Finding Ways To Love All Thy Neighbors

Iwas a young boy when I first heard the biblical words “love thy neighbor.” Most likely it was Sunday school, which I reluctantly though obediently attended.

Given the choice of sitting in a suit and tie in a church for several hours versus being outside playing with my friends, it wasn’t even close.

But as my parents believed in attending our Baptist church nearly every Sunday — so went my two siblings and I.

As an adult making my own choice, my churchgoing has been irregular at best and my prayers have been more ritual than the faith my parents have long possessed. Still, I have long endeavored to carry forth such basic principles as the golden rule.

So, last June, when a representative from the Connecticut Council for Interreligious Understanding invited me to speak at its “Love thy Neighbor Dinner,” held earlier this week, in Hartford, I accepted.

The group consists of members of nine different religions whose goal is to foster dialog and understanding, as well as address the various forms of hate and bigotry that have become so openly prevalent across this land.

There were 16 speakers ranging from a Holocaust survivor to a radio host, a high school senior, a college president and a police chief. We each got four minutes to talk about what “love thy neighbor” means to us. Here is what it means to me:

Fifty-five Septembers ago, on a Sunday morning in Birmingham, Ala., white supremacists blew up the 16th Street

Baptist Church, killing four young girls. It was a Sunday morning. In a church. And the Bible says — “Love thy neighbor.”

Thirty years ago, in the summer of 1988, I was standing by my overheated car on a dark road in the Mississippi Delta. Suddenly the night was lit up by the headlights of an oncoming car swerving rapidly toward me, and for the first time in my life, I knew what a deer feels, frozen in the headlights, unable to move.

It was my dad’s strong hands that yanked me out of the way, causing that car to miss as its occupants yelled the hateful word that has accompanied the deaths of so many black men, women and children.

And the Bible says — “Love thy neighbor.”

Last spring, my mom became seriously ill in Illinois. I took her to a hospital just over the border in Kenosha, Wis. The people in that hospital exhibited extraordinary kindness and courtesy and respect. They treated my mom as if she were their mother, their grandmother, their sister.

And the Bible says — “Love thy neighbor as thy love thyself.”

We all have stories in our lives that we have heard, seen or experienced. Stories in which people have demonstrated love for thy neighbor, and stories in which they have not.

We are a nation of divided neighbors. A nation where “love thy neighbor” has too often been a conditional rather than an unconditional love.

If the neighbor is of a different race, religion, language, culture, ethnicity, sexuality or political persuasion — there are those who don’t love thy neighbor. Those who hate thy neighbor, berate thy neighbor, belittle thy neighbor, make laws against thy neighbor, build walls against thy neighbor, commit acts of violence against thy neighbor.

We have all heard, seen, experienced these stories.

So what can we do? What we can do is recognize that each and every one of us has the capacity to determine how our particular story will unfold and be told.

What we can do is be that person who speaks up and stands up when hearing and seeing wrong being done or about to be done — regardless of who is doing the wrong, or whom the wrong is being done to.

Loving thy neighbor is more than stopping people from doing bad things; it is about you and I commencing good things. Simple things: like kindness, courtesy, respect.

Loving thy neighbor means wading beyond the waters that surround our islands of differences — and onto the common ground, the higher ground, of our hearts and minds.