Your Face, Lord, I Will Seek

When You said, “Seek My face,” my heart said to You, “Your face, Lord, I will seek.”

(Psalm 27:8)

There is a particular icon of the Pantocrator of which it has been said that His eyes follow, follow, follow the onlooker insofar as his being is open to it and to Him. I remember selecting this specific depiction of the Pantocrator several years back when I was tasked with finding new icon images for our newly built iconostasis in our charming, aged, run-down, rented-Catholic-convent monastery chapel. I had also seen then those eyes—that Person—gazing back at me with such a glisten, a serenity that escapes words. Many visitors have come and gone, many monastics pass to and fro, venerating the icons in a mechanical routine; the icon of Christ, the icon of the Virgin, the icons of saints. Hours upon hours are spent before this icon and that; they surround us with faces emanating Christ and auras of holiness, inaudibly permeating our atmosphere with tales of their holy lives offered to the Pantocrator till they came to resemble the Pantocrator. Our cells, corridors, living spaces are all filled with icons which are meant to draw our attention amidst the hustle and bustle of daily life to just take a moment and look, connect, ascend, see—Him in them.

Recently my Father spoke to us about the spiritual senses, namely the spiritual eyes and the blindness that very well may plague them. My Mother also spoke to us about our abundantly flowing monastery spring of gifts and graces made available for anyone willing to come and drink and drink deeply and be enriched thereby.

Actually it’s not the spiritual sight nor the spring that I wish to speak about here (for a change); rather, it’s the very connection through these things to the true Person of God for which the entirety of the being craves and thirsts with a stinging emptiness, loneliness, and desperation. There’s a seeing Him and a seeing Him. There’s a knowing Him and a knowing Him. There’s a coming in contact with Him and a true touching of Him. This is all simply a call to open oneself to Him in truth and really encounter Him. We might just find a totally unexpected gaze of His infinitely deep eyes penetrating into us and warming us with rays of holy, pure light and love and life in just the very ways our innermost beings are thirsty for.