I went to work today asking God to help me treat each person as though they were unique, precious, and beautiful.
It did make a difference. Somehow it created space between me and the ever-growing ‘to do’ list. This might become my Lenten fast. With God’s’ help (obviously) I’m going to try to have an attitude of reverence towards every person I encounter.
You might ask, ‘As a Christian and a priest, shouldn’t you be doing that already?’
The answer is obvious. But somehow I don’t. Parker Palmer, in his book ‘To know as we are known’, (pp 23 & 24) describes how our search for objective knowledge has led us to see the world in terms of ‘objects’, stuff that is ‘opposite us’, ‘opposed to us’. 
Eventually we come to ‘know’ our fellow human beings in that way… not as created, beloved others formed in the image of God, but as objects that may or may not be useful to us in having some control over our lives.
Am I caught up in this tendency to see others like this? I am. But today was a good day. I bring out of today a little album of memories consisting of moments when I intentionally allowed beloved human beings into the space between me and the background shrill of my growing workload.
Palmer says the only way we can legitimately ‘know’ anything is to know as God knows. And that is to know in a personal way, face-to-face. Through Jesus becoming human we’re invited into a loving knowing. God knows us and that knowing is infused with love. As Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 13, imagining us returning God’s gaze, ‘Now we are seeing a dim reflection in a mirror; but then we shall be seeing face to face. The knowledge I have now is imperfect, but then I shall know as fully as I am known.’
