How Long Will You Hide Your Face?
Photo by Gareth Harper on Unsplash
I remember one Christmas morning when I was eleven, and I couldn’t stand the suspense. At dawn I sneaked out to our living room, long before anyone else was awake. I had one keen hope.
In the months before, I had fashioned homemade drums out of kitchen pans, stretching brown paper over the rims, holding the paper fast with encircling rubber bands. My cymbals were pan lids. My drumsticks, chopsticks. I made primitive rhythm and my “drum set” was inadequate. But this Christmas I hoped for my first real instrument—a snare drum.
And there, as light just began to glow above the horizon outside, it was. I touched its taut, sandpapery drumhead, admired its chrome, felt the smooth hickory drumsticks, but only briefly, so as not to be caught snooping. I went back to bed, happy.
Later, when the family called me out, shielding the drum with a blanket, then dropping it with a flourish to reveal the longed-for gift, I feigned surprise. But I had been long awake, watching. Natural curiosity and anticipation would not let me stay sleeping.
We wait for lots of things. We hope for particular things to happen. We wish that a logjam of circumstances would show signs of loosening. Sometimes what we long for turns out as envisioned. Sometimes, of course, not.
We look with an aching heart at a world that seems shrouded in violence and darkness. The suffering in Gaza alone, where supplies of food and water and medicine are desperately depleting, defies the imagination.
Sometimes our waiting has to do with our souls, our spirits—whatever you name that part of us that senses and responds to the Divine. That shaft of upward longing scans for the gift of a Presence beyond the ordinary, above the limits of our human push-pull relating. We wait for something more than vague thoughts of a heavenly being removed from our ordinary joys and broken moments. And sometimes it is a Presence we meet. Other times there’s a delay in the encounter—even an absence, a sense of being ignored on a cosmic scale.
Our Longing for a Face
The other day I was reading the Psalms. And I found myself again struck by the immediacy of some of the images: Rock, fortress, shield, shepherd. And the pulling up, out of all the images possible, one supremely personal: a face. “Let the light of your face shine on us, O Lord,” I read. I find it remarkable that the Hebrew Scriptures use a term for God, even for our approach to God, that seems to reduce the ineffable God to a human-like feature, this from a faith that finds any kind of statue or idol-representation repugnant. But what other image can so viscerally and instantly communicate closeness, even intimacy?
And why not? We best picture God best not a lonely, distant being vaguely spread across the infinities of the universe, not, as G.K. Chesterton put, it, a remote, colorless being. Not, as Anne Lamott wryly pictures: “God as high school principal in a gray suit who never remembered your name but is always leafing unhappily through your files.”
As in any relationship, there are times of missing the presence, longing for something to overcome the seeming detachment or hiddenness. The heart is restless till it finds its rest in God, as Augustine famously prayed. Which suggests not only a longed-for outcome, but also the discomfort until the Presence shows up and befriends. So there are metaphors in the Psalms also highlighting the chasm of distance. Within a page or two of the psalm exalting about the face of God that I had read that morning, the next day in my slow read through Psalms, Psalm 10 asks, “Why, O Lord, do you stand far off?” And even more poignantly, “How long will you hide your face from me?” God’s face!
But in all this, especially in this season, even more I’m glimpsing a drama that gives us glimpses that keep us hoping. A script that gets through to us. A scene so gripping that it pierces our obliviousness.
God took our sometime sense of lack and longing especially seriously in the Incarnation. Here is the heavenly One made earthly and low. The immaculate one, as Frederick Buechner once put it, born under the soft, indifferent gaze of cattle. A Messiah delivered amid straw and oxen. But it’s also the One we fear descending to our level to say something clearly. To show another picture. To convince us how we matter to God.
No Throne but a Lap
“Now when we look at God,” writes Rowan Williams, “we do not see only the terror and darkness, the cloud that brooded over Sinai [where God gave the Ten Commandments]; we see Jesus, taking his throne on a mother’s lap. … [He] has come closer to us than we are to our own selves, as one of the saints has said.”
Here Jesus lives out a story where God as central character is seen not as sullen, or withdrawn, or prone to offense that makes him back off, not tempted to withhold his affection or blessing. But rather one who draws near. Immanuel, after all, is one of the hallowed names for Jesus: God-with-us.
He even became incarnate, we say. Made flesh. And in a jarring way, intimate. In Jesus this God joins the byways of human life, including the woes and worries of distancing, of pulling apart. All that in encompassed in his coming, too.
And it may be simpler than we think. In our longing and wanting we are already beginning to wake up to the Presence we need. “The simple desire for God is already the beginning of faith,” I once read. And while there may be clutter in any life to clear out and old habits to leave behind (as there are in mine), no equipment is required save a seeking heart. “There is that near you,” wrote an old Quaker seeker, “that will guide you. Wait for it, and be sure to keep to it.”
Sometimes I rush through my life’s daily scenes, unaware and insensitive. Or I forget the riches of grace tendered to me. But in my deepest self I want to go on.
When I realize how poignantly needy I am for God, turning to him becomes something I more naturally do. I wake up those mornings eager to see what gifts might await.