What does God look like?

Read Psalm 27 again.

"Your face, Lord, do I seek."

I would imagine I'm not the first parent out there whose pre-k child wants to know what God looks like. Lately, my daughter has been asking the question at a higher frequency. I don't have a fixed answer to give her. Maybe I should. But how on earth do I answer that question anyway? And so I tell her something inadequate each time she inquires. Sometimes I say that it's a mystery and God is hiding. She wants to know where of course. I just say, "I don't know. Maybe you know." Sometimes I'll tell her that God looks like lots of things, like people we love or people who need us to help them, or like the deep ocean or the night sky. Or sometimes I'll say that God looks like Jesus and we don't know exactly how he looked but that Jesus was a human being once. (I was surprised actually at how satisfied she seemed with this explanation.) But then she'll ask me again the next night and I'll give up and say, "What do you think God looks like?" She is no fool and in a battle of wills over unanswered questions, I always lose. So we end up back where we started. "It's a mystery. I don't know really."

Only later do I remember that God is alive in her -- God pestering me at my dinner table at night with this insistent question. If that's true then maybe the question keeps coming up because God wants something from me. So I tried something different last night. I said, "Why don't we ask God." She said of course, "You do it." She always gives this order when she's suddenly shy. So I tell her, "Okay." And I close my eyes and sit silently across the table from her. Suddenly, this seems right; this seems like the answer I've been searching for. Just ask God. So I keep sitting, savoring the silence. After some long moments, she leans toward me and whispers, "What's God saying?" There's just no winning sometimes.

Reflection

• Has a child ever asked you this question? What did you say?
• Did you ever ask this question of a parent or teacher or someone you trusted? What did they say?
• Do you still ask this question?

Prayer

We seek your face, God. We seek it in the people we love and the strangers we meet. Help us seek it too in the people from whom we turn: our suffering neighbors, our difficult relations, even our enemies. These things we ask in the name of your Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen