This Noble Quality Makes You Unforgettable: Lessons From a Modern Day Prince

I'll never forget meeting my first real prince.

I was a twenty year old college student visiting a school in the tiny Catholic European principality of Liechtenstein. One day a prince of that country, who was a sponsor of the school, visited for a meeting. I was asked to deliver his lunch. There was no fuss. Just slip into the meeting quietly, hand it over, exit.

But the prince greeted me and struck up a conversation. He politely asked me about where I was from, about my family, and what I was studying in Europe. After two minutes, I left thinking, Wait until I tell my friends! 

A few months later, I returned there to take classes over the summer. As I had successfully failed to trip and spill the prince's lunch, I was asked to serve afternoon tea to a party of diplomats meeting on the terrace. The prince was there.

He greeted me genially and asked how I was doing. Then he asked how my parents were and effortlessly mentioned every single other detail I had happened to drop at our first meeting. (No, he didn't want a date. He was a happily married Christian gentleman and way older.)

This man was the real deal

This time I left our two minute meeting, thinking, This man is a prince. A real prince. Most people just pretend to pay attention when someone catalogs the details of their boring, bourgeois life. He had really listened. It had a strange effect on me. Here I was—a hick—and yet he had treated me as if I possessed incredible dignity. I wanted to live up to that dignity.

I've never forgotten him.

Think about it for a moment. Have you ever met anyone like that? How many? In my experience, such souls are very rare.

A few years after meeting the prince, I saw that same quality in Dr. Alice von Hildebrand.

We had met briefly before. It had meant a lot to me but I didn't expect her to remember. She did. Though there were people swarming all around her, she gave me a few minutes of her full attention, and brought up details of our previous meeting. I thought, I hardly know her but she acts as if she's delighted to see me. Again, I was aware of a feeling of worthiness and unworthiness.

It is as if the person sees past all the superficial constructs you put up to either express or hide your true self. They see the core of you, as someone God created and loved and redeemed. They listen to you as if the shallow expressions of your personality are signs of something profound.

Who does that?

Those who knew Mother Teresa say she did it. I recently did a series of interviews in honor of her canonization. What struck me most was that her friends, who knew her quite apart from one another, all said the same thing.

"I felt at that moment that I was the most important person in the world to her and that should Jesus walk in at that moment of our encounter, He would not have received a greater attentiveness."

-Father Michael Champagne, CJC

"Everyone was Jesus to her. Everyone deeply mattered." -Donna-Marie Cooper O'Boyle

Once somebody gives you the gift of treating to you that way, it stays with you. Such a gaze calls honor forth from you. You try to be worthy.

You can't fake it 'til you make it

To begin with, you know you need to try to practice it yourself. But how? You can't exactly take a course in it—though plenty of courses exist that teach you how to fake it.

There is only one way to obtain it, and that is by really caring. You have to see everyone whom you personally encounter as sent by God. This one encounter with you might be the moment when they see how much God really cares about them, that they have this immeasurable dignity, and that they are called to live up to that dignity.

Do this, and an encounter with you will never be forgotten.