Dear Friends,
Who are your neighbors?
As young adults living in an apartment building full of other young adults, my wife and I recently had a conversation with her mother in which she was shocked to learn we didn’t know any of our new neighbors. At the time, we’d been in the building for three or four months, and we had to explain: it’s simply not normal for people our age, especially in transient urban settings, to know our neighbors. If anything, we consider it mutually disruptive.
This is not to say that under other circumstances we wouldn’t know our neighbors, but this is our sixth address in ten years. We recognize that we’re living with impermanence in the most literal sense, and the same is probably true for many of the other young professionals in our building. We don’t build bonds that we’ll simply sever in a few months.
Growing up, of course, it was a very different story. I grew up in the kind of setting where you knew your neighbors intimately. In fact, my early next-door neighbors were the same neighbors my mother had had as a child. Later, I babysat for my neighbors’, who also consisted of my little sister’s best friends. But then again, between the time I was 3 and the time I was 29, well after I moved away, my parents only had two addresses, and they were a few blocks apart. It was a very different time and place and way of living.
So, I ask again, Who are your neighbors?
This week’s Gospel reading turns to one of the best known passages in the Bible, one that has been converted into vital pieces of secular law and into a turn of phrase. We speak of the Good Samaritan, but Samaritan in our speech is divorced from it’s time and place. To look it up in a dictionary today, samaritan is simply defined as a “charitable or helpful person” – and that’s precisely what’s wrong with the story of the Good Samaritan.
When we tell the Parable of the Good Samaritan, we actually encounter several problems. First, are issues of race and culture. When we tell this story in Godly Play, it’s even prefaced with some sense of how the people in Jerusalem and the people in Samaria did not get along. But that explanation oversimplifies a much more fraught situation. The people known as Samaritans were displaced, conquered people. And more than that, Samaritans were religiously displaced because, at the time they were sent to Samaria, people understood their gods to be local. To leave home was to leave the gods you worshiped, whose practices you understood, who protected you. They had to learn new ways of being.
When we tell this story in Godly Play, older children have the metaphoric capacity to understand that “neighbor” is a loose term. That it refers, as the Gospel says, to acts of mercy and relationship. Younger children, on the other hand, grapple with questions of proximity. And the adults, we read or tell this story and we fail, in the words of Amy-Jill Levine, to be “convicted.” Because here’s the other thing we miss, something the the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. addressed in a 1967 sermon.
First, another moment of context. Just as Samaritans were religiously displaced people, they were people who lived at the end of a uniquely dangerous road. It is not a coincidence that there were robbers on that road. It is not a coincidence that everyone traveling down it was alone – it was too narrow to traverse otherwise. And so, Dr. King tells us,
A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see than an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.
What are we doing to be neighbors who transform the system? And what additional violence are we doing when we parse the moral existence of Samaritans by naming just this singular actor as “good”?
It’s not so different from when we attempt to differentiate between the deserving and undeserving poor. Let’s be clear, God never made that distinction, and we need to do the work – and help our children understand – that poverty, homelessness, and addiction aren’t some cipher for bad life choices or immorality.
So much of what we need to know to understand the Parable of the Good Samaritan just isn’t in the story, and as both teachers and students of the Parable, we have to navigate that. And the only answer to that complexity is grace. The grace to not know and still to offer both love and efforts toward the structural changes that transform the world.
More from the Wiggles-Verse
It may be summer, but I’m keeping busy! Next week I’ll be away at Wild Goose – if you’re there too, drop by the Children’s Tent to say hi! As such there will also be no newsletter next week. This is a one woman show, after all!
Are you following Wiggles on Facebook and Twitter? FB gets big updates and Twitter has lots of fun work and community chatter.
I’ve set up a little page on Medium for book reviews and other valuable but not time sensitive content. First up is a review of “Little Prayers for Ordinary Days.” Go check that out!
I write poems! Sometimes they’re even religious. Here’s a new poem out in Image Journal today.
I’m still sharing joys over on Twitter. This one was really good.
Let your light shine, friends. Til next time, you know where to find me.
Peace,
Bird