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"... God so loved the world ..."

Some down-to-earth applications of what my father would have called a "fifty-cent word."

Tom Toles, the political cartoonist for The Buffalo News, has drawn many interesting and provocative cartoons throughout the years. What, for me, ranks as his all-time best was one drawn around Christmas a decade or so ago. He drew a picture of a little girl on Santa Claus' lap with a list spilling down to the floor. She had this huge smile as she was going over the list with Santa. Out of her mouth were printed the words: "Barbie doll, stereo, and Apple computer." Right next to the little girl at the bottom right corner of the cartoon was a picture of a black Ethiopian child with a distended belly. He's standing next in line to see Santa and he's carrying an empty bowl and Toles has him picking up on the end of the little girl's conversation for he's mouthing the word "Apple" with a look of longing and desperation. No one preached a more powerful sermon that Christmas.

I reference that Tom Toles creation because of the technique he used to make his point. He set one picture up against another; he juxtaposed two images and in so doing he drew a powerful contrast between our children and those of the Third World. He employed the technique of juxtaposing, a technique often used by political cartoonists as well as artists to give some perspective to an issue, a cause, or a problem in need of our attention.

Juxtaposing is not something reserved for art professionals; it's something with which we're all familiar. We juxtapose quite readily and quite freely. The problem we have is that, in all too many cases, we don't juxtapose correctly. We don't put the proper picture next to the picture of our experience. We fail to image a suitable companion to the object of our vision. There's no great reminder of what needs to be seen and considered in light of what we're viewing or experiencing. When, by chance, we do happen to juxtapose correctly, when the right picture and image does come into our line of sight, there's no telling as to its positive effect.

I was recently on a panel with two other priests. Our purpose for gathering was to help Catholics who were mad at the Church, who had left the faith because of some experience in their past. What proved to be a constant was the fact that they juxtaposed incorrectly. They matched their one negative experience with a priest or a nun with the image of the Church. There were some who had a priest yell at them, some who had a priest or nun abuse them, and some, with tears in their eyes, recounted a horrible exchange of words between themselves and their priest. In a good majority of the cases, they then juxtaposed the image of that priest or nun with everyone who wore a Roman collar or a habit and then extended that image to the Church, failing to realize that the Church is much bigger than one priest or one nun.

That kind of juxtaposing is not something unique to disgruntled Catholics, but it's something which I'm afraid all of us have done on one occasion or another in our own life. It may not have been a priest we had a problem with, but it may have been somebody with black skin or someone who was of Irish, or Italian, or Polish, or German, or Jewish descent, or someone of a different sexual orientation. Because of what may have happened between us and them, because we may have observed some negative behavior in one of their representatives, we automatically juxtapose that image to everyone with black skin, or everyone who is Italian, or Polish, or gay, or lesbian. Juxtaposing in such a fashion has hardened many hearts and has fed the problem of prejudice.

I like that story of the mother who is very worried about her daughter's first day at school which was also the first day of integration in a formerly all-white setting. Running to meet the bus at the conclusion of the school day, she cautiously asked her daughter how it went. The daughter said she spent the day sitting next to a very friendly girl. The mother then asked the question she was afraid to ask: "Was she black?" "Yes," said her daughter. "What happened?" asked the mom. "Oh, nothing, we were both so scared we held hands all day."

The beauty of children is that they juxtapose correctly. They see people in much broader ways than we do. They don't connect them to one image or one caricature or one stereotype. If we could only do that, if we could only juxtapose in broad and expansive ways as do our children, we might see the sins of our prejudice and we might find our hearts opening up to those who might have otherwise never entered the circle of our care.

In Ken Burns' television series on the Civil War, the narrator describes a remarkable scene that took place in 1913 on the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg. What was left of the two armies decided to stage a re-enactment of Picket's charge. All the old Union veterans took their place among the rocks on the ridge and the old Confederate veterans started marching toward them across the field below. And then something remarkable happened. As the old men among the rocks began to rush down at the old men coming across the field, a great cry went up. Only this time, instead of doing battle as they did half a century earlier, they threw their arms around each other, and they embraced and openly wept. In the original battle, they juxtaposed the persons on the other side of the hill with the enemy, the evil monsters which war makes them out to be. Now they juxtaposed correctly. They saw the enemy as someone like themselves, someone who shared in all the hurts and pains and joys which life happens to bring. They wept because they may have realized that had they juxtaposed that way in 1863, maybe there wouldn't have had to be a war where so many beautiful and innocent people were killed.

