Welcoming All as Christ

It’s orientation week at the university, when new students are pouring over the sidewalks and across the quad, wearing their favourite outfits and looking either ecstatic or terrified. I imagine that we are a large monastery like the ones in the European Middle Ages, and the professed monks and nuns are all wearing yellow shirts, pointing the eager new novices in the direction of their profession classes. Some are completely sure of their vocation, having mapped out a solid eight year plan, while others are only here as postulants, not sure if university life is really for them.

As I point a young man in the direction of the engineering building, I think about my own vocation in this place. Tonight I’m getting a new tattoo which reads, “Welcome All as Christ,” a line from the Rule of St. Benedict. Although Benedict’s monastic rule seems harsh to modern readers, during the seventh century he was considered unusually kind and sensitive, teaching that every person should be welcomed into the community in the same way that Jesus would be. A striking feature of the Benedictine way of life was the insistence that all members of the community, including the very young, the lower class, and the uneducated, were to be included in group discussion and treated with respect.

When someone asks about my new tattoo, I explain that it means that we should look for God in everyone. That’s something almost anyone can understand. The implications of such an idea are much more difficult to wrap our minds around, however. University life, very often, does not teach us to look for God in everyone. We are taught to compete for grades, for fashion, for friends, and for jobs. This week already I have seen too many young women flaunting their bodies and young men being bullied because someone in their life has been unable to see Jesus in him or her.

Receiving a person as Christ is not simply a matter of “tolerance” or “human rights”; it goes far beyond such legal claims. When I see Jesus in the eyes of another, I welcome him warmly into my home; I sit with her when she’s crying; I go out of my way to treat her like she matters. Because if she matters to God, she matters to me. In St. Benedict's day, the people who were hardest to welcome were obvious: beggars, lepers, foreigners. I see many of these people on campus today too. What does it mean to look for the face of Jesus in them?

The problem, of course, is that despite my best intentions I am particularly bad at keeping Benedict’s rule of welcome. I am liable to see only a broken, sinful person sitting in front of me and not the face of Jesus. So as you and I launch into our respective vocations at the university this year, we do well to remember that it is only Jesus that is really able to see the image of God in everyone. Yet as we apprentice with Jesus this year, we will slowly learn to welcome the way he does. J