What does it mean that we cannot see the face of God and live?

There is a rather mystical and perhaps even strange instruction that God gives to Moses in his discourses with him in the tent of meeting.  Moses asked God to show him his glory, and the Lord’s responses was “you cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live”.  This is found in Exodus 3:20. One has to wonder why this is so.  Isn’t the aim and purpose of the spiritual life to be able to see the face of God?  After all, after the incarnation, wasn’t God’s face seen in the visage of Jesus Christ?  Didn’t many people in Jerusalem lay their eyes on God?  Yet, they lived.  So what is Exodus 3:20 saying exactly?  

 

Firstly, the face of Jesus isn’t the face of the Holy Trinity.  It is only the face of the second person of the Holy Trinity, who is God made man.  Although in him is the three persons, and seeing Jesus is seeing the Father, it isn’t this physical seeing that is alluded to in Ex. 3:20.  It has rather to do with something that happens when we enter into contemplative prayer – something that many people struggle to practice regularly and even more struggle to understand.  

 

Secondly, it isn’t the physical eye’s seeing that the Lord was referring to in his communication with Moses.  To “see” is more than just to look.  It is to behold, to be gripped by, to be enchanted with and to penetrate and to pierce through.  It even has the dimension of being immersed with and enveloped by.  

 

Once we know this, then we can see the connection between contemplation and the very important need to learn how to die to oneself in the spiritual life.  Contemplation, if it is to be deep and sincere, has very much to do with the struggle that many of us have to die to the self.  Especially when contemplation is Christocentric, where we immerse ourselves into the life, death and resurrection of Christ, there is a need to also similarly die to our own imaginations of how God should work, feel or even look.  To allow God to be God in his own way in prayer is a death in some form, and it is painful.

 

Death of the self is always a painful experience.  The mystics have tried to give some description of what a mystical union with God is – it is like becoming lost in the very presence of God.  It becomes very difficult at the heart of mystical prayer to differentiate between where I end and where God begins. There is a melding of beings and hearts. 

 

And this is where it becomes even more challenging – in order for the I to get lost in God, the I needs to become selfless.  It is a purification that is being carried out by God, and I could use an image as an analogue, it would be like how in Malachi 3:2-4 describes how God purifies us like the way a refiner purifies gold in a fire.  This is done with great love and constant gaze by the refiner who looks continually into the fiery and hot molten gold to ensure that all the dross and impurities that rise to the surface is completely burned away, leaving the gold so pure that its surface is so shiny and pure that the refiner can see himself in its reflection.  God wants to see himself in our purified love for him, and this requires of us to die to sin and die to the self.  The self doesn’t disappear, but becomes pure in its love for God.  

 

What is the dross in our lives?  These are what contemplation reveals to us.  They are the things that we are attached to in life, be it habits or fears or prejudices or parts of our hardened hearts when it comes to loving God and neighbor.  For many of us, these are crutches that we rely so much on to define ourselves, and the purification process that needs to take place is to allow ourselves to surrender these crutches to God.

 

We like to rate and judge the quality of our prayer by how our prayer makes us feel.  While this is not altogether wrong, there is a danger that we can be using the wrong standards to rate our prayer life.  Judging the quality of our prayer by the emotions that we experience means that I have still a long way to go before I become selfless.  It is still about me.

 

In our contemplative prayer, what ultimately needs to happen is that we come to that point to be able to turn our eyes away from ourselves and just be totally captivated, engrossed and taken up by God’s beauty, truth and love that we don’t even wish to look at ourselves and use our rating standards of prayer quality.  At that point, when we don’t make it about us, the self dies and we can look at the face of God, and live.  As long as there is an intense and crutch-like reliance on ourselves, our feelings, our sentiments and our emotions, we are still not fully gazing on the face of God.  

 

I believe that the purification that goes on in purgatory is what allows us to surrender those parts of us that are preventing us from fully gazing on God’s face which is what heaven is all about.