Searching for a face

"Lightly men talk of saying what they mean. Often when he was teaching me to write in Greek the fox would say, 'Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words." A glib saying. When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not talk about joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?"
'til we have faces' -C.S. Lewis

I suffer from wanting to hide. Maybe we all do. We all want to have faces and we all want to know what they look like. Regardless of how ugly they may be, at least they would be real. And it is typical to see the beautiful masks we are all so apt at painting....or the veils we drape over our faces to hide our own dusty reflections.
Seems we are always hiding from some form of reality if we are honest. Sometimes we just hide from being honest. It is brutal and it doesn't make us look good. Honesty isn't the eloquence we would like to promote to others. We want to be seen for the best costume we can put on. We have disguised ourselves so well that even we are fooled. Then comes the piercing light.....the kind that makes everything transparent. The 'beautiful' masks are really hideous.... the veil hides emptiness.... and we don't have a face until we find the one that has been given to us, and until we have something to show us a proper reflection.... not a dim and dying one.
I am writing again in the hopes of digging out that word. I am searching for a face that more fully reflects the one I was given, that reflects light from the one who gave it. And I am searching for honesty, however brutal it may be, however ugly or inconceivable it may appear through my half-awakened eyes, so that I may see more clearly the one I have been seeking out since this life began. It seems true, that if we aren't willing to have a face, to find our face, that we cannot expect to ever speak face to face with our God. And in finding ourselves we get lost in Him. The paradox continues. This journey seems to have no end, and I am never sure where the next footfall will take me. Let the search continue.....