Seeing the Beloved in Every Face

by Lori Wilson

There are moments when it is easy to see the goodness in another person, when their kindness is evident, when their warmth reaches across a room, when love seems to simply radiate from them. And then there are other moments. Moments when someone's actions feel like the opposite of love, when everything in me wants to draw a line, to step back, to quietly place them in a category of other.

I know that pull. Maybe you do too.

It is a very human response—this desire to feel more loving, more aware, more right. But here is what I've been sitting with lately: that sense of superiority is not love either. It's just a more comfortable distance from it.

Jesus calls us to something harder and more beautiful than tolerance. In the Sermon on the Mount, he says, "You have heard that it was said, 'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.' But I say to you, do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also" (Matthew 5:38-39).

I used to read this as simply taking it—absorbing the blow, saying nothing, enduring. But many Scripture scholars, including Walter Wink in his work on nonviolent resistance, suggest something more provocative is happening here. In first-century Palestinian culture, a strike on the right cheek was typically a backhanded slap—a gesture of contempt meant to shame and diminish. To turn the other cheek was not passive surrender. It was a deliberate act that said: You cannot make me less than I am. It disrupted the dynamic. It invited the other person to pause, to reckon, to see differently.

Turning the other cheek, then, may be less about absorbing harm and more about refusing to be reduced by it—and gently, unexpectedly, inviting something new.

This takes a kind of grounded love. The love Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 13—patient, not arrogant, not insisting on its own way—is not a love that goes silent. It is a love that stays present without needing to dominate.

And Jesus modeled this consistently. He ate with tax collectors. He spoke with Samaritan women. He touched lepers. He included everyone—not because their actions were always loving, but because he saw through to something deeper: the beloved child of God that each person carried within them, whether they knew it or not.

Seeing that belovedness in someone whose actions feel harmful or unkind is, frankly, one of the hardest invitations of the spiritual life. It does not mean excusing harm. It does not mean silence. But it does mean something shifts in us when we are able to speak our truth from love rather than from a sense of superiority—when we can engage with curiosity rather than contempt, and hold our ground without hardening our hearts.

St. Madeleine Sophie Barat, the 19th-century French mystic and founder of the Society of the Sacred Heart, offered this simple guide: "Be humble, be simple, and bring joy to others." I keep returning to these words. For me, they are an invitation to love quietly—to create space for God to move in me, in the other, in our world—without needing the last word or the moral high ground.

Suffering is real. Harshness is real. And joy can also be real, living right alongside all of it. I want to be someone who draws the joy out—who, like Jesus, keeps the welcome wide, the presence warm, and the love visible even when it costs something.

That is the life I am choosing to be about.

For Reflection

• Is there someone in your life right now who is difficult to hold with love? What happens in you when you try to see them as a beloved child of God—not excusing their actions, but looking through to something deeper?

• When you consider "turning the other cheek," does it feel like surrender, or might it carry a different kind of strength? What would it look like in your own life to disrupt a difficult dynamic with an unexpected gesture of dignity?

• Where in your day might you be a carrier of joy—not as performance, but as quiet, deliberate love?

A Closing Prayer

Gracious God, you see each of us—fully, tenderly, without exception—as your beloved. Help me to see that way. When I am tempted toward contempt or superiority, turn me gently back. Teach me to speak truth from a place of love, to stay present without hardening, to turn the other cheek not in defeat, but in quiet, grounded dignity. May I carry joy as an act of resistance and an act of grace. May I see your face in every face I meet. Amen.