The image in the mirror

Whatever form it takes, prayer is an encounter with God that occurs in the depths of our hearts, because it is there that we find ourselves face to face with Him. In reality, we will see God clearly face to face and be fully intimate with Him only after our death, "now we see Him dimly, as in a mirror" (1 Cor 13:12).

Those who have not experienced love in their lives struggle to understand the Love that is God and to communicate with Him. To be able to see God correctly, even if dimly, in the mirror of our hearts, it is therefore necessary to use our intelligence and our heart, even knowing that our efforts would be in vain without the action of the Spirit to construct for us an image of God as Love, to enable us to experience God as Love. There is a restlessness of the heart that thirsts for absolute love and that sometimes opens a rift in our hearts, where a flash of light enters, revealing to us for a moment the face of God, but the mind immediately closes the horizon of its relationship with God.

It is therefore important that the mind be enlightened and nourished, while the heart groans in longing for absolute love, so that an image reaches the heart that allows us to contemplate the face of God, the face of the God of love, allowing us to enter into communion with Him. Sometimes the image that reaches our hearts is not that of the God of love, but of a terrifying God, ready only to punish. This image only arouses in us a sense of fear, because we see a God of fire who burns sinners, and not the God of mercy. We are in some way conditioned by our life experiences, by ideologies, by the dominant way of life, and for this reason, in every historical era, a different aspect of the image of God can be emphasized. For example, one can emphasize the image of God of the powerful, and that of God of the poor. However, in every era, and for each of us, there is a firm point of reference, the living icon of the face of God, Jesus Christ. In him we have the living, pulsating, fleshly image of God, and in him we can truly discover the human face of God.

from Progetto (now NP) 1993 n. 6
HE TO WHOM WE PRAY (1/5)
NP January 2026