A few years ago, I spent a week in a scenic hill station with some fellow students and colleagues. One evening, after a picnic, my friends wanted to refill their supply of spirits. The place was in a “dry” state, but there were shops for those who knew where to look. We asked Gautam, our driver, to take us to a liquor store. He appeared upset and saddened by our request. I learned later that he had become a Christian just five years earlier. One of the first things he did after coming to Christ was to stop drinking alcohol. Since our thirst could not be satisfied by any other means, we kept asking. Finally, we found a shop, and he took us there before dropping us off at our destination.
On our way back to our lodging after that brief stop, Gautam casually asked who we were and what had brought us there. One of my companions answered for all of us without hesitation. Preferring to keep our identities anonymous, he told Gautam that we were software engineers working for Microsoft in Bangalore.
We spent quite a bit of time later that evening comforting ourselves by telling each other it was not a serious matter. We were tourists. He was a taxi driver. We did not owe him anything. We would never see him again. He would not know who we were. There was no risk of a scandal.
I keep thinking about those few hours that evening, especially the argument that since we would never see him again, our interactions with this ordinary stranger would be inconsequential. But is it true that we will never see him again? Was he just an expendable taxi driver? Are we, human beings, really strangers to each other?
C. S. Lewis, in The Weight of Glory, states that there are no ordinary people. He writes:
It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbour. The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbour’s glory should be laid on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken. It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. (C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory)
This is one of the splendors of the Christian Faith—the clarity it sheds on the enigma of human existence. One of the keys it offers for unlocking that mystery is its sober yet grounded view of human history as bidirectional. The French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain (1882–1973) wrote:
Truth to tell, history is bicephalous [two-headed]. The head of all the good folk leads his party to the place where God will be all in all; the head of all the wicked leads his party to the place where the creature will be all things to itself. When the members of these two parties, who at every instant are intermingled, shall have finally separated, history itself will be at an end. (Jacques Maritain, Freedom in the Modern World)
The simultaneous development and conflict of the two supreme cities within time—the City of God and the earthly city—lie at the very heart of Christian revelation. This drama is central to the unfolding of salvation history and holds the key to the enigma of human destiny, while avoiding, of course, the pitfalls of the extreme dualistic philosophical tendencies. Living as we do shoulder to shoulder in “a society of possible gods and goddesses,” and in light of the overwhelming weight of possibilities and outcomes this implies, we should then conduct all our dealings with one another—all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics—with the awe and the circumspection proper to them. Because, again, as C. S. Lewis writes: “There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. […] It is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendours” (The Weight of Glory).
There are no one-off encounters in this life. In every ordinary encounter, we are already participating in this bicephalous drama. We are either helping our neighbor (and ourselves) toward the city where God will be all in all, or toward the city where the creature is all things to itself. There is no neutral ground. The taxi ride, the request, the little white lie—all of it belonged to one city or the other. Gautam was much more than a mere driver we hired to take us here and there. By asking him to facilitate what he had renounced for the sake of Christ, and by hiding our identity from him, instead of seizing those fleeting moments to fan into flame the faith he had just discovered, we momentarily acted on behalf of the city that treats immortal persons as disposable means rather than ends in themselves. Our immediate needs had made us insensitive to the delicate situation of a brother in the Faith.
In The Brothers Karamazov, the elder Zosima makes a remarkable statement: “Each of us is guilty before everyone, for everyone and everything, and I more than the others.” Our lives are knit together far more closely than we can imagine. Every little interaction or conversation shapes another person’s life, who in turn shapes someone else’s. Families, friendships, and even entire societies are built this way. They grow through countless ordinary encounters that seem insignificant in the moment but continue echoing long afterwards. Thus, even the smallest act of love or simple encouragement can make a vast difference. A person’s life can take a completely different course because, even if only for a brief moment, someone chose to care about them. Zosima taught that every life touches countless others. Every action leaves the world a little richer or a little poorer than it was before.
Jesus Himself insists on the eternal weight of our ordinary actions. “Whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple—truly I tell you, he will by no means lose his reward” (Mt. 10:42). Of the woman who anointed Him, He said that her gesture of kindness would be proclaimed wherever the Gospel is preached (Mk. 14:9). Nothing given or withheld is forgotten. Jacques Maritain once observed that the philosopher cannot console himself for the irreparable loss of the least fleeting reality—a face, a gesture of the hand, an act of free will, or a musical harmony in which something of love or beauty passes. He believes that nothing of all this passes away, because these things are preserved in the memory of the angels, and that the angels will never cease to recount among themselves the history of our poor world (Jacques Maritain, Science and Wisdom, trans. Bernard Wall; see also 1 Peter 1:12).
The challenge Christ sets before us is therefore clear: to so transform our lives that evil diminishes and good prevails. Our ordinary moments—taxi rides, casual requests, quick answers—become places where God is either revealed or obscured, where eternal memories are created. The challenge is to show what the Dominican biblical scholar Adrian Schenker has called “infinite respect for the other person,” never harming God’s initiative, what God might be doing or wanting to do in them. We are there not to get in the way (Adrian Schenker, interview in Dominican Ashram 7, no. 2 [2025]). The challenge is to become men and women who recognize the faint flame but will not quench it, or the shaking reed but will not break it (see Matthew 12:20).
I do not know what lasting impression Gautam took away from meeting these Microsoft employees from Bangalore. I only know what it has left in me: a deeper awareness that there are no “fleeting” encounters with eternal beings. We are already living our immortality, right now, in every meeting. The only question is which of the two cities we are helping to build, one ordinary encounter at a time.
Photo by Lexi Anderson on Unsplash
