In the Old Testament we read, “No one can see God and live.’ (Exodus 33, 20) It has always made me a little frightened to think about that. God would kill me if I saw him. That is how I rather childishly conceived of it.
It isn’t about God striking us dead if we were to gaze upon him. We can’t really, in this world, even if we sought to do so.
But perhaps it is about something else. We often want to get caught up in the glory and glitz, the splendor and the divine pleasures that can be given us at times by God. We strain for the consolations of the spiritual life. We cling to life as we have it but want God to boot.
St. Bonaventure, whose feast we celebrate today, reminds us that we ought embrace the fogginess, the cloudiness, the darkness of life if we are to see God. Only in dying do we come to the vision of God. And we don’t have to wait for physical death. We can die a little each day by letting go of the extraneous, of whatever leads us into pride and embrace that which leads us to faith. Only in death to ourselves do we find life in God; this is the paradox of Christianity.
