I have a rather complicated relationship with technology. I spend a good part of an average week fighting with it. The rest of the time I spend absolutely relying on it for tasks important or trivial, and trying to imagine life without it, while – of course – like everyone else, enjoying its enormous benefits. So, although I have to find a good reason to praise it on a bad day, I have many obvious reasons to be tremendously grateful for it on a good one. I had one of those rare very good days recently when I opened up my email in-box to discover that an in-law had sent me a video produced by his younger sister. These are people I’ve known for more than 70 years, so I pay attention when they contact me. In this case, the video I was sent was the product of a program his sister was in the midst of creating on the topic of community relations and bridge-building at a fraught moment in the nation’s history. And with respect to modern technology, imagine how easily we can now communicate with people at great distances whom we see in person only occasionally but about whom we care deeply; it’s a miracle, one we all take for granted!
My relative lives in Toledo, Ohio, and she has been there most of her professional life. She is a retired social worker and has recently undertaken the project I mentioned just moments ago with some of her friends in a city where she has spent the better part of her working life. The project flows from her interest (and that of her friends) in promoting civil community discourse and just plain neighborliness as a way of not only coping with discord but also actively combating it. It’s a brief presentation, but it is accompanied by photos she took of herself, her home, and her larger community, in Ohio. The program is called very simply “Neighbor to Neighbor” and it promotes through language, images, and suggestions for deliberate acts of kindness an overall improvement in our ability as citizens to get along well enough to avoid confrontation and make our lives together in community stronger, more pacific, and more satisfying.
What particularly struck me about this brief video is its clarity of purpose, its simple way of communicating, and its down-home midwestern focus on the need to get along with one another even when it is difficult to do so, in part because we depend so much upon one another. For example, she begins standing under a beautiful, large shade tree in front of her house in Toledo which is framed by a lovely, quiet street under a canopy of deciduous trees. She says the name of the organization conveys very directly the purpose: promoting neighborliness despite whatever else may be going on in the world. She recalls that when we had an eclipse recently, people naturally assembled in groups large and small, got along, and enjoyed the event and being in the company of others. It was natural. It promoted good feelings toward our neighbors whether or not we happened to know them. The logo for her program is the outline of a large shade tree with a heart in the middle of it to convey the purpose of promoting neighborliness: something we can all do that will make both us and our neighbors more contented with the world around us.
She also has decided to avoid TV, social media, and the onslaught of information that invades our homes and confuses us, angers us, stirs up animosities and leads us down paths that are unproductive and damaging. In addition, she advocates the simplest of measures we can all take to make life more pleasant for everyone: looking out for neighbors or even new people we’ve never met, greeting people we encounter walking their dogs, etc. And she reminds us that when we do these simple things: inquiring about one’s health, chatting about the weather, learning the names of new folks, engaging in the briefest of encounters and thus promoting conversation and neighborliness, we are actually not only building community, we are actively promoting our own mental health. We can make a difference, we can do something significant through small acts of kindness and graciousness to build a better world. We can do this in the midst of whatever other activities and attitudes surround us at that moment.
It remains amazing to me that ideas as simple as these can actually make a difference. That we can really engage in “repairing the world” in a meaningful way which is one of the values our Jewish neighbors have always prized and promoted. We can learn from our neighbors whatever their backgrounds. We can make a difference. We can do it through the simplest of means: asking a neighbor how she is doing, inquiring about or informing others of an upcoming activity, petting a dog, smiling at people we meet even when we do not know them. And all of this is so much in line with what Jesus taught us and with what we have all learned over the years through our entire formation process as Christians, that it should come naturally, and if it does not, it should not take much to remind ourselves of our basic duty to care for one another. Jesus said, if you do it for the least of these, you do it for me.
Greg+