And that makes you wonder about the people whom we label as our enemy, whom we despise because of something they did to us. If we could see them as those old veterans saw each other, if we could juxtapose correctly, if we could see how those we are at war with share the same hurts and pains as we do, maybe we'd look upon them differently. Maybe we'd find that what is so bad about them is precisely the same thing that so many people find to be bad about us. Juxtaposing correctly might not only help us see the sin of prejudice but also see the sin of our private little wars. Juxtaposing correctly opens many a heart.

It also opens many a mind. Abraham Maslow once observed the following: give an adult a hammer and all he uses it for is to pound nails. Give a child a hammer and he dig withs it, sculpts with it, weighs down papers with leaves in between, knocks down apples, all sorts of things. The difference lies in the fact that nobody told the child that the purpose of the hammer is to hit a nail. The child juxtaposed the hammer with all sorts of possibilities.

As I mentioned earlier, children juxtapose much more broadly than do adults, so it really isn't any wonder as to why researchers tell us that the most creative people in the world are the children under five. They're not locked onto one or two pictures as to how things are supposed to be used, as to how things are supposed to be done. By not juxtaposing as narrowly as we adults juxtapose, they're open to a myriad of possibilities of doing things or using things, possibilities often absent in the thinking of many adults.

I remember reading of a tractor-trailer wedged under a bridge. No one could figure how to set it free. Engineers and experts converged upon the scene and they considered cutting off its top or perhaps pulling it free with bulldozers. In the midst of all their deliberations, a young boy happened to come by and said to the engineer: "Why don't you just let some air out of the tires?"

Because those adult experts were juxtaposing so narrowly, they didn't see the easy solution a child happened to see. Juxtaposing correctly may not only help us see the sin of prejudice or the sin of war, but it may also help us take note of the narrow-mindedness so common to us all. There's a lot to be found and discovered and created thanks to juxtaposing correctly. So juxtaposing opens a lot of hearts, it opens a lot of minds, and it also opens a lot of wills.

I'm reminded here of two outstanding athletes: Donny Moore of the California Angels and Chris Weber of the Washington Bullets. In 1986, Donny Moore was the eighth relief pitcher in a game that was to decide the representative of the American League in the World Series. If he put out the batter he faced, victory would be theirs. Unfortunately, the batter got ahold of his fast ball and sent it over the fence for a home run, costing the California Angels the championship and a trip to the World Series. Donny Moore never recovered from that pitch or that day and a few years later he tragically took his own life.

Chris Weber shared a similar story to that of Donny Moore except his sport was basketball, not baseball. He played on the Michigan team in the game that was to decide the NCAA championship. He called time-out in the waning seconds only to discover, to his chagrin, that his team's allotment of time-outs had already been used. His gaffe cost Michigan possession of the ball and with it the National Championship. Unlike Moore, however, he recovered from his mistake and in the following year went on to become the NBA Rookie of the Year.

The difference between Moore and Weber rested in the juxtaposition of their mistakes. Moore juxtaposed his with shame, depression, and other mistakes while Weber juxtaposed his with the success he had previously experienced. Weber was in touch with the reality of failure as an integral part of life. Unfortunately, that was not the case with Moore. The will to live, the will to go on with life, the will to achieve what we're capable of achieving is directly commensurate to how we juxtapose success and failure. To do so correctly, as evidenced by Weber, makes all the difference in the world.

I've been talking about juxtaposing because I see our Scriptures today doing so when it comes to God. The beginning of our first reading has God bearing this image of a mean and angry and vindictive individual bent on destroying us, an image held strongly by many believers. Next to that bogus image is attached the true image of God which the second reading describes as "rich in mercy and full of kindness," a God whom the Gospel describes as "having so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life." When we hearers of the Word are filled with an overwhelming sense of sin, when we think ourselves unworthy of any kind of love, that's the image of God we need to juxtapose to our experience.

Juxtaposing correctly can help put an end to prejudice, it can help expose the folly of our private little wars, it can strike a blow to our narrow-mindedness, it can help overcome defeatism, but most especially it can help pull down the barriers between God's love and us. Bless yourself, bless others this Lenten day by looking at how you juxtapose when you experience life and when you experience people. Juxtapose as children do, juxtapose broadly, and you'll help create a world where less frequent will be the incidence of alienation and prejudice and war and small-mindedness and suicide.