I have many neighbors who live down the twisting lane beyond my house. None of them, I suspect, will ever become presidents or emperors, bishops or millionaires, or even Division I football coaches with oversized egos. They are ordinary folk, these neighbors, singularly lacking in accolades or extravagance of any kind. But like me, they have dreams and joys and hopes and problems and struggles. When I walk down the lane on a dusky evening, grinning at the glug-glug of the bullfrogs down in the bog, and keeping a wary eye out for the agitated boxer that seems to dislike males of all species, I see my neighbors relaxing on their porches, a beer in one hand and grilling tongs in the other, turning their barbecue to perfection, or cooling their heels in the splash pool. I greet them with a wave or stop to speculate on the weather.
They are fascinating, these ordinary neighbors of mine. Each is a unique character and could easily become the centerpiece of a short story, perhaps a celebrated protagonist, a warm-hearted grandmother, or a troublesome villain. Most of them do not look at all like me, and isn’t that a blessing? Together we are young, we are old, we are alcoholic, we are poor, we are sometimes rotund, we are childlike, we are childish, we are black, we are white, we are divorced, we are Irish, we are atheist, we are Chinese, we are Jewish, we are widowed. We also take out the dog several times a day, nurture the geraniums on the windowsill, and feed the ornamental fish after breakfast. In short, we are singularly human.
My neighbors are also genuine to a fault, like the fellow who, in answer to my knock on the door, opens it with no pants on. “Come on in,” he says matter-of-factly, “just give me a minute to get something on.”
“Which commandment is the first of all?” the scribes asked Jesus. He answered them, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength. And love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other commandment greater than these.”
Love bursts with eagerness to connect with others. Love is voluntary and willing. Love can be sparkling, exhausting, dusty, joyful, loathsome, weary, or exhilarating, but love is always . . . always . . . always in season.
A genuine appreciation of our neighbor is built through intentional friendship and fellowship, and implies community. Love is not passive; it involves rolling up our sleeves and giving of ourselves. Like the farmer who receives no harvest reward in the autumn of the year without first putting in the hard work of plowing and planting, watering and weeding, we cannot love our neighbor unless we put some work into it. The details of that work, clearly spelled out in the gospel of Matthew, chapter 25, are to feed and clothe and welcome and visit and care for those around us.
The commandment to love our neighbor does not include any qualifiers. It does not say that we should love those who are enjoyable to be around. It does not say that we should love those who are nice to us, or who will return a favor. It does not say that we should love those who are easy to get along with. Jesus’ commandment to love presumes all our neighbors.
“Neighbors,” says Harper Lee in her novel To Kill a Mockingbird, “bring food with death, and flowers with sickness, and little things in between. Boo was our neighbor. He gave us two soap dolls, a broken watch and chain, a pair of good-luck pennies, and our lives. But neighbors give in return. We never put back into the tree what we took out of it: we had given him nothing, and it made me sad.”
I commute to work every day, and I pass many people on the streets of our town, some of them with monotonous regularity. I see them so often that, not knowing their real story, I begin to assign them nicknames. There is Bud, the lonely hiker who daily shuffles along a sylvan back-country lane, tuned in to his earbuds. There is Brother Joe, who sits on the stoop of the barbershop in all kinds of weather, “wearing his shorts well,” as someone told me who had a little too much to drink. There is the Bearded Bard, striding along the road, joyfully conducting the music that blasts from his headset, oblivious to passing traffic. There are others such as Papa Nono, Big Gil, and Antonio the Pizza Man. There is the older gentleman who rides his bicycle around the county in all kinds of weather, a rusted army helmet hanging low over his eyes. There is amiable Jayson, whom I meet on the same stretch of sidewalk every day, lumbering along slowly, faithful to his job even in atrocious weather. There is Mr. Peter, lounging in his rocking chair on Main Street, staring blankly out at the world. There is the fellow who strides along the shoulder of the road wearing a yellow reflective vest; does he work at the local lumberyard and walk home from there, I wonder, or is he straight off the Adirondack Trailways bus after a long day of building high-end kitchen cabinets in the Big Apple?
