We shouldn't identify a person by his or her infirmity.

Monday, 10/26, 15

Jesus called the woman he cured a “Daughter of Abraham,” beyond that, all we know about her is that she was bent over for eighteen years.

It seems to be the ordinary thing for us with people whose infirmity radically alters their appearance. It makes me think of my high school day when four of my classmates had summer jobs at the Catholic cemetery. They often talked about a fellow worker whom they called old Sickle-Ass.

Working in a Catholic cemetery, Sickle Ass might have been a Catholic; but my classmates never spoke about his parish, his family, his speaking or singing voice. He was just Sickle Ass.

Do you catch yourself falling into similar cheap ways of summing up people? Are there people you identify only by their limp, or big nose, or poor complexion?

Isn’t each of us a treasure chest of an ancestry that struggled against great odds to raise children, to be true to God and country?

Shouldn’t we curb the impulses to judge by fleeting appearances while failing to perceive the interior worth of the people we come up against?