“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.
