Who is my neighbor

Who Is My Neighbor?

The Gift of Good Land, The Unsettling of America, and Hanna Coulter: These are just a few of Wendell Berry’s books that occupy my shelves at home. Some seventeen years ago, I had the privilege of visiting Wendell and Tonya Berry at their Lanes Landing Farm in Northern Kentucky. Mr. Berry was then, the age that I am now. He has probably long forgotten that visit. I have not.

Another of my favorites is early 20th century author Ray Stannard Baker.

Before his death in 1946, Baker wrote several books under his pen name, David Grayson. I have read nine of them, including Adventures in Understanding, Great Possessions, and The Friendly Road.

Although not as well known today as Wendell Berry, They both wrote, in their own way, about such values as friendship, community, a sense of place, and neighbors.

In our world of remote work, social media “friends,” and online everything, we seem to be losing our connection to anything other than ourselves and our computer.

Today, we have outsourced our memories to a cell phone, and our appearances to photoshop. Once personal business transactions are now carried out by an automated voice which searches through a data base to locate our information, and rambles on, answering questions we did not even ask. And with what is being called artificial intelligence, we are now……Well, you get the picture. The name says it all.

In the well known comic strip, Peanuts, created by Charles Schultz, Linus and Charlie Brown are together at “the wall.” Linus with his chin in his hands, sighs and says, “I love mankind, it’s people I can’t stand.”

“Love Everybody,” the slogan is found in song lyrics, on tee shirts, posters, and refrigerator magnets. Knowing myself fairly well, this saying is probably somewhat optimistic. I saw a poster recently that is maybe a little closer to the reality of my own life.

                                        I love everyone!

I love to be around some people,

I love to stay away from others,

and some people, I’d just love to punch right in the face! 

I’m not bragging about this, and I’m sure there is work to be done in my own life, however, in our overly sentimental culture we often equate love with being nice, and having warm fuzzy feelings toward everyone. Because of this and the various Greek words in Scripture that are translated love, we sometimes mistake this “niceness” for the love of which Jesus spoke.

I think that Jesus calls me to respect the innate worth of all who are created in the image of God. I think he calls me to act for the good of those who are in my path, and I think he calls me to love and forgive even my enemies, in the sense of desiring their eternal well-being.

However, when the ancient Hebrew king, David, agreed to forgive a man who had deceived him, he did not smile, pat him on the back, share a few jokes and invite him for lunch. His forgiveness of the man simply meant that when he passed by him, he would not kill him.

Rather than calling me to love everyone, Jesus mainly calls me to love my neighbor. This is not some vague, general, and disconnected warm feeling for people whom I don’t even know and have never seen (like Linus’s love for mankind).

It is a love that is close by, specific, and identifiable, a love that touches real life in the here and now. Loving my neighbor is much more difficult than loving everyone. As Ray Stedman has said in his book Body Life,

To live above with those we love,

That will be glory.

But

To live below with those we know,

Well, that’s another story.

Wendell Berry has said, “You can’t love your neighbor if you do not know your neighbor.” And I can’t really know my neighbors unless I know something of their personal stories.

May I learn to be a better listener, show more compassion for those in my path, and somehow see my enemies, not merely in light of their sins, but through the light of eternity.