Most of us are fine with the idea of caring for the poor in the abstract, as an act of charity done from a distance. We're okay with writing checks, as long as we don't actually have to see or touch those who benefit from them. That's certainly better than ignoring the poor (as far too many do), but it doesn't have the transformative power that personal contact does.

When we conquer our fear of the other -- of their difference, of their dirt, of the hardness of their lives, of the way their very presence convicts us of complicity in a materialistic world -- we enter into deeper human solidarity. We encounter Christ as he can be encountered in no other way. More and more, I'm convinced that there is no other path to true metanoia.