There is a sense of great freedom in understanding that one does not represent anything and anyone else except oneself. One can easily be crushed by the sense of responsibility that comes from feeling that we stand for anything else except for who we are. When you go through life thinking you represent anything else except yourself, when you allow the world around you to reduce you to a symbol rather than the person God created you to be – that can have devastating spiritual effects.
We are human beings, made of flesh and bones, not symbols of anything else, be that a symbol of our family, of our job, our gender, our race, or even of our faith. We are real human beings. We have real, personal feelings. At some point in our lives, each of us has experienced both the pain of sin and the joy of Christ’s forgiveness. We are only who we are, each of us representing nothing and no-one else except ourselves and our personal story of salvation.
I am not an institution. I am not a system of believes. I cannot be reduced to my gender, my age and my race. Both Peter and Judas were men. Both men crucified with Christ were thieves. The Mother of God and Eve were both women. Nothing, no logical criterion, no external sign can express our personhood, who we are in our personal relation to our Creator.
I travel constantly these months, and the temptation to reduce people to categories is always present. The opposite is valid, too – many people meet me during these travels, and I also sense their temptation to reduce me to my faith, because that makes it easier for them to interact with me. As a rule, it is easier to interact with ‘categories’ of people, with the generalities (that is, the prejudices and already formed opinions) concerning a category, than it is to risk meeting a real human being.
I pray both myself and the people I meet will find the courage to take this risk. I pray to remain simple and focused on just being myself. I pray to simply witness to nothing else except my personal experience. I pray we all remain open to love each other, open to enter a real relationship with our true selves – as human beings, as persons created in the image of God; not as impersonal categories, not as symbols of anything or anyone else.
Small explosions of life. Small miracles. This is what meeting each other should be like. The image of God meeting the image of God: a life-giving sacrament.