Today’s Life-Line is:

Let me be clear about this final point, which hinges on faith’s grasp of a gratuitous, merciful, healing presence even amid the storms of life. For Christians of every color, solidarity with the stranger and the option of the poor spring not from some idealized notion of the poor, of their innocence, worthiness, or simplicity relative to us; still less does solidarity issue from our own heroic capacity to love, to “keep on keepin’ on,” which we find, after all, isn’t there. Solidarity depends on our having already been seen, touched, and realized by love, lifted up again by mercy. For Christians, it is possible to love the other, the stranger, even those at the furthest margins of society whose very existence terrifies us, because God “first loved us” (I John 4:19).

“Nothing is more practical,” writes Pedro Arrupe, “than finding God, that is, than falling in love in a quite absolute, final way. What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything.” I have suggested that in a world full of crosses, our task is not to run from them, seeking security only for ourselves, our own kind, and our children. Our task is to pray for the grace to sit beneath the crosses, to let our hearts be broken, our imaginations be stirred, and our feet be moved to action.

~ Christopher Pramuk, Hope Sings, So Beautiful: Graced Encounters Across The Color Line