By Carolyn Y. Woo
My friend Sister Maura worries about my travels to risky places for Catholic Relief Services (CRS).
On the other hand, I marvel at how this soft-spoken and diminutive nun of 90 provides medical care in the toughest local neighborhood to which I have never traveled alone.
While CRS abides by strict security protocols, there is no greater “protection” than that offered by our local communities. Beneficiaries and staff know one another as people with names and families, quirks and humor, unspeakable losses and stubborn hope.
Sister Maura, too, knows the residents of her neighborhood: the man whose high school football and work injuries left him in constant pain leading to a succession of drug overdoses, then the loss of purpose. She has known a biker since he was in grade school and who is trying to help his mother whose abuse he witnessed. They pose no threats to her. They are friends whose lives are difficult.
Getting personal, as in engaging and knowing one another, underlies Pope Francis’ urging for a culture of encounter. He speaks against the tendencies to intellectualize, judge, dismiss and demonize the poor, the unemployed, the undocumented migrants, etc. They are categories of social construction with statistics, theories, precedents, antecedents and solutions that delineate costs and benefits.
Too often they are devoid of faces, stories, pains, dreams. That need not be the case.
Clear Message
An ad on TV features an insurance company distinguishing itself as not only assigning a number to the policy holder, but also knowing the story of the individual and holding her dream in trust. An unlikely source to illustrate a papal teaching, but the message is clear enough: Encounter is personal.
An excellent essay by Benjamin Durheim lists the four elements that the theologian Karl Barth sees as essential for human encounter. The first is face-to-face interaction by which we are both seen and see, eye to eye as equals without class or power distinctions.
The second element requires us to talk and listen or to dialogue, another favorite suggestion of Pope Francis. Shared expressions involve self-disclosure and receptivity of the other. In an encounter, we seek to know and be known.
The third element calls for assistance: We act for the well-being of another person. We do not just see, listen and speak. We act. Barth sees that we can only become human in relationship to the other. Through assistance, we are not simply with the other, but for the other.
For the final element, Barth cites the spirit of gladness as the orientation that enables all the other elements. And so, our encounter with each other is marked by God’s gladness in his encounter with us. Anything less, to Barth, does not qualify as encounter but a mere accident of life.
So when you next serve at the homeless shelter or deliver canned goods for the local food pantry, take time to stay and join the residents for lunch or bring a pot of coffee to let the aroma seduce a conversation with a dad collecting food supplies for his family.
All encounters with the other, acknowledged or not, are encounters with God. These are therefore holy, sacramental. They all start with the personal.
Carolyn Y. Woo is president and CEO of Catholic Relief Services.
