The Struggle Toward Neighborliness

Main idea. From a gospel perspective, one does not have neighbors, one is a neighbor, especially to the other.

Being a neighbor is something you choose to do, not a title given by virtue of proximity. This puts neighborliness squarely in my court. This pinches.

Being a neighbor to folks like me is easy. It's hard to be a neighbor to folks who reek of sweat, alcohol, feces, and urine all while acting a bit crazy. It's hard to be a neighbor too uppity folks who don't think their stuff stinks. Truth is, those hard folks are precisely the ones to whom I need to be a neighbor. Not sure how to do that.

Here's what I do know. The people of God are called and expected to help the outcasts and the afflicted (reflection on Psalm 82). And it's not just the Old Testament. Jesus calls his followers to be neighborly in the Old Testament sense of sojourner in the parable of the Good Samaritan.

Neighborliness is first behavior toward the other, expressed an engagement with and provision for them as whole persons. This is behavior, not commitment or intention. It is practiced in how one engages the other and what one provides for the other. Those who are different from us are the focus of our attention because those who are similar to us are easy.

For goodness to be goodness, it must go beyond words to behavior (reflection on the Calendar of Wisdom, Mar 12).

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(C) Laura Springer

Musings of a peripatetic wannabe-sage by Laura Springer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License..