June 11, 2010
Taking the Time to Make a Difference
Looking into the face of another
BY PAUL R. LEINGANG
(Listen to Paul read this column | Weekly podcast)
I don’t know how to begin this story.
My wife and I went to a convention of Catholic media people in New Orleans. We had some significant presentations. We had good food and heard great music.
But among the strongest memories of the trip was what we experienced on a Saturday morning at a widow’s home in an area of the city still working its way back from Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
After several days of meeting with archbishops and bishops, media consultants and other professionals, colleagues with common concerns, and some old friends, we spent Saturday morning scrubbing the siding of a house in the Gentilly neighborhood of New Orleans.
During the days of the convention, I learned a lot about developments in Catholic newspapers and other media, about the role of Catholic media in the mission of the Church, and about some technical possibilities for our own online edition.
On the morning after the convention, on the porch of a home that had been under water five year ago, I met an elderly woman who took the time to tell us how she survived the hurricane and its aftermath.
There was no powerpoint display to illustrate her story. No aerial photography to locate her home in relationship to the Superdome or the Convention Center, no graphic display of flood statistics.
What we experienced was simply one human story, spoken to a small group of listeners. Our group included lifelong residents of the area who had experiences of their own, and others among us who had followed the news reports from afar.
In a few hours on a Saturday morning, the widow’s story brought us into a kind of communion — the members of the work crew united with the woman whose house we were preparing for a new painting.
What happened next, after hearing the story, was remarkable. What we did was work, hard work scrubbing the city’s grime from the siding so the new paint could adhere to a clean surface.
I climbed up and down a ladder to scrub the siding beneath the eaves. On the sidewalk below me, another worker scrubbed the siding above the foundation. We shared one bucket of soapy water as we moved in tandem from the back of the house to the front.
That’s a description of the tasks we did, but that’s not what we really did. What we really did was offer our time and our effort in service to an old woman. She wanted the house to be painted the same color as it was, she had told us earlier, because her late husband had picked out that color originally, and she wanted the same color again to remind her of him, and to honor him.
We heard her story and it brought us together. We responded with our actions and offered what we had to her, our simple gifts. We did what we did in memory of one who was loved.
Sounds more like liturgy than a Saturday work project.
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The challenge of wanting to do something is that we should first learn to look and to listen.
The urgency of doing a good deed, a charitable act, should never get ahead of the first requirement of Christian service — looking into the face of another before holding out a helping hand.
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The Christian Family Movement is guided by the simple process, one anyone can use: Observe, Judge and Act. It is a method that helps us to see clearly and examine objectively some situation in our society. Only then should we decide to apply Gospel principles, in simple terms, to ask ourselves what would Jesus do in this situation. And then, it is not only possible, but necessary, to take action.
Jesus is often described in the Gospels as looking around or looking at the people or looking upon a person in need. That’s how Jesus would begin to take action, and that is as well our calling, too, to make a difference.
Comments are welcome at office@cfm.org or the Christian Family Movement, P.O. Box 925, Evansvsille, IN 47706-0925