Thursday of the Third Week in Ordinary Time
"This is the people who long to see your face” — today's responsorial from Psalm 24.
Goals. The word used to drive me crazy. As a teacher for nearly 40 years, we were required to submit 3 goals to the principal every fall at the start of the new school year. In all honesty, I wasn’t sure what the previous year's goals were and whatever they were I should just repeat them (and often I did) because obviously I didn’t follow through.
But when it comes to our faith there is really only one goal for Christians (some would say the only goal for Christians) — the Beatific Vision.
I first heard of the Beatific Vision from my maternal grandmother. She had a hard life, my grandfather
having died very young of cancer (originating in the open hearths of Youngstown Sheet and Tube, no doubt) in 1933 leaving her with 7 children at the height of the Depression. There were few safety nets back then and her extended family was back home in the Irish sections of Glasgow Scotland. Her life truly was “a vale of tears.”
But she never took her eyes off the prize and the goal of her life remained a constant: to see God in the face. It was this promise of the Beatific Vision — seeking God as God is, “seeing God in the face” that gave my immigrant grandmother and millions like her the fuel to carry on through tremendous hardships. There is no greater human goal and there is no greater Divine promise.
Here we are on January 30, an especially difficult time of year for some who live in the northern hemisphere. The start of the great Paschal season of Lent-Easter-Pentecost remains on the distant horizon of March 5. So as January comes to a close and the cold and chill of February awaits, it might do us well to ponder the undying joy that awaits those who “long to see the Holy Face.” In what some may consider the no man’s land of Winter Ordinary Time we are well to plead with today’s Psalmist, “This is the people who long to see your face.”
Through these dreary wintry days may we not only call out, “get me through, Lord” but the far greater “help me thrive, Lord, thrive to seek your Holy Face.”
Let’s keep our eyes on the prize.
—Timothy J. Cronin