I was reading a retreat talk of Charles Cardinal Journet’s on the Our Father. In it he says,

Our Father, the same Father for all: that’s an inter-communion. As soon as we turn towards him, love him, we love what he loves, all the others, even our enemies. But as coming back down. It’s not a matter of turning towards others immediately; if we did that, we’d put ourselves into a game of sympathies and antipathies, comprehensions and incomprehensions.

It’s not on any exclusively natural plane or human-to-human plane that we see each other as sisters and brothers and that we see Jesus in our neighbours. It’s not because we see people as a family immediately. It’s purely and simply because, either consciously or unconsciously, we taste of God and we see him vaguely with the knowledge of love of God our Father, and because of this, when our eyes come back down to earth, they see our neighbours as sisters and brothers and they see Jesus in our neighbours.

To get the best view, we don’t look straight across at our neighbour. At least not as far as the spirit is concerned. We look up to God, and that flows straight back down to our neighbour.

It’s like a two-step movement: two steps that might happen so fast that we don’t notice it, but two real steps nonetheless. We might never come to know the difference between the steps, and we might love all the same or all the more. However, if we ever wanted to consciously pursue loving each other as sisters and brothers, this is where we might start: Our Father…

^^