Richard Dawson, 9 August 2014

To live with Christ we must also learn to live with others. There is no Christ without others because Christ in giving His life for all humankind has assumed us into Himself. We are completely human only as we are ’in Him.’ My brother isn’t just my brother—he is Christ to me. My sister isn’t just my sister—she is Christ to me. One of the most fundamental signs of maturity as a Christian is to be able to see the Christ in others. Mother Theresa was a master at this for her whole life and predicated on seeing Christ in the poorest of the poor. One of her favourite sayings was this… “If you judge people, you have no time to love them.” I am more and more aware these days of my underlying attitudes and judgements of others and they aren’t pretty. In my mind I find a defensiveness and a prejudice that colours all my relationships so that I have begun to judge even before I know another and in this state all my senses are looking, as it were, for signs that the person before me who should be a Christ-sign according to the Gospel is, in fact, the devil in disguise. In this continual state of ‘readiness for battle’ we cannot hear the Spirit’s whisper and we certainly cannot recognise the Christ in the other. The only safe option is one of separation which leads to further paranoiac suspicion of the other. The result is perhaps the most common illness in our society, loneliness. Of this Mother Teresa said, “The most terrible poverty is loneliness, and the feeling of being unloved.” Only the cleansing work of the Spirit can reunite us with one another but we have to be prepared to both die and be raised first.