Lillie Romeiser ’16 M.Div.

My first intuition was to escape the conversation, if you even could call it that. I was standing before a man named Hazel whose disability made the barrage of words flowing from his mouth indecipherable.

Hazel was a “Friend of the Farm,” one of the many guests who came for dinner each week at Nazareth Farm, where I was spending one month of my summer break. The Farm is a Catholic community dedicated to home repair for the rural poor of West Virginia. Perhaps at some point in the past, the Farm had worked on this man’s home, fixing a leaky roof or building a ramp.

I had decent home repair skills (or at least a strong work ethic!) to contribute to the Farm’s mission. What I didn’t have was the ability—or perhaps more truthfully, the patience—to decode Hazel’s seemingly endless stream of words that evening. Little did I know that this encounter would change my vision forever. 

As time passed and the list of tasks I’d rather be accomplishing slowly drifted from my mind, I stopped drowning in Hazel’s words and began drinking in his very person. His dark blue jeans and worn, soon-to-be-fraying button-down flannel shirt belied the heat in this humid, middle-of-nowhere West Virginia “holler.”

His weathered hands, however, spoke the truth about his life—one of labor as he worked his way through the perpetual poverty that surrounded and entrenched him. And then there was his face, similarly worn and weathered, revealing his age—perhaps mid-60s—and the sun under which he had labored for so many years.

The image of the man standing in front of me was not novel to me—his clothing, his hands, his face, even his litany of indistinguishable words. No, I was accustomed to his poverty and his disability, two things I had come to love throughout my journey of faith. Yet the deeper I looked, the more startled I was to find something, or rather someone completely new.

It happened in Hazel’s eyes, which were a tantalizing hue befitting his name—soft yet deeply striking. As his words rushed past my ears, his eyes slowed to a dead stop on mine and, finally, mine on his. And there before me, more clearly than ever before in my life, I saw him, Hazel, and him, the Christ.

In seeing Hazel, I saw Jesus seeing me.

This encounter with Jesus was one of the most subtle and yet powerful moments of my life. As befits the beauty and creativity of our Lord, the eyes of my heart were opened through another set of eyes. Hazel’s eyes allowed me to see Jesus Christ looking at me with an attention, an intimacy, and a love I had so often overlooked, usually too rushed to truly appreciate.

Jesus’ words in Matthew 25—”When you do this to the least of your brothers and sisters, you do it to me”—came alive that day, not in my acts of service with the Farm but in the person before me. Hazel’s poverty and disability gave astonishing evidence of Jesus—my poor, disabled Lord. And even more miraculously, I finally could see my Lord, as Hazel had ceased to be the mere recipient of my service and instead became the giver of a love that knows no poverty, no disability.

The image of Hazel and his eyes remains etched in my memory as that moment of grace-filled conversion when I experienced the Lord anew. Hazel’s eyes provided me with a new way of seeing—a new vision of the world, of those I meet, and of myself. I learned to see Jesus before me and, perhaps even more importantly, to be seen by Jesus with the simple love that the Lord has for each of us.