“Continually seek [God’s] face,” the psalmist urges us. For me, that means to aim to be in the presence of God, to encounter the Holy One face to face. But what do we imagine the face of God looks like; how will we know when we are there? We know God is pure BE-ing and doesn’t really have a face like yours or mine. With our earthly limitations, however, we tend to express our view of God in anthropomorphic terms.

As children, probably because of the pictures in our Bible story books, many of us start out picturing God as an old king with a long white beard sitting on his throne far away in heaven somewhere or maybe as the God of creation in Michelangelo’s ceiling in the Sistine Chapel with God reaching out to touch Adam with life and Love. As we grow to maturity, our pictures of God likely changes as our spiritual journey deepens. Maybe we come to see the face of God in our depictions of the face of Jesus because Paul tells us (Col.1:15) that Jesus “is the image of the invisible God.” Or perhaps, considering Jesus’ calling God Abba/Daddy, we think of the face of God as that of a loving father. As we experience the nurturing aspects of God touching our lives, feeling the tender, loving care we may attribute to mothers, perhaps we may even see the feminine face of God as Amma/Mother. When we come to recognize the presence of God deep within our souls, the Inner Presence of Love described by the iconographer in the Virgin of the Sign icon, our picture of God changes yet again. Our images of God change as our encounters with God open our eyes, minds, hearts to know God in new ways.

Take a moment to sit with God and let your image come forth into your mind and heart. God continues to reveal Godself to us in ways that we are ready to receive, to accept, each of us and all of us, in ways that ever call us into deeper, more intimate relationship with Love. My current image of God doesn’t seem to have a face as such; it’s more of an intimate Presence within and without. It is mediated for me by the quantum physicist, David Bohm, with his picture of God as that which enfolds all creation, the entire cosmos. It’s what he called the “Implicate Order” with all creation, you and me and “the galaxies in their courses and this fragile earth, our island home,” unfolding within. That speaks to me of the Womb of God as Paul describes (Acts 17:28) the One “in whom we live and move and have our being,” encircling us with Love. I guess I’d say that, for me, I experience God’s face as the Love that is the Center and Circumference of All that Is. What about you?