The face of God is imprinted on everyone

The first time I went to Rome, experienced the intrigues of the Curia, saw the politics of the system, watched the maneuverings of national clerical alliances, and realized how helpless women were in the face of all of it, I felt years of ecclesiastical conditioning go to dust under my feet. What was there left to believe in? Where was the Shangri-La of my religious dreams? How could I possibly continue to profess any commitment to any of this? It was all so human. It was all so venal. It was all so depressing. “Don’t worry,” the old monk said to me. “You’ll be all right. Everybody who comes to Rome loses their faith here the first two weeks.” Then, he smiled a small smile and added, “Then in the last two weeks, they put it back where it should have been to begin with: in Jesus.”
 
I grew immensely in those four weeks—out of spiritual infancy into spiritual adulthood. Out of adoration of the church, into worship of the God whom this tradition had made accessible to me. To understand the value of the church, ironically, I had to understand its limitations. To worship God I had to stop worshiping the things of God. “Open yourself to the Tao,” the Tao Te Ching teaches, “then trust your natural responses and everything will fall into place.” Now I knew what that meant.

We are steeped in God, but it takes so long to realize that the God we make in our own image is too small a God on which to waste our lives. God is the energy of the universe, the light in every soul, the eternal kaleidoscope of possibility that surrounds us in nature. The face of God is imprinted on the face of everyone we see. God is no one of them, and God is more than all of them, but without them, we miss all the tiny glimpses of God we’re being given on the way. “How easy it is to forget and disregard the divine beauty and light within ourselves and in the other,” Deborah Chu-Lan Lee wrote. It’s a simple insight, but the very ground of the spiritual life, I think. I have seen God’s mercy and justice, felt God’s love, and heard God’s voice—but always in the other. And all of them have grown me beyond myself.
 
I’m not so sure that it’s “easy to forget” the Divine in the other. I think, given our formation in the potential pitfalls and essential weakness of matter, that it is more likely to be impossible to see it at all. But once we do, once we realize that we are surrounded by fragments of the Divine, life becomes luminous.

        —from Called To Question: A Spiritual Memoir, by Joan Chittister (Sheed & Ward)