From David Brooks at the New York Times:
”The superficial way to change minds and behavior doesn’t seem to work, to bridge either racial, partisan or class lines. Real change seems to involve putting bodies from different groups in the same room, on the same team and in the same neighborhood.”
How did it happen that the thing which was supposed to bind us together is the thing that drove us apart? What if (digitally) leaving the neighborhood to associate with like-minded people actually increases our loneliness, instead of ameliorating it?
There is a better option: stay in place, and associate with people different than you. Bari Weiss and Eve Peyser are trying it out- getting together, not to fight about things they disagree with, but to live in the physical world, and eat physical bread. As critics have pointed out, this sort of relationship is hard, its costly, and there is only one thing that can sustain it: the meal with the God who left the place of power, comfort and authority, and moved into our neighborhood (John 1).
Neighborliness is trendy, I get it. Everything from yard signs to pub names to children's shows tells us we ought to be neighborly. But why do it? What is the fuel in tank of neighborliness? What motivates neighborliness beyond a desire for social media affirmation? Can our fuel for neighborliness sustain us when loving our neighbor becomes a risky, costly activity? It must, if we are followers of Jesus:
“We should not regard what man is and what he deserves: but we should go higher- that it is God who has placed us in the world for such a purpose that we be united and joined together. He has impressed his image in us and has given us a common nature, which should incite us to providing one for the other. The man who wishes to exempt himself from providing for his neighbors should deface himself and declare that he no longer wishes to be a man, for as long as we are human creatures we must contemplate as in a mirror our face in those who are poor, despised, exhausted, who groan under their burdens... If there comes some barbarian, since he is a man, he brings a mirror in which we are able to contemplate that he is our brother and our neighbor: for we cannot abolish the order of nature which God has established as inviolable.”