Christ comes to meet us in the faces of his children, scattered throughout the world. In fact, He tells us that we will have encountered him even among the least of us. And in seeing that love, and in being convinced of that love, and being convicted and possessed by that love, I too can only say, despite my own dreadful imperfection and undeservedness, “To whom Lord will I go? You alone have the words of eternal life.”

That latter point is important. What does it mean to love others in the same way we are asked to rely disinterestedly on God? If I can indulge myself in borrowing ideas from my go-to philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, the responsibility that originates from an “immemorial past” in the face of the Other is analogous (or perhaps synonymous, if we take Jesus at his word in Matthew 25:40-45) to the relationship of responsibility towards the demands of God.

Christian charity is grounded in obedience to the law of love that emerges from the particular face-to-face relationship with another. For Levinas this otherness contains a trace of the divine; for the Christian, it is the face of God. Penance is reconciliation then, both turning a person back to God and likewise does turning them back and reorienting them towards other individuals.

An old poem of mine.

The same faithful obedience that St. Paul describes in his letter to the Philippians in reference to the death of Jesus is presumably the same faithful obedience that Jesus learned from witnessing the faithfulness of His mother. In fact, I cannot help but imagine that the Jesus we know from the Gospels was formed in His perfect humanity by the perfect faithfulness of His mother, Mary. In my mind, this motherhood was both the necessary and good foundation for our salvation, and prefigures and sets up the beautiful character of Jesus whose humanity and personhood catalyzed and enabled the divine work of salvation.

War we have seen not only forces us to rethink our relationships with others and ourselves and the world at large, but it illuminates a natural state of things, bare of the positive affects of care and concern that extend beyond ourselves. As Levinas hints, care of the other reveals to us the possibility of our own vulnerability, and this vulnerability I think allows us to rethink an engendered and primal fear of death that not only abides in our subjectivity but is present by virtue of the external, phenomenal, and evanescent world we live in.

It must be the case then that if one’s very existence strives to continue to exist and nothing to the contrary, then it must be the case that if one is to also want that for another, and that it is essential that this desire be coupled with an idea, then the proper desire for others must be accompanied by some idea that the shared first cause that makes both one and another worthy of continued existence must have some inherent moral value that transcends the finitude of nature.