1. The Good Samaritan
Just then a religion scholar stood up with a question to test Jesus. “Teacher, what do I need to do to get eternal life?”
He answered, “What’s written in God’s Law? How do you interpret it?”
He said, “That you love the Lord your God with all your passion and prayer and muscle and intelligence—and that you love your neighbor as well as you do yourself.”
“Good answer!” said Jesus. “Do it and you’ll live.”
Looking for a loophole, he asked, “And just how would you define ‘neighbor’?”
Jesus answered by telling a story. “There was once a man traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho. On the way he was attacked by robbers. They took his clothes, beat him up, and went off leaving him half-dead. Luckily, a priest was on his way down the same road, but when he saw him he angled across to the other side. Then a Levite religious man showed up; he also avoided the injured man.
“A Samaritan traveling the road came on him. When he saw the man’s condition, his heart went out to him. He gave him first aid, disinfecting and bandaging his wounds. Then he lifted him onto his donkey, led him to an inn, and made him comfortable. In the morning he took out two silver coins and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, ‘Take good care of him. If it costs any more, put it on my bill—I’ll pay you on my way back.’
“What do you think? Which of the three became a neighbor to the man attacked by robbers?”
“The one who treated him kindly,” the religion scholar responded.
Jesus said, “Go and do the same.” – Luke 10:25-37 (The Message)
2. My Neighbor, Brenda
We are treated most kindly by our near neighbor, Brenda. She lives at the end of Redbud Lane, up a driveway that crosses a creek and rises to the top of a hill. Her house is guarded by her dog, Tank, and several loose chickens. There are cows in the pasture behind the house, and blackberries that grow on trellises and hummingbird feeders and flowers. Brenda grows stupendous flowers. She once gave me a bouquet of the biggest, most beautiful red and yellow sunflowers I’ve ever seen.
Brenda is one of the givingest people I have ever known, and what she gives is always choice: a bag of turnip greens, a bowl of blackberries, a sack of pecans, an entire warm pound cake, a jar of homemade sauerkraut. I wish everyone had a neighbor like Brenda, because then the world would surely be a much happier and better-fed place.
There is even an element of the magical about Brenda. One afternoon she showed up on the front porch with two hand pies, apple ones like the kind my grandmother used to make. We had never discussed apple hand pies, but I had been searching that entire week for a recipe that sounded like Grandma’s. And here they were. Brenda not only gave me the pies, she gave me the recipe and a little gadget for folding and crimping them. Said she had several versions of the gadget and frankly the pie dough was bad about sticking to this one but maybe I would have better luck with it.
Another week or two, and she brought me something less familiar that I wouldn’t have dreamed of: three bags of frozen persimmon pulp. I was thrilled to have it, never having owned any and never expecting to. I try to buy a persimmon pudding at the Smithwood Church fall festival every year, but this year I had missed the festival entirely. Again, I had not said a word about any of this to Brenda. And yet, behold! Three bags of persimmon pulp! What a neighbor Brenda is.
3. An Unrelated but Somehow Necessary Side Note About Persimmon Pudding
The minute I owned that persimmon pulp, I consulted my Beth Tartan cookbook for a recipe. For purposes of this post, I should have gone straight to the Ask-Your-Neighbor Cookbook, but I didn’t. Beth did not disappoint:
Persimmon pudding is as characteristic of North Carolina as any dish there is. … Finding a recipe on which all persimmon pudding lovers will agree is difficult. Some insist that the pudding must have eggs; other would not dream of putting an egg into it. Grated sweet potatoes are a necessity for some; others stick to plain persimmons. …
Whatever is in the pudding, it is not likely that you will jump up and down and scream with joy at the first taste. You almost have to be raised on the stuff to love it. – North Carolina and Old Salem Cookery, by Beth Tartan (new and revised edition, 1992)
(Captain John Smith did not jump and down and scream with joy when he first sampled persimmons in the New World. Having tried them, he wrote in his Generall Historie (1624): “If it not be ripe it will draw a man’s mouth awry with much torment.”)
My pudding, Mrs. Myatt’s version from Beth’s cookbook (no eggs, no sweet potatoes, certainly no coconut), came out lovely, with chewy edges. I had increased the amount of cinnamon and added in a half-teaspoon of ginger. It tasted like a toffee pudding, rich and not too sweet, dark and wintry. Something about it struck a deep chord in me. When I ate it, I heard a sound like the humming of a Tibetan singing bowl. Bliss. I shared a serving with Brenda, but I never heard back about how she liked it, though she did call this week to tell me she how much she enjoyed the cranberry butter I gave her for Christmas. We are both of us very neighborly together, although Brenda definitely has the upper hand.
4. Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood
Someone else who understood the value of being a good neighbor was the late Fred Rogers. In fact, it’s almost impossible to say the word “neighbor” without thinking of Mister Rogers, don’t you agree? I was too old to be a regular viewer of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” but I knew about the show, with all of its quirks and comforting traditions—the endless putting on of a red cardigan sweater, the constant changing of shoes.
I didn’t fully appreciate Mister Rogers until I read a story about him in Esquire magazine, called “Can You Say… Hero?” Written by Tom Junod and published in November 1998, it includes a story about why Fred Rogers saw the need for a children’s television show about goodness and neighborliness.
He was barely more than a boy himself when he learned what he would be fighting for, and fighting against, for the rest of his life. He was in college. He was a music major at a small school in Florida and planning to go to seminary upon graduation. His name was Fred Rogers. He came home to Latrobe, Pennsylvania, once upon a time, and his parents, because they were wealthy, had bought something new for the corner room of their big redbrick house. It was a television. Fred turned it on, and as he says now, with plaintive distaste, “there were people throwing pies at one another.” He was the soft son of overprotective parents, but he believed, right then, that he was strong enough to enter into battle with that—that machine, that medium—and to wrestle with it until it yielded to him, until the ground touched by its blue shadow became hallowed and this thing called television came to be used “for the broadcasting of grace through the land.”
Mister Rogers broadcast plenty of grace for as long as he lived. When he signed autographs, he usually included the Greek word for grace, cariz. In return, he received grace back, in abundance:
Once upon a time, Mister Rogers went to New York City and got caught in the rain. He didn’t have an umbrella, and he couldn’t find a taxi, either, so he ducked with a friend into the subway and got on one of the trains. It was late in the day, and the train was crowded with children who were going home from school. Though of all races, the schoolchildren were mostly black and Latino, and they didn’t even approach Mister Rogers and ask him for his autograph. They just sang. They sang, all at once, all together, the song he sings at the start of his program, “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” and turned the clattering train into a single soft, runaway choir.
I can only imagine how happy that moment must have made him.
You don’t need me to point out that lately television is a nonstop broadcast of pie-throwing, mud-slinging, crap. But I try not to get too far up on my high horse, because I know that I may not always recognize grace myself, being at times as narrow in my views as the priest and the Levite. When I feel a spell of high-horsedness coming on, I need to remind myself to be a good neighbor, and spread a little grace, like the good Samaritan, and Brenda, and Mister Rogers.
5. A Sufi Parable
Let’s face it, there are people I pass in the course of daily life (or can’t pass, because I’m stuck behind them in traffic) who are difficult to love. And yet I walk around metaphorically wearing a t-shirt that reads: “As Far as I Know, I’m Perfectly Charming.” Well, I am perfectly charming, on a good day. On a bad day, not so much. We are all in turns charming and maddening, dark and light, Levites and Samaritans.
There is a Sufi parable that I love, and it seems to fit here:
A man was sitting at the gate of a town, a wise elder. A man on horseback stopped and asked him, “What are the people of this town like?”
“Why do you ask this?” the elder wondered.
The rider said, “The people of the town I have come from are very indecent. I was upset and disturbed by them. I had to leave that town. Now I want to become a resident of some new town. So I am asking you how the people of this town are.”
The old man said, “Brother, you had better move on. The people of this town are even more vile, more wicked, more indecent. Here you will get into trouble, go look somewhere else.”
The rider moved on. Just behind him a bullock cart came to a halt and a man looked around and said, “Grandfather, how are the people of this village? I am searching for a new residence.”
The old man asked again, “How were the people of the village you have left?”
Tears came to the eyes of the man on the cart. He said, “The people of that village were very loving and kind. I had to leave to try to find a job, but someday I will return there.”
That old man said, “You are welcome. You will find the people of this village even more loving and kind than the people of that village.”
Another resident of the village had been sitting there listening to all this. First he heard what the horse rider said and the old man’s answer. Then he heard what this man on the bullock cart said and the old man’s answer. The villager said, “You have really surprised me. You said to one man that this village is very vile and wicked, just move on. And to the other you said this village has very loving people, you have no need to go further, you are welcome!
The old man explained, “People are just the way you are.” – Adapted from http://oshostories.wordpress.com
Which village are you going to live in?
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