Whenever I am bored at the airport or find time to sit in the park, I can’t help but “people watch.” You might do this, too. I love to watch a family interact, or watch an individual slowly turn the pages of a novel or peck away at the keys of a laptop. These people exist in the background of my own story, faint and out of focus. And yet they are populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, mistakes, worries, triumphs, and inherited craziness. When I finally board my plane or leave the park, their epic story continues invisibly like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that I never knew existed. Their story flickers in place wrapped in a cloud of backstory and inside jokes and characters strung together with countless other stories I’ll never be able to see and in which I might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk. We all play a role in each other’s story.
There is a large, bronze plaque to the left of the doors of Moody Memorial Church in the Near North Side of Chicago which reads: “Ever welcome to this house of God are strangers and the poor.” Over these past few years, I have found The Church of St. Michael & St. George to be one of enormous hospitality and tremendous generosity. It is a place where the welcome of Jesus is readily found. There are no strangers among us, only friends—whether life-long or brand new. The writer of the Letter to the Hebrews exhorts, “Keep on loving one another as brothers and sisters. Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it.” The virtue of hosting and caring for visitors and travelers was especially valued in antiquity because travel was difficult and dangerous. But that virtue also recognized the worth of the “other.” We all play a role in each other’s story.
In The Weight of Glory, C.S. Lewis writes:
.....There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, .....cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a .....gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit - .....immortal horrors or everlasting splendors. This does not mean that we are to be .....perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, .....in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, .....taken each other seriously - no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption.
Once you recognize the gravity, the worth, the immortality of another person, you see them as Christ sees them. There are no ordinary people. They no longer are strangers, mere passersby, but bearers of God’s image.
I have this ritual. It’s not a superstition, or compulsion, it’s just a habit. Whenever it storms, I always make sure that the light over my front door is lit. I don’t know exactly when I started doing it, but when the storm clouds roll in, I put on the light. Like a candle in a window, it is a signal. I want any passerby to know that there is someone home. Should the rain bear down too hard, should the wind grow too strong, here is a homely house. Here is shelter. No one has ever turned up, soaked and bedraggled, to my front door. No one has knocked seeking shelter, but the light stays on.
This week, as you go about your lives; as you shop or work, as you pray and vote, as you interact with your family, friends, neighbors, or strangers, strive to see others as Christ sees them and remember that we are all an immortal part of each other’s stories. Let’s leave the light on for one another.
Peter+
