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About The Georgia bulletin (Atlanta) 1963-current | View Entire Issue (Dec. 14, 1989)
Who is my neighbor? Page 3 • Faith Today A troubled teen By Jane Wolford Hughes Catholic News Service he stood on the porch one day this summer close to the door. There was a tall, gray-haired man directly behind her and two children, a boy and a girl, holding her hand. The black woman’s broad smile indicated she expected to be welcomed like a relative returning from a trip. I waited until she said, “Mom, you haven’t changed very much except for the white in your hair.” Twenty some years disappeared and I blurted out, “Marilyn!” We embraced with laughter and tears and as she introduced her husband and grand children she kept saying, “I told you she would remember me.” Marilyn was 18 and just graduated from high school when she left us to go south for a job with some cousins in Georgia. She promised to call upon her arrival, which she did. We exchanged some letters until ours came back “address unknown.” Our efforts to find her were fruitless. Marilyn had been in a class taught by my Aunt Ruth. She was a 15-year-old whose life had been a joyless stretch of neglect and abuse. My aunt believed that this bright girl would be destroyed without some experience of trust and love. Ruth prevailed upon us to raise Marilyn with the six children we then had. It was a gamble. We took the risk, for Marilyn was not the first troubled girl who stayed with us a year or so. I look back now and wonder how we managed. I guess we accepted Marilyn as part of the strong song of love which kept on singing in our lives in spite of frayed nerves, frustration and her early resistance to just about everything from food to curfews. Our young family learned that love and trust are enormous mysteries to anyone who has almost never known them, so these mysteries must be seen as well as felt. We became more conscious of our relationships with each other. My husband and I saw that what we were trying to do carried a crucial message about our relationship with God, for whom race is no barrier. In our loving we were echoing God’s love for us. When we no longer heard from Marilyn we wondered what more we could have done in preparing her for a life on her own. Now she was back, pouring forth her history of a stable, caring family with a modest financial success and a dedication and involvement in church. “Just like you, Mom,” she proudly exclaimed. She and Tom, her husband, had converted to Catholicism when they were first married. They raised five children and had several grandchildren. Marilyn, Tom and two grand children were on a trip to northern Michigan from their home outside Atlanta. Marilyn convinced Tom to detour to return to where she had spent summers on Lake Huron. She must have locked a picture of our house and grounds in her memory for she took her family on a tour of every nook and cranny with special emphasis on the room which had been hers. She told stories to her grandchildren about her “brothers and sisters.” Marilyn wanted to know about my husband (“Dad”) and the grandparents, who are all dead now. She grew very quiet and then said with real convic tion, “I’m sure they are all in heaven, they were so good to me.” Marilyn lingered as the others reached the car. “You all were a puzzlement to me at first, but I caught on. You were with me all the way. I was important to someone for the first time. Whenever folks talk about home I tell about my three years with you. It’s really when my life began. The rest, before — well, it was just a mess. It’s almost forgotten.” Recently I asked a veteran religious educator how to teach Christian love. Her answer was, “You can’t teach it. You have to be it.” I think I understand. (Mrs. Hughes is a religious education consultant and a free-lance writer.) By Joe Michael Feist Catholic News Service ove one another as I have loved you, Jesus told his followers. A nice line, you might say, but totally impossible? Not only is the world filled with seemingly unlovable people, how can the love we have for anyone ever begin to equal the total, unconditional love God has for us? Yet the struggle to reach that level of all-encompassing love is what Christianity demands, said Patricia LeNoir, director of the office of wor ship for the Dallas Diocese. Mrs. LeNoir said she isn’t sure that loving one another as Jesus loves us “can be done consistently.” But there are moments, “when we cooperate enough with the Spirit inside us, that we can draw near to that kind of love.” For many parents, she said, the relationship with a child “often approaches the kind of unconditional love God has for us.” She told of an occasion with her An unconditional love infant daughter, Mary Teresa, last Lent. She was making a list of all that she had to do when the baby began to cry. “My first reaction was, Oh, no, not tonight,”’ Mrs. LeNoir said. When the baby continued to cry she went into the baby’s room and patted her for a while. Realizing that this approach was not going to work, she picked her up. “I could feel her begin to relax almost as soon as I held her close,” Mrs. LeNoir said, and soon she had fallen back to sleep. She said that her first instinct was to put the baby back to bed and begin to work. Instead, she chose “to sit in the silence, holding my child. .. A tired mother and a