There are no invisible people to God. All are always known and always loved. 

However, to a fallen world peopled with poor stewards, anyone we do not wish to love, we render invisible. We deny their reality. We deny their suffering. We deny their suffering to be our problem. Alternatively, we decide they deserve their pain and define their suffering as a result of their failures, poor decisions and upbringing. We define them as thems or its.

The list of pejoratives and the reasons are legion. For all the ways to suffer and be ignored exist in and throughout all of time, we have names that let us, in our sinful state, place such souls into a box that allows us to ignore their cry. However, God hears both their pain and our silence. 

Those here, who hear, must act, or we will hear, “I do not know you” when we seek God's presence at the end of all things. To the extent we pretended we could do nothing and thus did nothing, we are culpable to our Lord. For whatever we do to the least of our brothers, we do unto him. 

Lest we despair, we know whenever we seek to help the suffering, when we say Yes to whomever God has placed before us to serve, we allow Christ to enter more deeply into our hearts. God longs for us to let him in. When we do, we allow Christ to reveal himself to the wounded world. Our world seeks to distance us from having to connect with others, or to sanitize the sanctification that would otherwise take greater hold, by giving us programs, taxes and forms that let us give without feeling, support without seeing, and feel virtuous without sacrifice. We pay taxes, and maybe toss a few dollars in the special collections, but none of it requires our hands to get dirty, or an element of time that is exclusive to the reality of living out the acts of mercy we’re all called to do. 

God does not ask us merely to tolerate, but to love. God does not ask us merely to render unto Caesar, but to give alms in secret. God does not ask us merely to care for our children, for even tax collectors do as much. 

God calls us to love as God loves, which means all in, to the point of pouring ourselves out for others, letting ourselves be used to feed and clothe and heal others. We are to be part of the reparations for all the damage done by sin to the Body of Christ, to our brothers and sisters in Christ. 

It will not be finished until the last soul willing to be saved is saved. It will not be finished until all who seek the Lord make their own fiat, laying down their lives for others from that point forward. 

Heaven is, above all, communion with Christ, living in Communion with the God who is love. This includes everything God loves.

As Mother Theresa said, “Find your own Calcutta. Find the sick, the suffering, and the lonely, right where you are.” 

We who long for that Heaven here, in our marriages, our families, our classrooms, our neighborhoods, our parish, our workplaces, need only begin to cooperate with God’s grace by serving those before us, and more will be put before us. The people we’ve been given, long to be seen, to be known, and to know their joys, sufferings and stories matter. The communion intended, broken by the fall and all the falls since can begin to be restored, by one soul, one service at a time. Every one of us has a role in helping to reveal more of those the world has rendered invisible. Every one of us has a vocation to say yes to yoking our soul to the happiness of another — whether through marriage, holy orders, adoption or service to those the world does not yet see. It is required, if we would build up treasure in Heaven, that we use all our gifts and time here to reveal to the world how necessary, how important, how loved beyond all measure, each person we serve is. 

It involves dying a little more to one’s self every day, and it is a sacrifice — but all love is a sacrifice. So let us get to the business of dying to ourselves today, so that the world may be more full of Christ’s life.