Tomorrow is the first day of Advent. Between now and Christmas many of us find ourselves in more public settings than usual . . . shopping in stores, attending Christmas programs, holiday gatherings with friends.
You'll see many faces over the next few days, and underneath each face will be common yearnings, a good measure of brokenness, but also some hope for a life healed and whole. At an interior level, each person you see will have the image of God imprinted upon their innermost soul, an image that cannot be altered nor lost.
Sometimes it's easy to see that image . . . yesterday I saw it several times in simple, quiet acts of kindness.
Sometimes it's difficult to see that image . . . either I am in a bad place, self-focused, and my seeing is off kilter, or those I encounter are acting in self-interested ways. (It's a recipe for dynamite when my own self-interest meets your self-interest . . . two universes collide that are ordered around different centers . . . in that place arises anger, violence, hatred, and all the defenses that put us over-against one another.)
So these words from a book I picked up yesterday at the bookstore remind me of what I am seeing in every face and situation.
Lord, it is easy to believe in you and see you where there is power and success and riches. It is harder to see you when you are powerless and a failure and poor. And, yet, you are both -- the God of power and might, all-powerful and glorious forever, and also the self-emptying God, who does not cling to equality with Godhead but empties himself, becoming as we are, even to accepting death on a cross. Help me to see both your faces, Lord; help me to see that they are really one.
from Tales of St. Francis: Ancient Stories for Contemporary Living by Murray Bodo, O.F.M., pp. 32 - 33.
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