“For whom no one else has time”

“Le Portrait d'un vieillard et d'un jeune garçon,” Domenico Ghirlandaio (Louvre, Paris. image public domain.)

“The word of God occurs not only in preaching … it occurs in conversation with the elderly, with the abandoned, with the sick, with people for whom no one else has time.”
Joseph Ratzinger, “Meditation on the Day of a First Mass”

The priest is not a bureaucrat, Ratzinger says. The priest must be open to the word of apparently odd parishioners, hurt or depressed parishioners whom I and others easily write off. But these parishioners often love you, and the Church’s prayers, and the Sacraments. One came to me when he found a Host on the church floor. For his quirkiness, combined with unabashed love for you, friends around him act like it’s still a schoolyard: teasing, snickering, even to his face.

God has spoken the word of each person and wants someone to listen. Jesus, you have revealed to me the answer to my request: “Show me how to love this person.” Whenever a person asks to speak, listen. Hear each person, do not shut a person out. If I have something crucial to do, apologize and say that you like listening to the person and being with him. But the presence of a person relativizes all other concerns, reveals what is crucial: what is as crucial as a person, the crux of God’s gaze, for whom He died an excruciating death super Crucem?

To encounter a person is to receive, reverence and embrace a person with God’s gaze. You have made us to encounter the personhood of others, and our hearts are restless until they rest in encountering the personhood of others.