Working with people who have Alzheimer’s, I hear an incredible array of comments, usually about their disease and the difficulties that arise as a result. This last week I heard something that was so profound that I haven’t been able to shake it. In fact, it has in a sense, shaken me.

I was in a group with people who have a diagnosis of some form of dementia. The purpose of the group is to encourage them and help them to live as well as possible for as long as possible. As the group discussed different aspects of the disease and how it affected their daily lives, one of the individuals, I’ll call him Sam, said, “I see people’s ness”. Of course we weren’t clear what he meant, so I asked Sam to continue. He explained that he has learned to see the essence of people, not just the surface appearance. He intuitively sees people on a deeper level, for who they are, not just who they appear to be. This is, Sam explained, a result of having the disease himself and his intentional meditation practice.

I have spent a great deal of time this week thinking about the “’ness” of people. Most obvious is the superficial-ness. That is pretty common in our culture. Life tends to be about appearances. Bleh.

There’s the broken-ness. Everyone is. We just tend to do a great job of hiding it, until we can’t anymore. Sometimes we let others who are closest to us see it, or even experience it. There’s the lonely-ness. So common. Life’s struggles cause us to create a protective cocoon around ourselves. We become more and more isolated as individuals.

But not all “’Ness-es” are negative. There’s happi-ness and joyful-ness and glad-ness and living everyday in full-ness! These come not in spite of our struggles, but even because of them. I believe that Sam was not only looking for those in others, but experiencing them himself.

I don’t know what Sam’s “faith tradition” is , but I believe he exemplifies what it means to be “Christ-like”. Too often I have thought that being a Christian meant going to church, being a good person, and trying to live a moral and ethical life. Maybe the Essence of the Christ life is something much simpler: seeing others—and ourselves—for who we really are. That is, after all, what Jesus did. He didn’t look AT people, He looked INTO them! Those who were most polished on the outside were the ones who were the most pathetic on the inside. On the other hand, those who didn’t appear to be much at all were the very ones He valued most!

I remember one time I was walking down a street and a homeless man approached me. He asked me for money. I honestly told him I didn’t have any. But we did have a short conversation, at the end of which he said, “Thank you for looking at me.”

Maybe he was saying in a slightly different way what Sam was. “Thank you for seeing my ‘”ness”. Not homeless-ness, or helpless-ness, but human-ness. It’s a condition we all share. The challenge is to see it.