I Sought Him

Saturday With the Second Week of Lent

Micah 7:14-15, 18-20
Psalm 102:1-2, 3-4, 9-10, 11-12
Luke 15:1-3, 11-32

Draw Near to Hear

The first line of today’s Holy Gospel is perhaps the key to all the rest: “The tax collectors and the sinners were all drawing near to hear Jesus” (Lk 15:1). Draw near to hear. This is the listening that changes life. One cannot hear rightly while remaining at a distance.

God Seeking Man

Our Lord says, “No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him” (Jn 6:44). The Father seeks us to draw us close to the Son. What did we sing in this morning’s Canticle from Deuteronomy? “He sought them out in the wilderness, there in the fearful desert spaces, gave them the guidance, taught them the lessons they needed, guarded them as if they had been the apple of His eye” (Dt 32:10). When we consent to God finding us, a flame of desire begins to flicker within: a yearning to be enfolded in His protecting love and sheltered in the “shadow of His wings” (Ps 16:8).

Repentance

Turning one’s life around begins with the painful awareness of one’s need for God. Look at the prodigal son. “Then he came to himself and said, How many hired servants there are in my father’s house, who have more bread than they can eat, and here am I perishing with hunger! I will arise and go to my father, and say to him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee’ I am not worthy now to be called thy son; treat me as one of thy hired servants” (Lk 15: 17-18).

Feeling the Pain

We experience this painful awareness of the need for God in different ways. Loneliness, for example, can be an immense grace if it orients the heart towards God alone. Failure can serve the designs of God’s mercy when it obliges us to seek Him, to call to Him out of the depths of brokenness. Illness can become a gift; the awareness of our weakness can be for us the discovery of His unfailing strength. Disappointments in human love can lead to drive one to the one Love that never deceives nor disappoints. God alone can satisfy the deepest longings of the heart.

Upon my Bed by Night

The bride of the Song of Songs describes the experience of every human heart tormented by the desire for God: “Upon my bed by night, I sought him whom my soul loves; I sought him, but found him not; I called him but he gave no answer. I will rise now and go about the city, in the streets and in the squares; I will seek him whom my soul loves” (Ct 3:1-2). Her nocturnal disquiet is the image of our restlessness of our souls. Within each of us there is an appetite more relentlessly gnawing than the appetites of the senses: the appetite for intimacy with God.

The Word of God Himself has come down into the streets and squares of the city in search of all who search for him, just as in the first pages of Genesis, the Father walked in paradise in the evening breeze (Gn 3:8) and called to Adam, saying, “Where art thou?”