What does God see?

Michelangelo Buonarroti is said to have maintained that every block of stone contains a statue within it, and it is up to the sculptor to uncover it. If that is true of an artist, how much more is it true of God! In the young woman of Nazareth he saw the Mother of God. In Simon the fisherman he saw Peter, the rock on which he would build his Church. In the publican Levi he recognized the apostle and evangelist Matthew, and in Saul, a harsh persecutor of Christians, he saw Paul, the apostle of the Gentiles. God’s loving gaze always meets us, touches us, sets us free and transforms us, making us into new persons.

~ From Pope Francis' message for the 2022 World Day of Prayer for Vocations

And when God looked on me, thirty or so years ago, what did he see? He would have seen a young woman, restless and searching for an elusive and indefinable 'more'; a young woman going her own sweet way, whom he needed to woo and beguile back to himself. He'd have seen vulnerability alongside strength; gifts as well as limitations. And there, within the unformed, un-sculpted stone of that young woman, God would have seen someone primordially called to proclaim his unlimited, unconditional love with her life... and someone called to do this in union with his Heart as a Religious of the Sacred Heart.

What, I wonder, does he see now? A work very much in progress, I'm sure: still plenty of unhewn potential; still so much need of that loving, creative, transformative gaze, and what Pope Francis describes as a vocational dialogue between ourselves and the Lord, but also between ourselves and others. A dialogue that, experienced in depth, makes us become ever more who we are. 

But fundamentally, he sees someone he loves, infinitely, and has been making his own since forever.

And you... when God gazes on you, what does he see?