‘Love your neighbour’ stretches our souls

Love your neighbour.

It’s such an ingrained element of our faith, of our Christian DNA, that it’s all too easy to let it slide over our thinking and our souls, almost ignored.

But maybe it’s more powerful than we think.

On a bitterly cold winter night, I put out my trash and recycling for pickup the next day. Before heading inside, I glanced down the street. A huge apartment-sized recycling bin was slowly coming down the street. I looked more closely and saw a man behind it, pushing the bin forward metre by painful metre. Nearby, a woman sifted through recycling boxes in front of homes.

In my affluent Peterborough neighbourhood, one person’s trash is another person’s rent or food money. Several people, including one or two individuals in wheelchairs, regularly cruise our neighbourhood before garbage day, hoping to find wine or beer bottles and cans they can return for cash.

But never had I seen someone pushing a colossal recycling bin down the street in the hope of earning a few dollars. I rushed into my garage, retrieved some wine bottles, then ran over to the man with the bin. When I reached him, I expected him to appear exhausted and grim. Not at all. Both the man and his partner greeted me with warm grins and deepfelt thanks. We chatted briefly, and then they went back to work.

I stepped into my warm, comfortable home, feeling good about helping someone in need. However, I was keenly aware it was only a Band-Aid action. It did nothing to address the fact that in this wealthy nation, so many are living on the edge of survival.

Then I thought some more – about how my tiny action took place alongside countless other acts of love. Our individual acts are connected to the power of God at work in us. God invites our participation in this grand collective enterprise of renewing our broken world.

Seen in this light, a simple act of charity, like giving a few wine bottles, takes on greater significance.

Yet my conscience still gnaws at me about this situation. As winter approaches, I don’t want my neighbour forced to do hard labour on cold nights to earn a few dollars to make ends meet. I don’t want other neighbours to line up outside on frigid winter mornings at our local food bank, three hours before it opens, to make sure they receive food before supplies run out.

Putting love into action can seem like a mammoth, if not impossible, challenge. We have the most amazing role model to inspire us in the life and actions of Jesus, who came to show us a new way of being in the world. He broke through boundaries of status, ethnicity and physical neighbourhoods. His version of loving your neighbour was truly radical, to the point of loving his enemies, not just those who were easy to love.

We’re called to root our inner being in love (see Ephesians 3:14-19). This is a lifelong journey of opening our souls to the love with which God has embraced us.

That immense love can extend beyond our souls to inspire a decisive difference in our outward actions. We are entering the season of urgent appeals from community agencies imploring us to donate to provide turkeys, toys and much more for low-income families and individuals facing a bleak Christmas. It is shocking that two million Canadian households rely on food bank handouts to eat. And equally shocking that most of us have become numb to this grim reality.

The words of Martin Luther King Jr. ring home: “True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it understands that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth.”

Responding to our neighbours in need is an essential act of love. Yet, as Dr. King suggests, is not God challenging us to stretch our understanding about love beyond the dimension of individual charity? Can we not live out “political love” as well, and tackle the root causes of poverty so that all are able to live in dignity?