This article is part of the Special Feature: Faith and Light—Anatomy of a Community of Encounter.
We often walk through life like hurried strangers on the sidewalks of our great cities. Each of us alone. We cross paths, but we do not truly meet.
Is it simply a matter of welcoming the other? No. We must also allow ourselves to be welcomed by them. There is something almost paternalistic about viewing welcome in too one-sided a way—bending toward the other "with a delicacy whose secret we alone know," listening to them "with great patience." Real welcome is not about the gesture itself. It means welcoming a person while respecting and loving what is unique and fragile within them.
Not long ago, I had the chance to visit Guyana. One day in the forest, I saw something striking: a new metal bridge, lying on the grass in the middle of the jungle, near the bank of a river. I asked about it and learned it was a prefabricated bridge from a Dutch factory. But the Amazon soil is too soft to bear its weight.
Is this not sometimes what happens to us? We place such importance on welcome that we never stop to ask whether the person or community can actually bear its weight.
Yes, sometimes we need to be insistent and persevering to reach someone in the solitude that has surrounded them for years. But true encounter begins when, instead of forcing welcome upon them at any cost, we let them come forward on their own terms.
I think of our joy each time a new family arrives at a Faith and Light gathering. After so many home visits and invitations, we ask them again—but without holding our breath. When they finally arrive like this, encounter becomes possible.
Meeting
Encounter frightens us because we cannot know where it will lead. We can never predict all the consequences. Encounter forces me to leave my security and step onto a path that belongs to the other as much as to me. Then I fear disappointment. I fear suffering. I fear taking a wrong turn, or going too far even in the right direction. I fear.
It is easier to pretend. To avoid truly meeting the other, we construct a carefully tailored encounter instead:
- we meet the other by using intermediaries: "After all, there are specialists!"
- we meet the other through a checkbook. I know people who would sign checks for all the handicapped people in the world, if only they could avoid meeting a single one in person.
- we meet the other on calendar schedule, moving from "National Day for the Handicapped" to "National Day for the Handicapped" without asking what happens to them the rest of the year.
- we meet the other through Good Works, asking what we can do FOR them, when we should be discovering what we can do WITH them.
- we meet the other through the apparatus of organizations, letting the U.N. declare a World Year for the Handicapped Person (1980) while closing our eyes to the reality of our own neighborhood.
- we meet the other behind the screen of religion, whenever the silence of the crucifixes in our churches keeps us from hearing the cry of those who are crucified today.
None of us is free from these attitudes. They express our fear of the other, and also our fear of ourselves. Fear of not being understood. Fear of being unequal to the moment. Fear of the unknown. We open the door easily to those who resemble us. We open it far less willingly to those who are different.
I have had to turn away from people who confessed to me that they had shut me out because they saw the "stranger" in me—and then opened the door as if by magic once they discovered I was a priest.
How hard it is to accept that the other is simply different from us! Beneath every racism, every sectarianism, every hatred and every act of violence lies a rejection of the other who is not me.
To meet the other, we must abandon comparison. As long as I am "superior" or "normal," I signal that the other is "inferior" or "abnormal." And if I ever decide that they irritate me or cost me too much, I will be tempted to do away with them.
Most of the time, we encounter people like us—people who share our ideas, who flatter us (and we call them "intelligent" to give weight to their praise). We build a small universe where the other becomes a mirror reflecting a flattering image of ourselves. If the image they show us displeases us, we push them beyond our horizon. The world becomes divided into those we meet and the "others."
Who among us has never felt this? I have found myself completely unprepared when faced with people I did not expect. Their presence made me uneasy and seemed to suffocate every capacity I had for encounter. Then one day something shifted. I no longer spoke of the other in medical terms, or political terms, or pastoral terms. Slowly, fear gave way to trust. The other became my brother, my sister.
Years ago, I was on a train headed to Germany. I remember a family next to me with a small child. I longed to play with him, to hold him. But the train arrived in Strasbourg. I got off and went to the waiting room—I had hours to spend there, and it was night. Soon after, a man stumbled in and sat down beside me. He was completely drunk. I do not know if in "normal" times I would have let him sleep on my lap (normal time is so often the time of selfishness and fear). But that evening, beyond what I saw and smelled from him, I knew there was a child in him, more vulnerable than the one I had seen on the train before. He rested his head on my lap and slept in that position until dawn.
To meet the other does not mean to choose them. It means to choose to let yourself be chosen by them.
When we speak of poverty, we usually think of a manageable poverty, one that lets us grow without being born again. But when poverty reveals itself as it truly is, it stuns us and we pull back with the best excuses: "Anything, but not this."
The poor always disturb us because they shake the building of certainties we have patiently constructed. And to be honest, they open us to a freedom we do not yet wish to have.
To encounter is to discover that we are present to one another, that we live for one another. Not only to look into each other's eyes and feel good together, but to look in the same direction and move forward as one.
In Faith and Light, we must be ready to let the presence of the poorest call us into question.
Because of their hunger for love, as at Cana, they will lead us beyond our hesitation, beyond what we had planned and foreseen. They will open our hearts to the unexpected and to celebration.
Luis Sankalé, 1980
- Read the next article: 3. The Protagonists—The Faces of Faith and Light: people with disabilities, parents, friends, and priests