‘Come and see all that God has done.’

Come and see. The invitation to experience. The chance to be present. The challenge to witness. Come and see. To me these three words are the essence of faith, the heart of mysticism, the core of religion. Come. Don’t sit down quietly waiting for things to happen to you. Get up and start and move and search. Come close, enter, face the reality you have been called to meet. And then see. Open your eyes, watch, see for yourself. Don’t just listen or read or study. You have spent all your life in readings and studies and discussions and abstractions. All that is good, but is only second-hand evidence. It has to be transcended in faith and courageous humility to seek the firsthand evidence of vision and presence. Come and see. Seek and find. Enter and enjoy. The Lord has summoned you to his court.

I now take those hallowed words as said by you, Lord, to me. Come and see. You invite me to be by your side and to see your face. Your words are unmistakable, and your invitation deliberate and serious. Yet I fight shy, I hold back, I find excuses. I am not worthy, I’ve been told it’s safer to walk in the darkness of faith. I’ll stick to the trodden path. I’ll keep my place and hold my peace. I leave to my betters the mystic claims of your face-to-face vision, and feel content with the life of routine that waits in patience for the plenitude to come. I am afraid, Lord, I don’t want to get into deep waters. I feel comfortable where I am, and beg to be left unmolested. The heights are not for me.

I am afraid that if I see you my life will have to change, my attachments will drop and my routine will be upset. I am afraid of your presence, and in that I feel one with the people of Israel who delegated to Moses the responsibility of meeting you because they were afraid to do it themselves. It is my laziness, my inertia, my cowardice. Ultimately, it is my lack of trust in you, and, maybe, in myself. I acknowledge my pusillanimity, and ask you not to withdraw your invitation from me.

I want to come and see your works, to come and see you at work, to contemplate you, to see the splendour of your face as you rule the vastness of your creation and the depths of the human soul. I want to see you, Lord, in the light of faith and the intimacy of prayer. I want the direct experience, the personal encounter, the effulgent vision. Devout people in all religions speak of the experience that changes their lives, the realisation that fulfils their aspirations, the illumination that gives meaning to their existence. I humbly want that illumination for me, and it is your face alone that can shed that light on my mortal eyes. I want to see, and by that I mean that I want to see you, who are the only reality worth seeing, you who with the light of your face give light to the whole of creation and to my own life. That is now my only desire and my ultimate hope.

Come and see.

I am coming, Lord.