sleeping child in Christ’s embrace, both in need of the holding and the loving.” Mrs. LeNoir views that encounter not only as Lent at its finest — choosing to fast from “all that’s got to be done” — but also as a lovingly sacred moment. “When I finally put her back to bed, I left the room knowing that in Mary Teresa Jesus had come to me,” she said. A robber's victim By Father John Castelot Catholic News Service esus' contemporaries generally agreed that love of God was the greatest of all the commandments. Jesus made it clear that love found practical expression in love of one’s neighbor. The legal expert who questioned him agreed with his answer, in princi ple. But he had a problem: “Who is n?y neighbor?” (Luke 10:29). In the minds of most people, a neighbor was someone of the same ethnic and religious background. But in the famous Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 11:29-38), Jesus shocked his listeners by extending the relationship to include those who did not share these ties, even those who were considered implacable enemies. The hero of his story was a despised Samaritan. But Jesus went further, subtly changing the discussion to a con sideration of how to be a neighbor. He threw the question back at his inquirer: “Which of these three, in your opinion, was neighbor to the robbers’ victim?” The man could only answer, “The one who treated him with mercy.” =fn the process Jesus made the important point that love is not a Aggie Gladback, director of religious education at Holy Family Parish in Irving, Texas, said she experienced a similar moment in a most dissimilar circumstance. She recently joined a group of Holy Family parishioners involved in jail ministry on a visit to a Dallas County jail. “When we went in and I heard the doors clang shut, it was like cold chills just ran over me,” she recalled. “And then we went in and they opened another door and we stood • there” facing the prisoners. Suddenly, she said, her fear and apprehension disappeared. “As I looked in the eyes of the prisoners, not knowing whether they were child molesters or rapists or thieves, or what their crime was, it was as if ; ' that did not matter. For that moment, I experienced loving, I guess you would say unconditionally,, as much as we can.” Mrs. Gladbach said she kept thinking that “bars separate us now, but in the kingdom we will be one.’”’ She also was struck by being able to see in each prisoner “the ‘you’ that Jesus loves. It was like looking beyond the human. “To see beyond the crime, beyond the bars, to see the oneness that Christ calls us to — for me, that’s what ‘love one another as I have loved you’ is all about,” she said. Feist is editor of The Texas Catholic in Dallas.) matter of relationship alone but of attitude and conduct. Love is not merely a warm feeling for someone congenial. It is a selfless attitude which expresses itself in practical service. The two who passed by the fallen traveler were concerned about their own convenience. If the victim was dead, they risked “defilement” by contact with a corpse. This would have interfered with their work. The Samaritan had no such scruples. All he saw was a wounded man who needed him. No matter that he was a Jew; he was a fellow human being. That was enough for him to rush to his aid at considerable trouble and expense. Love, then, is selfless service which transcends relationship. This points up the basic meaning of love: selflessness. Selfish love is a contradiction in terms. Another way to put it is to say that to love is to give, not just of one’s resources but of oneself. This truth recurs frequently in the New Testament. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son” (John 3:16). In one of the most beautiful passages in his letters, Paul says of Jesus with touching simplicity: He “has loved me and given himself up for me” (Galatians 2:20). From whom can we learn what love really is more surely than from the one who is love itself (1 John 4:16)? Jesus’ every word and act revealed the nature of love, particularly its self-giving. Jesus’ whole career, his whole meaning, is summed up in the cross. For those who go to school at the school of Jesus, the cross is the supreme expression of selfless love. How has he loved us? “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” Love may not require that one actually die for others. But every act of unselfish love involves a dying to oneself and finding more fulfilling life in the process. (Father Castelot is a Scripture scholar, author and lecturer.) FOOD FOR THOUGHT. The word “love” is bandied about a great deal by people in love, by TV pro grams and magazines, by movies. How do Christians understand love? • »Can you think of a film or TV program that has depicted love well? •After reading the articles by Father Eugene LaVerdiere and Father John Castelot, how would you describe love? •What connection do you see between Christian love and the way you feel about family members and friends? Second Helpings. What might happen if you prayed, “God, who do you say that I am?” asks Gregory M. Corrigan in Disciple Story. The answer might overwhelm you, he says. For the most part, people are going to hear: “You are loved. You are my very special child, a blessing to the world. You are beautiful and you are capable and I have made you my disciple... 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