One day, at a Mass in Lourdes, I found myself sitting next to a woman whose tongue hung from her mouth and would not return. It was deeply unsettling to watch that face, tubes and thin lines protruding from it. She made small cries now and then, and I asked myself: "Why, Lord, do You permit this?" Passersby looked away. At the moment of communion, I saw a nun rise with a syringe in her hand—it held powdered host—and in that way the woman was able to receive communion peacefully.
Then I said to myself: "So this is what it means to share the meal of true Love!" Jesus visits each of us through the tenderness and creativity of our communities. Through that woman, I understood who the God was who makes himself small.
Since then, when I speak of Jesus's love for the sick—I who am a quadriplegic with a tracheotomy, confined to a wheelchair—I see different reactions in the eyes of those around me. Those who do not know Him are guarded and careful. They seem to say: "If religion does him good, we won't object," yet they manage easily enough to establish a simple human relationship.
But those who do know Him rejoice at the thought that I have Christ as a friend—and yet they fall easily into the temptation of reducing me to a purely spiritual dimension, forgetting simple gestures of friendship like eating together, taking a walk, watching a film. Many parents of children with disabilities tell me: "People are kind to us at Mass or in our prayer group, but after that, there is no one. Outings happen among 'normal' people: we seem to be a burden." This loneliness is a real poverty. I want to remind people that Christ did not limit himself to preaching like a solitary rabbi.
He was surrounded by friends. Yet even today people want to confine him to a purely spiritual life, to eucharistic initiation alone. But the Bible does not separate man from his everyday world. Jesus ate fish sitting on the shore. He found time to visit anyone. He went to celebrate at the wedding feast of a friend. He asked a blind man what he desired. He had time for this, and he loved making that time. He commanded us to invite the forgotten to our tables and not to content ourselves with saying "Lord, Lord" without living it out.
Incarnation means living with others in the midst of everyone—not shutting them away in an interior life that, after all, costs little. You must find the time. And that is often harder than going to Mass.
Jean Christophe Parisot, (Deacon, Prefect, man with myopathy, married father of four), 2013