The casual admiration we lavish on the physically beautiful—and the equally obvious scorn we direct at those who are not, whose appearance falls short of our conventional standards—has troubled me more with each passing year. It irritates me. It breaks my heart.
Perhaps this comes from meeting so many people who have confessed their despair at not being "what others want them to be." A deep disappointment weighs on them, fills them, denies them the simple joy of being alive in the world.
Or perhaps it comes from a sense of injustice that compels me to think about how to redirect all those who, without meaning to, almost unconsciously, keep saying: "What a beautiful child!" "What a lovely girl!" "What a splendid young man!"
Or perhaps because I recognize in myself a profound bitterness at having felt, with fear and defiance both, the invasive and disapproving stares directed at my own daughter.
A bitterness I feel even more acutely now, when I present myself "to others" alongside a dear friend of mine (not quite by conventional standards), and I watch the discomfort flicker across faces that strain, uselessly, to stay unmoved.
You might say: but that's natural! Yes, I know it well. But wouldn't it be more natural—at least once we reach adulthood—to prepare ourselves to look with kindness? To arrange our faces as our hearts should immediately suggest in such moments: a wide smile, full of attention to what lives beneath the surface, waiting with longing to be respected and loved—not for what appears outside, but for the perfect person within? And fine, so much for that; these are the world's rules, and I prefer not to follow them if they are so foolish and empty.
What strikes me as profoundly unjust—and I am certain I will have allies among those who read this—is to find this same attitude in church, in the presence of that God who, as Isaiah says, "has the appearance of one from whom people turn away, so disfigured is he."
It can still happen—I hope it happens less and less—that at the moment of receiving the sacraments (which are the continuation of Jesus's gestures for each of us, beautiful or ugly, good or bad), there is reluctance to let children and adolescents who visibly bear the marks of that "Man of Sorrows" receive them "with the others." Those who, in other words, are most like Him.
We proclaim and preach in words Jesus's special love for them. We contradict it in practice.
Great progress has been made, and no small part of it is owed to the many young people, the many parents of "normal" children, and a few priests, who understood and placed themselves alongside their "special" friends—so they would not face alone the still-unconverted eyes of others. They discovered that beyond appearance lies a heart to be looked at differently; that surface often conceals people profoundly wounded, yet even more profoundly capable of loving and being loved.
We hope, then, that every bishop, every priest, imitating those among them who have already done so, will know how to "fling wide" the doors of their churches to those who bear visibly upon themselves the likeness of Christ.
- Mariangela Bertolini, 1995
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