January 29, 2010
Taking the Time to Make a Difference
Seeing a neighbor, through the eyes of a child
BY PAUL R. LEINGANG
(Listen to Paul read this column | Weekly podcast)
In a place far away, at a time long, long ago, I made a discovery. And when I announced what I had discovered, nobody laughed. But they could have.
Some childhood memories make you smile. Some can be embarassing (like wondering what that rooster and chicken were doing). Some merely reflect the reality of what it means to be child-like.
My parents had taken us to a movie — I don’t remember what it was or who was in it. I was young enough, though, now that I think about it, that I was not ready to distinguish what was reality and what was happening on that big screen in a dark theatre.
I guess I could easily say, with St. Paul, “When I was a child, I used to talk as a child, think as a child, reason as a child.” I am not so sure that I can claim with him, that “when I became a man, I put aside childish things.”
My story is pretty simple. A few days after seeing the movie in the theatre, I recall seeing some people walking along our main street (which, of course, was called “Main Street”), probably some of the parishioners leaving church after Sunday Mass.
I looked up at their faces and their shapes, the way they walked and the way they looked at each other — and I announced to my parents that they were some of the people who had been in the movie we had last seen.
Nobody laughed, but I recall a gentle suggestion came from my mother that maybe I might have been mistaken. The people on the street were real, our neighbors. The people in the movie were people in a movie; they just seemed to be real.
* * *
Today, in a place and a time after Avatar, a well-crafted movie can still allow even grown-ups to suspend belief, to leave reality and to enter into a world that exists only in the mind. Or in a 3-D theatre.
Today, in many ways, my childish perceptions are not so different than what an audience perceives to be “the news” — and therefore “real” — and what may be in fact an artful presentation of visual effects.
Is there such a thing as truth? Are those real people on television news? In the reports from Haiti, following the horrific earthquake, are those real people crying, digging through the rubble, standing dazed alongside the road?
Did you see the video of the highway and roadside bouncing up and down? Did you see the buildings crumble? That was amazing television. What else is on?
* * *
Perhaps now is the time to reflect on why Jesus held up a child as an example. “Amen, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven,” he said.
“Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.’”
Perhaps now is the time to look at the faces of the people in the news, and their shapes, and the way they walk and how they look at each other — and to say, “These people on televison news and on the front page of our newspapers, these are people from my home town. They are real, and they are my neighbors.”
I believe Jesus would say, that whoever receives such a child with such a childish discovery, “receives me.”
Take the time to recognize your neighbor — the ones who mourn and need comfort, the ones who are in the hospital and need your visit, the ones who are imprisoned by poverty and prejudice and need your recognition.
Don’t turn to another channel until you turn to look at each other, and know the reality, the truth that we are all children of the same father.
To insist on this reality, to see across borders and race and culture, to see each other as part of the same family, is to risk making a discovery that could bring laughter from a hardened society. It is worth the risk to make a difference.
Comments are welcome at office@cfm.org or the Christian Family Movement, P.O. Box 925, Evansvsille, IN 47706-0925