Neighboring

The path was muddy and steep, buildings nowhere in sight, as I climbed toward what I assumed was a residence. I hesitated at the gate, eyeing barbed wire and warning signs, but only for a minute, resolute was I to fulfill my constitutional responsibility to enumerate the population. ("How noble of you," was one noncompliant nonresponder's sarcastic reply.) 

When I found the house, amid thick undergrowth and perched on the hill like a hawk seeking prey, it felt dark and empty. The door was to the back, meeting the path and the ground at the same place. Like homes in Asia, shoes neatly lined up to the side. My, how big they are, I thought, and images of "Fee, Fie, Foe, Fum" sprung to mind. 

I knocked tentatively on the door. As I waited, it dawned on me that the door was fairly new and substantial, a stock purchase from Home Depot. How on earth did they get this door up that path? A sneeze could blow the whole building down, all but this door and its frame. 

This house, remote as if in the Canadian Tundra, sits less than half a mile from a tired, squat apartment building crouching on the edge of one of Portland's busiest streets. Like the house in the woods, the apartments are fortressed, only with bars instead of briers. 

I wonder about community in all this, these people cut off from neighbors who have no idea who each other are. In a nearby apartment building, a tenant doesn't even know the last name of her roommate. I've discovered that age, gender, ethnicity, marital or economic status, even population density do not determine connectivity. And I wonder why two neighborhoods identical in all the externals can be either so neighborly or so reclusive. 

Community is an essential characteristic of what it means to be human. The defining sign of the fall of Adam and Eve was separation – from God, from each other, with divisiveness even creeping into the relationship between humanity and the rest of the created order. Moreover, the hallmark characteristic of the new community of faith, the people of God, as portrayed in the New Testament, is a community based on love. "This is how they will know you are my disciples," Jesus said, "that you have love one for another." (John 13:35)

We sat in a hotel lounge, this provincial government official and I, drinking tea and talking like the old friends we were. He, a member of the Communist Party, and I had worked on many projects together, but never had I been able to share my faith with him. He, mentioning some foreigners kicked out for doing "religious activity," was passing on a caution without saying as much.

I took a chance. "You know I am a Christian and so are the people in my team." 

"We know that," he replied. We talked in soft tones, feebly attempting a private conversation.

"How do you know that?" I ventured.

"By how you relate to and treat each other," he said. "And that is why we like working with you."

We'd been found out without saying a word to "them" about our faith. 

I love the story of the Good Samaritan, particularly how Jesus uses it to transform the noun "neighbor" into a verb. We do right when we neighbor other people, when we love them as we love ourselves, the way we want to be loved.

And I think about the next time I trek up that winding path. I won't say it, but I will demonstrate it by my effort. I come here to enumerate you today, not because the Founding Fathers ordained it, but because my God calls me to treat you as I wish to be treated. 

Maybe the way he wants to be loved is to be left alone. Not really. "To be left alone" really means I don't want to be bothered, troubled, be given new pain. 

I am bothered when someone treats me poorly, doesn't protect my sense of boundary, of personhood, of space. I am not bothered when someone truly loves me. Love has no barriers. At least that is what Jesus teaches me.

Now, taking someone's census isn't like taking their temperature when they are sick, but it is a sign of community, just as much as gathering the whole family for the annual picture. 

I don't think we are any more or less communal as a society than we were a generation or two or five ago. Every age has its problems with building true, biblical community. I just think that we have to learn at every turn how to build community anew and in ways that demonstrate God's love to each other.

The census will come and go. The need for neighboring each other, like serving the poor, remains with us.