"Rabbi Barukh’s grandson, Yehiel, was once playing hide-and-seek with another boy. He hid himself well and waited for his playmate to find him. When he had waited for a long time, he came out of his hiding place, but the other was nowhere to be seen. Now Yehiel realized that his friend had not looked for him from the very beginning. This made him cry, and crying he ran to his grandfather and complained of his faithless friend. The tears brimmed in Rabbi Barukh’s eyes and he said: “God says the same thing: ‘I hide, but no one wants to seek me.’”
Our life with God is a constant game of hide-and-seek. Sometimes, when we are ashamed of ourselves, or angry at God, or bitter, or emotionally burned out, we'll deliberately "hide" from God. We'll deliberately stop praying and live our daily life as if God doesn't exist. However, if we're truly in a relationship with God, sooner or later we'll come to our senses, put the house of our disordered feelings in order, and turn back to find God. Wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles, God will always be there, waiting for us.
The saddest situation of hide-and-seek occurs when we do not actively seek for God. Our God, often enough, is a humbly hidden God. Because God has given us free will, God does not actively impose Himself on us. He is not a Zeus hurling thunter-bolts to get our attention, or a Thor, hammering our enemies in front of our eyes. He is not a Cupid, doing our work for us by shooting an arrow into the heart of the one we are enamored with.
No, God usually stays quietly hidden in the midst of our daily life and in the depth of our hearts. He is really a God Who hides everywhere! He is waiting for us to discover Him in the gifts of the Holy Spirit which He pours into our hearts and the hearts of those around us. He is waiting for us to ask Him for the gift of faith, and He will gift us with faith if we humbly ask Him for it.
J. Heinrich Arnold reminds us:
"Who is God, and how can we find him? One answer to this question is that something of the light of God already lies deep in each of our hearts. At times, this is to be felt only in a deep longing for goodness, justice, purity, or faithfulness. But if such a longing turns to faith, we will find God. The early Christians said that if we seek God we will find him, because he is everywhere. There is no boundary that cannot be crossed, no hindrance that cannot be overcome, to find him. We cannot excuse ourselves for not finding faith. If we knock at the door, it will open."
What a great gift the Light of Faith is! If we freely choose to ask for faith and accept faith, our heart is lit with the Light of Faith, and our hearts will illumine God hiding everywhere.
God hides in the daily miracles of love we see in our lives. A parent's love for a child is a miracle. How truly miraculous is the love a parent has for a child who has been hurt in an accident and will never be the same; the love a parent has for a special needs child; the love a parent has for a child with a different, unexpected sexual orientation; the love a parent has for a child with a physical or mental illness, or an addiction. Our faithful Father God loves these children through the faithful love of their parents, both the love of a married couple and the love of a single parent.
Our Creator God hides in the hands of a cook, carefully adding herbs to a soup, or a baker, turning out exquisitely light pastry; the hands of a hair stylist, delighting in special cuts and tints, styles and shades; in the hands of a brewer making beer or a vintner making wine; in the hands of a beekeeper loving her bees into producing honey; in the hands of a poet playing with words or an artist playing with paint. Everywhere we reverence, love, enhance, play with, the gifts of creation, of nature, the gifts of our bodies, God is there, rejoicing with and in us.
Our compassionate God lives in the feet of the policemen and firefighters rushing to the scene of a crime, or a fire, or a natural disaster; the feet of doctors and nurses rushing to an emergency room; the feet of lawyers rushing to do pro bono work for the poor; the tireless feet of people staffing soup kitchens, food pantries, missions.
Our God Who created the Universe with spectacular love lives within all His creation. Some find Him best where He hides in the wonder of the galaxies, the mystery of black holes, the almost infinite variety of butterflies, the still-undiscovered frontiers of the human body - and with awe, they reveal His Presence in His works to us.
Faith, if it is rooted deep in us, never changes. Even if we are in deep doubt or despair, Faith is the abiding level of calm at the bottom of the ocean of our soul while troubles produce violent waves on the surface. Our faithful God loves us in and through every storm in our lives; our faith in God, given to us by this faithful God, will likewise remain undisturbed.
The Light of Faith illumines the heart of Christ for us so profoundly that we can Keep Faith even in the midst of the tragedies and horrors that beset the entire world. Even as God allows us our freedom to sin and allows us to reap the consequences of our sins, Faith tells us that the Power of God, of Love continues to be at work everywhere and anywhere. The crucified hands of Christ continue to embrace our world and uphold it.
A faith-filled Teilhard de Chardin, bearing a stretcher in the middle of a bloody World War I battle, suddenly had a vision of all mankind made one in the risen Christ. Like the human Christ, he knew through experience that we cannot close our eyes to the darkness of suffering, or avoid it; we must see it clearly and enter into it. But his Faith also was suddenly illumined to understand and trust that God unites us all and cares for us all no matter what catastrophe we're enduring as individuals or as a world. He wrote this prayer:
"Ah, you know it yourself, Lord, through having borne the anguish of it as a man: on certain days the world seems a terrifying thing: huge, blind, and brutal. . . . At any moment the vast and horrible thing may break in through the cracks—the thing which we try hard to forget is always there, separated from us by a flimsy partition: fire, pestilence, storms, earthquakes, or the unleashing of dark moral forces—these callously sweep away in one moment what we had laboriously built up and beautified with all our intelligence and all our love.Since my human dignity, O God, forbids me to close my eyes to this . . . teach me to adore it by seeing you concealed within it."
Faithful Lord, please give us the gift of Faith. May the Light of Faith empower us to always seek You where You are hidden, believe in Your Presence even in the midst of darkness, rejoice in illuminating You hidden in the daily ordinary miracles of our lives. May we knock at Your door and see You open to us and invite us into the Kingdom of Your Mercy and Love every day of our lives. Amen.