SAUCIER — Neighbors unawares

“Love your neighbor as yourself.”

Those words have been in the Judeo-Christian tradition for 3,500 years.

You’d think that we’d be doing a better job of it by now.

In Leviticus, there is a section known as the Holiness Code — about what it takes to lead a life pleasing to God. There, in Leviticus 19:18, love of neighbor first appears in Hebrew Scripture. 

Whatever holiness means, it is not just about a relationship between a person and God, but an equally important relationship between the person and others.

Jesus upped the ante. He insisted that love of neighbor meant treating others, even enemies, with the same care and respect that one expects for oneself.

Few would argue that we have made much progress over the ensuing 2,000 years.

Technology has made our world much smaller, reducing it in many ways to a global village. But we still don’t recognize our fellow villagers as our neighbors, much less love them as ourselves.

Our news feeds don’t mention the loss of neighbors, only describe their destruction and quantify their deaths in places like Gaza, Ukraine and South Sudan.

At home, algorithms and “likes” rule our social media, and words of insult, anger, hatred and spite are click baits, the rungs on the ladder that leads to the top.

I wonder how the man who pictured the dreaded Samaritan as the loving neighbor would react to this.

There’s no sad emoji that would suffice, but perhaps a Scripture quote, maybe John 11: 35: “Jesus wept.”

But how did we get so unneighborly, so threatened, so we-they?

Part of it is we’ve bought into a different gospel, one which puts our own individual welfare, satisfaction and salvation center stage.

Our neighbors may help us, but they are not considered an integral and necessary part of it.

Perhaps, though, the greatest obstacle to loving our neighbor as ourselves is that we’ve never learned to really love ourselves, to spend time with ourselves, to encounter our deepest longings, to learn what makes us tick and what ticks us off.

Perhaps we’ve never taken the time to see ourselves as God sees us — and as those who love us see us — a core of goodness wrapped in a cloak of complexity, failure, fear and extraordinary potential.

Perhaps, when we can see ourselves loved in this light, we can see our neighbors this way and love them, as well.

It’s important. As St. Anthony said, “Our life and death is with our neighbor.”