We are All Looking for a Face
A Face that Fits
You guys!! Today is launch day for Saving Face! What are you waiting for—have you ordered your copy yet? Did you know that I narrated the audiobook? I am excited to see Substack authors like Mike Bird and Beth Felker Jones working with my publisher to share excerpts from the book. Here is the Preface, A Face that Fits:
We are all looking for a face. It's the first thing we do when we are born into this world. We look for a face looking at us, delighting in us.
We are all looking for our own face. That's a big part of these other faces, really. We come out asking, Who am I? Who loves me? Why do I matter? So we need to be seen. The first mirror we see is the face of another human. In the other's face we find our own.
We are all looking for God's face. That is the blessing: to see God's face, to see God's face looking at our face, to see God's face delighting in our face. Then we will know who we are. Then we will know we are loved. Then we will know in our bones how we matter.
Our faces prove we were made for relationships in community. Our faces provoke a sense of meaning that calls us to hold one another responsible.1 Our faces summon our humanness. They show our nakedness, our need, our truth. Can you do that? Can you look into the nakedness of another human face?2 Can you reveal your own face before another so that you may learn the truth of who you are? Can we find our faces? Can we find God’s face?
Looking into the nakedness of another’s face is how we learn about who we are, the meaning of life, and therefore who God is. He shows up in the faces of others.
But we are busy trying to hide our faces, mask them, conform them to the face we think is acceptable—clamoring to discover what that is. We are, in a sense, terrified of our own faces, frightened to discover who we really are and, even more, to reveal who we are to others. We are stuck in the hustle, and therefore we are only looking at the outside of things. The outside of our face and the outside of the face of the other. We have an unspoken agreement: I'll accept your mask if you accept mine. Ironically, it can be described with the idiom Saving Face.
It doesn't work though. Our longings are too deep. Too true. Too powerful. We need to dig them out of ourselves. We need one another's faces to excavate and nourish them. It turns out that pain, fear, and shame are working hard to strangle and malnourished our longings that need to be blessed. They trick us into believing that we cannot share our secrets, even with ourselves. They attack at the corners of our broken pieces, where beauty does its best work in the mending and creating. We need one another to listen and look. We need to be awakened to spring because the last of the winter snow is melting. God is calling us. And amazingly, he wants to see our face and hear our voice (Song 2:14).
What is it about the face? What do we mean when we talk about God’s face? Or our own? Why can it be so difficult to look someone in the eye? Especially a suffering someone? To hold that gaze? What is revealed? How do we find Christ in the faces of others? How do we find our own faces?
We all long for faces that fit. For faces worth saving. And we need one another’s faces to call out our own. Looking into others’ faces reveals a greater mystery. Saving Face is a reflection on the divine face and the meaning we get from the faces of others as we are trying to find our own. Our personhood will be consummated as we together make it to that day before the face of God. I am inviting you into a combination of storied memory, journaling with God, interactions with the faces of others, and relooking at the Scriptures in light of it all. Will you enter with me into a different kind of reading?
1. “The relation of one face to the other, or seeing the face of the other . . . , means that I approach the other so that his face acquires meaning for me. Then meaningfulness of the face is the command to responsibility.” Emmanuel Levinas, Is It Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas, ed. Jill Robbins (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 135.
2. See Levinas, Is It Righteous to Be?, 108.
I never really connected the dots but things have been starting to click/connect lately .Sifting through a lot... The idea that we come into this world looking for a face that is looking for us, and when our eyes connect and we sense/feel embraced and clothed - the game is now on in our most vulnerable states. Living in this sin-shattered and ruptured world that is undergoing repair, we start to experience ruptures that wound and shape us into many self-protection behaviors of avoidance, mask wearing, addictions - pattern shaping ways to cope with the emotional distress that builds - we are hide, we shame, we run, we expand the details of our stories, or we look to pleasure, to ambition... And somewhere along the way, our true selves begins to erode, we become afraid just to be ourselves in our own skin, often without even recognizing that were doing it.
I wondering in all the references that Jesus makes to becoming like little children, and explaining salvation/redemption in terms of a new birth, being "born again" - I wonder if He is saying that being born again encapsulates being born, but this time, our new life begins as soon as we lock eyes with Him, that we enter the new world looking for a face/embrace looking for us, and we find that it is God - He is the one looking for us, as He was in the garden when it all fell apart. We begin our new life with face always set before us, slowly repairing us and the world into His image and our truest, most glorious, most beautiful selves. Our new life of redemption begins, undoing/healing/repair our old selves, all the stories, all the ruptures, all the wounding - the new birth and new life begins. Along the way, we begin to find ourselves again - that is the hope! Can't wait to read the book Aimee! Congrats on the new book launch!
Your title reminds me of this: “The Word became human and made his home among us. He was full of unfailingly love and faithfulness. And we have SEEN his glory, the glory of the Father’s one and only Son… No one has ever seen God. But the unique One who is himself God is near to the Father’s heart. He has revealed God to us.” We behold the Father through Jesus, full of unfailing love and faithfulness.