The Greater Good

In an individualist culture, perhaps more than ever, we need to learn from the lesson placed before us by Christ the King. We are our brothers and our sisters’ keepers. ’We live in each other’s shadow’, as one Irish saying puts it. While independence is all fine and well, inter-dependence is the greater good – a kind heart and open hand. The plight of war refugees has been well documented, but there were and are disquieting voices raising opposition. The Irish Rune on hospitality says:

We saw a stranger yesterday.
We put food in the eating place,
Drink in the drinking place,
Music in the listening place.
And with the sacred name of the triune God
We were blessed, and our house,
Our cattle and our dear ones.
As the lark says in her song:
Often, often, often goes the Christ
In the stranger’s guise.

It is not uniquely Irish, of course, for many cultures instinctively know that we need to honour the heart of the stranger; we need to recognise how much like us the person is; we need to remember the humanity of each and every person. Welcoming the stranger blesses us as well as it aids the recipient of our hospitality.

In God’s family, there are no strangers, only kin or clan, as we might say. Kinship is God’s dream come true. It’s about imagining a circle of compassion and then imagining no one standing outside that circle. For whatever you do with love has eternal value.

Today Christ the King says to us, ‘What you do for others, you do for me’.

Tom Cox, The Sacred Heart Messenger, November 2023