Love Thy Neighbor

It's funny that I've been struggling with these concepts of aloneness, alienation, and questioning myself all along the way. I keep wondering, why should I care if someone is rude to me, doesn't want to say hi, isn't interested in neighborliness, or common courtesy. Why should I care if I feel excluded, slighted, constantly, wherever I go. Why should I bemoan a lack of substance, an emptiness in my regular adult human relationships. It's funny that I should come, after my rejection of religion, and in particular, Mormonism, to the concept of "Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself." Isn't this an infinitely outdated idea in an era of self-serving consumerism, where personal fulfillment and accomplishment, or the outward appearance thereof, have become the highest form of achievement?

And yet, it's true. All of the pieces started coming together for me. I had been skipping from article to article in an attempt to catch up on my New York Review of Books, unable to settle on anything, reading a paragraph here, another there, when I stumbled upon the article Auden and God. I was eager, for I have always loved the poet WH Auden. Reading his poems has always filled me with a deep sense of meaning, profundity of thought and feeling.

Auden was a much more religious, erudite, talented, thoughtful, worldly person than I. It doesn't really matter, though, does it, because that's not the point.

I ran out the door, looking forward to the Metro ride, and my read. The Metros were backed up, and delayed. When I stepped onto the Metro, four young Mormon missionaries were sitting there writing Christmas letters home. I thought of greeting them, "Hey, Elders!," and telling them that my brother served a mission in the Philippines, but, as is my usual state these days, I became too welled up with emotion to utter a word, so I just sat there, trying to concentrate on my reading, looking over at the Christmas letter one of the "Elders" was writing to his family, all stamped as it was with a "Merry Christmas!" stamp on red and green Christmas stationery. For the second year in a row, I will not be visiting my family "back home" for Christmas.

I'm still reading the article in bits and starts. I had to take my son to the speech therapist, where the woman was cheerfully gruff, once again, re-inforcing my feelings of isolation. Why can't anyone ever be genuine? She's not bad, but why the off-hand comments. All the time, always. There always has to be a snide undercurrent, not bluntly rude, but challenging. "Oh! You're still eating your lunch!" And then she walks away. I told her that we're always in such a hurry to get to her office on time that we don't have time for lunch. My children were hungry. Still, she can't resist throwing in a little jibe. This seems to be very common. Somehow, people often feel the need to cut you down to size from the get go, to emphasize how truly unworthy you are. It's become the universal that's replaced "Love Thy Neighbor," "Undercut Thy Neighbor."

I shouldn't have, but I did. I did what she'd done to me. I told her what I'd been thinking. I used her sarcastic comment about our hasty lunch as an opportunity to inform her that American is not a language. I also told her that when we're not living in The Netherlands anymore, my son won't have the need to loose his American twang, and that yes, it's true "American is a softer language than Dutch, and the culture is softer, too," although, that might be stretching the matter. At least if I'd been there, instead of here for the past nine years, I wouldn't be this alone.

I'm getting so worn down these days, which always throws be back to the question, why do I care that she, or anyone else makes a rude comment? Why do I care if people ignore me, or simply don't care? Just let it roll off, right? I really ought to study Buddhism.

After all, why would I want to love my neighbor? I've seen my neighbors. I've made attempts at be-friending some of them. Others, I'd really rather not have in my neighborhood. But of course, the point isn't the physical neighbors, it's the fact of seeing people regularly, walking past them, being in their midst, and the pure lack of contact, year after year, that is so bothersome.

As the article on Auden and God states: "human indifference, no matter how commonplace, is a moral failure, a refusal to love one's neighbor. And that commonplace failure has universal significance. As Auden noted, the gospels describe the commandments to love one's God and to love one's neighbor as "like" each other, and for Auden the moral significance of one's neighbor becomes clear when one thinks of him as created in the image of God."

Ach, there's such a tragic lack of love in this world, and religion is more commonly used to hate, to show fault, lack, in others, than to build a sense of "sisterly," or "brotherly" love, than anything else. Let's face it. Most of us have become secularists who shun religion as fervently as we would choose not to practice it, and those who do choose to practice, wag their fingers in turn. It's mutual finger waging. The church-goers believe fervently, and the non-church goers believe that the church goers are fervent fanatics. Surely, they couldn't believe in that, they all think, suspiciously, of the other!

I like Auden's concept of "being" Christian: "Auden referred to himself as a would be Christian, because, he said, even to call oneself a Christian would be an unchristian act of pride. "Christianity is a way, not a state, and a Christian is never something one is, only something one can pray to become."

One of my yoga teachers is fond of stating, "Don't think of what could be, but what is." She wants to encourage acceptance of the status quo. Stop trying to change things. Humpf. Sorry, yoga instructor, but I will keep on trying. It's in my nature. As my foster father, who I haven't spoken with in twenty years, always used to say about me, "You're a fighter, Emily." Yes, it's true. The struggle continues. I'll keep looking for the peaceable kingdom, even if, in doing so, I never find it.

Create it, you say. Ah yes, to have the strength within oneself to create my own miniature peaceable kingdom. Harmony at home. Within these few walls. Yes... It's true. I ought not to complain, because I don't have it so bad, after all.

I leave you with the WH Auden poem, Musee des Beaux Art, a poem about a Breugel painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus that hangs in a museum in Brussels of the same name:

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.