Inside the human circle as it stands there are the tasks of life, love and work and communal life. Outside it there are the boundary situations that define the human condition, circumstance and conflict and guilt and suffering and death, outside it because these situations drive human beings into deep solitude. When the loneliness that appears in each of these situations becomes love...,then it may be possible for the human circle to expand until it includes them. It may be possible for human beings to meet in circumstance and conflict and guilt and suffering and death. "I in them, and thou in me" describes the place where they may meet, the place of the Son, a locus of knowing and being known, of loving and being loved. - John Dunne, The Reasons of the Heart.
What would it be to meet where we are most alone? An image of such a meeting would be that of meeting a "child of God," an afflicted person who lives outside the human circle. Dostoevsky seems to describe such a meeting in The Idiot. He set out there to depict a good man, but with the consciousness of the Gospel, "one there is who is good," and so he imaged the good man as an idiot, a "child of God." Prince Myshkin, the idiot of his story, meets others where they are most alone-- in their circumstance, their conflict, their guilt, their suffering, their dying. - John Dunne, The Reasons of the Heart.