There are two striking touch points that Pope St. John Paul II includes in this excerpt which I find comforting: encounter and the heart. Pope Francis has been describing a "culture of encounter" since the beginning of his papacy in 2013—the idea that we are changed by engaging our Faith in the world and the people in it. He says, “Whenever we encounter another person in love, we discover something new about God.â€
We know this to be true in our own experience, whether we can relate to these discoveries in terms of our best friends, or those whose opinions and perspectives challenge us most deeply.
If we’re lucky, these attributes can be true of the same people...