At the Stewart’s shop along the river, a merry crew of old codgers gathers, rain or shine, to start the day together, to smoke and swagger and swig gallons of coffee. Breakfast is the apparent excuse, but the real reason for this daily gathering is political discourse. They gesture, articulate, pontificate, and speculate with eloquence, like Charles Barkley on steroids, and push decisive index fingers into the spongy chests of others. Observing this daily ritual on the way to work, I am tempted to pull over, grab a cup of coffee myself, and listen in. Perhaps they’re on to something, these fellows. Give them a few more weeks, I figure, and they will have solved the mysteries of the military-industrial complex, the stern challenges of global warming, and the unrelenting inconsistency of the New York Jets.
Each person is unique and marvelous, and each person has a story. That story is important because Genesis 1:27 tells us that each person was created in God’s image. Sometimes that image is hard to see from the outside, for we see only what our eyes tell us. What we cannot see sometimes is the hurt, the torment, the pain buried deep behind the façade, behind the outer shell. Perhaps if we knew the whole story, we would be filled with compassion, and in the end, we might even love them.
“We can't have moral obligations to every single person in this world,” Alexander McCall Smith has said. “We do have moral obligations to those who we come up against, who enter into our moral space, so to speak. That means neighbors, people we deal with, and so on.”
It has been said that “life is too short not to love somebody.”
When the world seems dreary, or when I am discouraged, I go out and talk to someone, anyone, and try to connect in a meaningful way.
I have walked our dog down the lane and waved good morning over the fence. I have knocked on a recalcitrant stranger’s door and, when there was no answer, left behind a loaf of fresh bread and a jar of maple syrup, and an invitation for dinner at my place. I’ve offered my yard as an option for a neighbor’s long-planned yard sale. I have sat on my front porch with a friend and sipped beer together and chewed the rag as we watched a great blue heron land deftly in the sycamore that leans over the row of mailboxes. I have entertained a neighbor’s dog by throwing a tennis ball dripping with saliva, and done it repeatedly because the neighbor was watching carefully to see if I really did like his dog. I’ve left work abruptly to hunt for another neighbor’s lost dog, while my wife attempted to comfort her. I’ve offered smiles at the Motor Vehicle Department on a crowded Friday afternoon, and in the turbulent aisle of a downtown ShopRite.
I have accepted a dinner invitation and listened for hours to an unflinching account of the trauma of a torn and shredded life. I have opened my home to a mother who arrived at my door unannounced, seeking refuge, a suitcase in one hand and a baby in the other. I have pulled up a photo on a neighbor’s smartphone because he was unable to accomplish it himself, his fingers trembling too much due to an alcohol-induced fall on concrete. And, on a neighbor’s porch, with the sun low overhead and a neighbor’s baby in my lap, we have held hands in a circle and prayed together, even though one of us was dead drunk, because that is what love required at that moment.
I have traded leftover plastic fencing for several buckets of periwinkle as ground cover for a neighbor’s rocky garden, then stayed for chips and cashews and conversation, and laughed so hard that oranges began rolling off the counter and I feared I had dislocated my larynx, and the dog, who had been sleeping soundly moments before, clambered to her feet and came to inquire after my general health.
I have experienced all of these things and, invariably, I am the one who came away enriched, inspired, and blessed.
And speaking of blessings, whenever I shovel the snow off the paved garden walkway of a venerable friend who is nearing the age of ninety, she opens her door as soon as I have finished, comes out onto the porch, and blesses me.
“God bless you, Kirk!”
She is one of the sweetest people I know. Living through the blusterous winters in New York, it’s not unusual to have multiple snows within a few days, and each time I am lovingly thanked and blessed. I have never been blessed so many times in my whole life. Now, whenever I feel particularly in need of a blessing, I pray for snow.
