From “Why Christians Should Be Leftists” by Phil Christman
And then, as we read the Sermon – popcorn-style, like the good little Christian students we were, one person taking over from the last – something shifted. I won’t say that these other people were suddenly transfigured in my mind, that I suddenly saw the glory of God shining out of their faces. But a fundamentally other way of thinking about them suddenly appeared to me as an option; a wholly different map of the world abruptly unfolded in my mind, in which – this is as close as I can get to summarizing it – each of these people was a subject that a person could love, and was capable of giving love to others, and was therefore infinitely precious and infinitely interesting. That whole economy of losers and winners, with its implied scarcity of worthiness, had disappeared. Or not disappeared but receded: it didn’t seem inevitable or fully real anymore. It seemed like a lie that needed to be undone by the constant practice of universal, constant, and unvarying love.
What I needed, what I so feared I’d never have, was already there, in these other people. Another way of saying it: the way of life that the Sermon on the Mount suggested was available to me and to them, and if we chose it, no second spent with them or with any person could be anything other than a gift.