We Long to See Your Face

 “Lord, this is the people that longs to see Your face.” Psalm 24:6

Today we celebrate the Feast of the Solemnity of All Saints. We celebrate those who have been canonized like Padre Pio who had the stigmata, who could read minds, and bilocate and had the gift of tongues. We also honor the unknown dirt poor man or woman in a remote African village who was tortured and beheaded because they did not denounce their faith. 

I am reading “The Private Writings of the Saint of Calcutta”. It is taking me some time as it is hard reading. Mother Teresa lived a lonely life even if she was surrounded by her community and the throngs that she ministered to. She herself would describe this excruciating inner pain in a letter to Archbishop Périer in February 1956. Rather reluctantly she wrote, as she needed his prayers: “Please pray for me, that it may please God to lift this darkness from my soul for only a few days. For sometimes the agony of desolation is so great and at the same time the longing for the Absent One so deep, that the only prayer which I can still say is—Sacred Heart of Jesus I trust in Thee—I will satiate Thy thirst for souls.”

In answer, the Archbishop wrote back: “In what you reveal there is nothing which is not known in the mystical life. It is a grace God grants you, the longing to be His entirely without return on self or creatures, to live by Him and in Him but that longing which comes from God can never be satisfied in this world, simply because He is infinite and we finite.” 

Indeed I believe each of us has this longing to see God’s face, but it is subverted into many other cravings and desires for earthly things. I have read this described as a “God-shaped hole" within us, a built in spiritual yearning that is misdirected towards temporary pleasures and material possessions. 

Father, satisfy this longing we have to see Your face. Do not allow us to stray and be distracted by things that are worthless and disposable.