THE NEIGHBOURHOOD PRINCIPLE

Your neighbour is not a family member or person next to you. It is not your co-worker. It is not the person seated next to you on the subway train. It is not your class- or schoolmate. It is, in fact, all of these and more. It is the stranger you meet on the street. It is that person your eyes are gazing at right now.

You are called to love your neighbour and not to fight him; to understand her and not to ridicule her. You are called not to keep a grudge against your neighbour. When your neighbour wrongs you, forgive him or her. Are you entertaining feelings of resentment against someone? Are you bitter? If you are holding something against somebody, free yourself. You are in danger. Love bears no grudge against anyone. Today, set yourself free, drop the grudge and choose to embrace your neighbour! Make loving your neighbour a new commandment each day.
What We Remember Most

Faces may be forgotten, but love will ever be remembered. What we do for others, and the manner in which we do it, is very important. People will not remember us because we looked good and drove expensive cars. People are likely to remember us because we touched them when it mattered most. Every touch to a person in need means so much!

There are four people I will never forget in my life. They all helped me in the neediest time of my life. There was a time when I had neither a place to lay my head nor anything to put in my mouth. These four people all at respective moments came to my rescue. I am sure you also can identify people like these in your life. I don’t remember what property they owned or what cars they drove. But I remember their love, and what they did for me when I was in need.

Love Sees No Flaws in Others

The only place where love is a stranger is to the frailties of others. Love will acknowledge the weaknesses and misgivings of others but will then ignore them. Love will always magnify the positive in others. There is a story of a minister who only saw the best in other people. Each time someone passed away, he spoke only about the good things that person had done. This made some people very angry, so they began to look for opportunities to discredit the minister.

Then one day a notorious criminal died. His enemies had finally found an opportunity to discredit the minister. What good would he see in this criminal who no one had loved, they wondered. Then, in his eulogy, the priest remarked, “At least he had a good set of teeth.” His enemies’ euphoria was turned into despair. The principle behind this anecdote is that if you look for goodness you will always find it! Love looks for opportunities to pay a compliment.

Love Yourself First, Then Your Neighbour

Jesus gave the above answer when a lawyer asked him what the greatest commandment was. This commandment does not infer that you cannot love your neighbour unless you love yourself. What it means is that to the extent to which you love yourself, to that extent you should love your neighbour.

How appropriate this rule is to our loveless society—a society in which love for self predominates! But the other view to this rule is very important as well. It assumes that love is not hypothetical. There must be real love in you before you can love someone. You cannot love unless you know what love is. This also means that not to love yourself is wrong, because you cannot love someone else with the love you don’t have.

This is a balanced approach, where you love yourself and others to the same extent—at the same time, because you know love, so you give it away. This leaves no room for selfish love, which only considers its own interests and not that of the others!

Moreover, you should not only love others as you love yourself, but you must love even those who hate you. If you love only those who love you, you will have your account in heaven cancelled. We can liken loving your neighbour to a debt. You owe your neighbour love. You are condemned to love.

Let us put it this way: Suppose we all owed each other something and that something was love—then we would all be debtors of one another. Just as a debtor is beholden to his creditor, so ought we to be slaves of love—and a slave of love is better than a master of hate!

Love Deals Well with a Nearby Stranger

We live in a complex society in which we hardly know the people living near us. When we are in trouble, we may call 9-1-1, or friends far away, but may ignore a neighbour living nearby. The person next door is a stranger to us. We build fences of separation and create no-go zones between ourselves and our neighbours. On the phone we pretend to be friendly to acquaintances far away, yet we don't even know our neighbours! Love deals well with all men. Love is comfortable with all, irrespective of race, colour of skin, gender or orientation. Love is gregarious and sociable.

Love greets too. Have you greeted your neighbour lately? You can touch someone simply by you saying, "Hi, how are you today?" Don't be in a hurry; take time to greet your neighbour! Do not underestimate the power of a greeting. You can turn someone’s gloomy day into a memorable adventure. You can break barriers of enmity just because you cared enough to greet someone. All it takes is that initial effort.

Love gives hope to strangers. Love is to a stranger what a campus is to a voyager because it gives direction and focus. You cannot be lost where there is love. Our world is full of strangers, people who claim to care for each other, and yet they are lonely. They speak loudly but act naively. Why are most people lonely in a world of over six billion people? Why aren’t population spurts helping us? The truth is, love breaks the silence of loneliness. Because love never has bars!