence I will pronounce my name … but my face you cannot see, for no human sees me and still lives” (Ex 33: 18-20).

Although our senses and our consciousness have not sufficiently evolved to view God directly, God still wants to be known by us. God gets around this dilemma by appearing to us in human form in the person of Jesus, by imbuing the world with the spirit of Christ, and by “making all my beauty pass before you” in the things of the world that we can grasp with our senses.

Unfortunately, we often place our own impediment in the way of knowing God: judgment. The chief priests and elders of Jesus’ day judged him to be an arrogant reprobate. We judge others almost constantly and often fail to see the beauty in many aspects of God’s creation. As a consequence, as Verónica Rayas notes in Give Us This Day, “When we judge others falsely, we blur our vision of God.”

We all know how blurry our vision gets when we get a particle of dirt in our eye. How much more difficult is it to see when our vision is obstructed by a large wooden splinter, which Jesus equated with our judgment of others?

If we really want to live out the prayer that St. Richard of Chichester addressed to Christ, that we may “see you more clearly, love you more dearly, and follow you more nearly,” we must stop blurring our vision of God through judgment. How? It is by cultivating humility that we are able to avoid judgment and enlarge our hearts to encounter Christ in others and in the gift of creation. If we truly wish to see God’s face, the surest way to sharpen our vision is by practicing humility and gratitude.