Needing Each Other

"No man is an island, entire unto himself" - familiar words, and very true. Some people maintain a wide circle of friends, others have fewer, sometimes very few, but we cannot exist without the interplay of human relationships, even if those relationships be entirely to do with service or commerce. And, surely, without family or friends the individual is greatly diminished.

Christians are called on to 'love neighbour as self', something I touched on in a recent posting on this blog. I return to it now because I have always been attracted by the thought of the neighbour as holy; why? because our neighbour gifts us the opportunity, day by day, to be of service to our Lord. 'Neighbour', of course, is not the same thing as 'family and friends' - I may have neighbours on the other side of the world whom I shall never see or know, but they are my neighbours nonetheless, because one definition of neighbour that is very true to, for example, the parable of the Good Samaritan is that my neighbour is anyone I have the power to offer help to, or turn away from.

It follows, then, that the definition of neighbour will include, as it did for the Good Samaritan in the story, people we would not regard as friends or feel any family attachment to - except that they like us are human, which in one analysis means they have a right, in their need, to whatever help I can offer. As a Christian I might add that they are loved by God as his own, and therefore I should strive to love them too.

That's an interesting thought, to me, which takes me further than the broadly humanist sense of duty towards one's fellow man and woman, attractive though that is in its own right. I am required to love people I may find it impossible, or virtually so, to like. That would seem to me to be a very challenging project indeed, but it may well lie at the heart of what Jesus was doing in the wilderness at the start of his ministry: it seems to me that that process was a testing time directed to ensure that in his ministry he would not be presenting himself in any flashy way, however plausible a strategy that may have seemed to be, but simply loving people who needed to be loved.

Those people include me, of course, loved though I deserve not to be. With that thought in mind, and claimed as I believe myself to be by grace, I will do my best to live, to behave, as though every person I meet is potentially at least, my friend.