Up close and personal
That gospel episode about Christ healing a big crowd of sick people by laying his hands on each one of them speaks eloquently of how we ought to deal with everyone we meet. He just didn’t say “All of you, be cured.” He approached everyone and laid his hands on each one.
Like Christ, we should try to be up close and personal with everyone we meet, irrespective of who they are, whether they are relatives, friends, colleagues, strangers, and even enemies. We have to avoid a casual and generic dealing that doesn’t go deep enough to show and give the real charity we are commanded to do.
Of course, this will require a lot of effort and sacrifice. We most likely will be tempted to think that Christ is God first of all. He has all the powers. Nothing is impossible with him. We cannot be like him since we are only human.
But he is also man who has assumed our human condition to the point of becoming like sin without committing sin. He assumed the worst condition that man can get into. Being “the way, the truth and the life,” he shows us how to deal with people in general.
The fact that we are humans with limitations and weaknesses should not be an excuse from developing and having a universal concern with a personalized approach in our dealings with people.
We were made in God’s image and likeness, endowed with powers to enable us, with God’s grace, to be truly like God. It’s like we have been given a blank check, the amount of which we are completely free to write. What we write on that check depends on how we correspond to God’s grace in our effort to be like God through Christ in the Holy Spirit.
We have to train ourselves to have the mind and heart of Christ. This requires us to do some adjustments and even drastic changes in our attitudes and ways. What’s needed is that we just try, even if our best efforts cannot achieve that ideal. Anyway, we aren’t really expected to reach that goal with our powers alone. It is Christ, with his grace, who will do it for us. Ours is simply to try.
We, of course, have our own personal ways that can sort of define us—our temperament, personality, biases, preferences, culture, lifestyle, opinions, and views, etc.—but we should not be trapped by them.
Our differences and conflicts among ourselves are unavoidable. But they aren’t meant to be divisive, alienating us from others. They, in fact, can be the condition to generate the power of God’s love that unites everyone to work on us.
That is why Christ told us to be humble, to have the attitude of wanting to serve and not be served, to avoid the attitude of entitlement. He told us to deny ourselves and carry the cross. St. Paul reiterates the same idea by saying that we have to regard everybody else as better than us, looking after the other’s interest rather than focusing on our own.
This may be a tremendous, overwhelming endeavor to undertake, but we can always start somewhere. Are we training ourselves, for example, to be more thoughtful and mindful of others? Are we developing a keen interest in others? Are we learning to let go of our personal preferences to accommodate the way others are?
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