from ON HUMAN BEING ch. 3

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We must not think of a person as a cell in a body. Each person, while a member of the one body, is complete in itself. Each one is sufficiently important to the risen Christ to be received by him face to face in his kingdom. There is no question of comparison; Christ prefers each person. We often think of Christ's lvoe for humanity as if it were egalitarian, repeated over and over again, but such love would be only an abstraction...Love is always a preference. And Christ prefers each one.

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The miracle of the first time, the first time you realized that this person would be your friend, the first time, in childhood, that you heard that heartrending music, the first time that your child smiled at you, the first time...Then you become used to it. But eternity means becoming unused to it. The more I know God, and my neighbor, in the light of God, the more God is revealed, and my neighbor, also, as blessedly unknown.

...Another receives me and I receive the other. And every other person whom I receive is a wound by which I lose my life, and by which I find it. Christianity is the religion of faces.

Christianity means that God, for us, has become a face and reveals the other as a face. Macarius the Great says that a spiritual person becomes all face, and his face all expression....

There is nothing more thrilling than interplanetary travel, soon perhaps intergalactic travel. We must explore our prison. But it is a prison without limits. For us the only way out is a face...The explorer is greater than what he explores, the expression on his face is all that saves us from nothingness. And if his expression should harden, if his face should close, we know that secretly there is an expression that is always welcoming, that the face of Christ is never closed.

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The training of our consciousness enables us to recover an immediacy of response to anybody's face, however spoilt, haggard, or careworn, and precisely because it is such. God loves this person here and now, in their very ordinariness, their cowardice, their loneliness, their sin...For nearly always the image is disfigured by the powers of evil; on this new battlefield we must henceforth fight, armed with discernment, love and prayer.

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...In Christ my death is no longer ahead of me but behind me, I can set myself to live and love. Sin...is regression more than transgression...

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If we did not know that Christ had shed his blood on the cross and uttered his cry of unimaginable despair, we should be crushed beyond recall. Everyone who relinquishes the security of a sleepwalking existence is sooner or later mortally wounded by the world's suffering. But because God became man and took this suffering on himself, the way of vulnerability and death becomes for us resurrection.

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