In today’s first reading we see exactly why we Catholics believe the Scriptures proclaim a preferential option for the poor. We who live in relative comfort and ease often forget exactly how difficult it is for others to exist. When one comes from a home with both parents, never worries about where their next meal comes from, and/or wakes up in the morning with a home protecting them from the elements, it’s easy to see why God calls out for us to help those who don’t have those benefits. The widow, the orphan, the homeless, and the destitute; the traveler, the immigrant, the broken, and the healing. It isn’t those who live in the comfort and standard ease of society who need assistance usually, but rather those on the outskirts. The margins. The ones who have trouble, or even the inability, to fit into what society feels is a norm.
That’s why it’s important to realize that being poor doesn’t always mean not having money or material possessions. One can also be poor in other areas of their lives, from the emotional to the mental, the physical to the moral. When we look at these men and women we don’t do so with pity or disdain, but rather to see them as Jesus whom we can serve. There was a woman named Caryll Houselander who once had the following experience:
I was in an underground train, a crowded train in which all sorts of people jostled together, sitting and strap-hanging—workers of every description going home at the end of the day. Quite suddenly I saw with my mind, but as vividly as a wonderful picture, Christ in them all. But I saw more than that; not only was Christ in every one of them, living in them, dying in them, rejoicing in them, sorrowing in them—but because He was in them, and because they were here, the whole world was here too, here in this underground train; not only the world as it was at that moment, not only all the people in all the countries of the world, but all those people who had lived in the past, and all those yet to come.
I came out into the street and walked for a long time in the crowds. It was the same here, on every side, in every passer-by, everywhere—Christ.
I saw too the reverence that everyone must have for a sinner; instead of condoning his sin, which is in reality his utmost sorrow, one must comfort Christ who is suffering in him. And this reverence must be paid even to those sinners whose souls seem to be dead, because it is Christ, who is the life of the soul, who is dead in them; they are His tombs, and Christ in the tomb is potentially the risen Christ.
Christ is everywhere; in Him every kind of life has a meaning and has an influence on every other kind of life. It is not the foolish sinner like myself, running about the world with reprobates and feeling magnanimous, who comes closest to them and brings them healing; it is the contemplative in her cell who has never set eyes on them, but in whom Christ fasts and prays for them—or it may be a charwoman in whom Christ makes Himself a servant again, or a king whose crown of gold hides a crown of thorns. Realization of our oneness in Christ is the only cure for human loneliness. For me, too, it is the only ultimate meaning of life, the only thing that gives meaning and purpose to every life.”
How then do we encounter Christ in all of these faces, in all of these experiences? The cross. It is through suffering with them, for them, and even through them that we begin to see them as God sees them. With empathy instead of pity. With love instead of hate. With understanding, instead of condemnation. In looking at each and every person that we encounter as Christ, as a Christ who is ready to rise from the tomb, or Christ who is already risen and appearing to us as the gardener or as the traveler to Emmaus, as Christ who loves us so much that He made the sun to rise over us, and the wind to nudge us gently to remind us of His love, that we begin to see with the eyes of God.
It’s also in that line of thought, in that suffering that we realize too that it is only through grace that we have any of the ‘advantages’ that we have over those who are poor. In fact, everything we have, even our lives themselves, are gifts that belong not to us but to God who gave them. That’s when we should discern that we are just as poor as others. All of us have fallen short of the glory of God. We need to be like the tax collector in today’s Gospel, simply looking down and beating our chest, saying “O God, be merciful to me a sinner.’” Once our vision is no longer blurred by pride and is only tinted with grace, can we begin to see the fingerprint of Christ all around us? In nature, in our neighbor, in the universe that He created.
That’s when the Sacraments become even more awe-inspiring. That’s when we realize that Christ is being made substantially present in a more unique, more perfect way in the Eucharist. He is present there body, soul, and divinity. That the Christ we have been seeing glimpses of during the week is now right in front of us, lifted up on the Cross, not a new sacrifice but the one and same cross of Calvary being brought present to us out of the mercy of God. That in receiving Him, we are being brought closer to the mystery of our own salvation, and being made more like Jesus Himself, so that we can see all the more clearly His presence all around us.
A reflection on the readings for October 27th, 2019: Sunday of the 30th Week in Ordinary Time