From his very first appearance on the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica, to his last years confined mostly to a wheelchair, Pope Francis always seemed one step ahead of the rest of us. Indeed, his whole life embodied the surprise of the Gospel.

If I had to try to sum up Pope Francis’s ministry (throughout his life, not just as Pope), I would do so with one word: encounter. Whether advocating for the poor and migrants, working to instill the Church with synodality, or traveling to places no one would expect a pope to visit, the concept of encounter runs through it all.

He prioritized encounter because it is God’s style. God, by humbling himself and coming close to humans in the person of Jesus, modeled and embodied encounter. And so, the quotation from Francis that best sums up his life, comes from his exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, published mere months after the start of his Petrine ministry:

“The Gospel tells us constantly to run the risk of a face-to-face encounter with others, with their physical presence which challenges us, with their pain and their pleas, with their joy which infect us in our close and continuous interaction. True faith in the incarnate Son of God is inseparable from self-giving, from membership in the community, from service, from reconciliation with others. The Son of God, by becoming flesh, summoned us to the revolution of tenderness” (EG 88).

This says it all—not only about Pope Francis’s life and ministry, but about what should be the animating principle of every Christian life.