Love the One You’re With

But only if you really want to make a difference in this world.

I’ve always been annoyed by the Stephen Stills song, “Love the One You’re With,” because it is nothing more than a call to sexual license,

If you're down and confused
And you don't remember who you're talkin' to
Concentration slip away
Because your baby is so far away….

Turn your heartache right into joy
'Cause she's a girl and you're a boy
Get it together, make it nice
You ain't gonna need any more advice.

Love the one you’re with….

On the other hand, if love is understood as giving oneself for the sake of each of those who cross our path, the chorus of this song is nothing less than the gospel, which got me thinking that we’d be wise to take Jesus literally when he commanded us to love our neighbor.

When asked by an inquiring mind, “Who is my neighbor,” Jesus told a story about a Samaritan who, upon seeing a Jew lying helpless in a ditch, did what he could to help him. The main element of the story highlights the moral bankruptcy of the religious leaders and how one man crossed a significant cultural barrier to help another human being in distress. 

But there is another implication of the story, and it has to do with the word neighbor.  The first definition of the word that pops up in an internet search gets to the heart of the word: “a person living near or next door to the speaker or person referred to.”  The key idea is “living near or next door.”  The neighbor is one who is physically proximate. The priest and a Levite ignore the person they pass by, while the Samaritan reaches out to help the person next to him.  He is not concerned that the person  is a Jew; what’s important is that he is next to a person in distress. 

We are said to live in an age in which the world has shrunk, that people in India and Nigeria and Venezuela and so forth are now our “neighbors.”  And we should love them accordingly—usually by sending money or goods to organizations that help needy people in these nations.  That such people need us to share our abundance with them nearly goes without saying. But I think it is a mistake to consider these people as our neighbors. 

Neighbors are people physically near us, even next to us, people we rub shoulders with.  They are husbands and wives, children and parents—each of whom we are both grateful for and  frequently annoyed and angry at.  They are, yes, the people who live in the house or apartment next to us, whom we hardly know.  It is the smelly beggar we pass on our way to the grocery store.  It is the person standing behind us in line, complaining about the long wait.  It is the clerk who checks us out with a vacuous indifference.  It is the person in the pew next to us in church, the Democrat or Republican whose sanity we question, the annoying charismatic who won’t shut up about the Holy Spirit, or the cantankerous elder who causes so much trouble at parish council meetings. 

Such “neighbors” are much harder to love than the desperate people overseas.  Such neighbors are so much less interesting than reading about what our government should or shouldn’t do about this or that local or geo-political problem.  Such neighbors interrupt our busy-ness as we rush around checking off our to-do list, which we rightly believe is often shaped by our faith.  But as Dietrich Bonhoeffer observed in his classic, Life Together:

We must be ready to allow ourselves to be interrupted by God, who will thwart our plans and frustrate our ways time and again, even daily, by sending people across our path with their demands and requests. We can, then, pass them by, preoccupied with our important daily tasks, just as the priest-perhaps reading the Bible-passed by the man who had fallen among robbers. When we do that, we pass by the visible sign of the Cross raised in our lives to show us that God’s way, and not our own, is what counts.

The key phrase in this context is people “coming across our path,” that is, neighbors. 

We are called to participate in larger communities and commitments--to the local church, to the community in which we live, to our nation, to the world.  We do so because, yes, we want to do our small part to make a difference.  But the older I become, the more I’m convinced that the greatest way to make a difference is for each of us to love the one we’re physically with at the moment. Such love will have ripples that we can hardly imagine. Maybe that’s why Jesus made it just as important as his first commandment.

And yet the older I become, the more aware I am of how miserable I am at doing this. I suspect I’m not alone.  So let’s pray for each other, eh? 

Grace and peace,

Mark

Photo credit: frantic00

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