Good Samaritan

“Love your neighbour as yourself”… Sounds pretty simple and straightforward. We’ve heard this reading for years… Christianity has heard this reading for centuries. We know what it means. We need to look around us and recognize that each person is our neighbour. And we do that… more or less. We might grumble at seeing the terrorist, the abortionist, the pedophile, the rapist, the prostitute, the lawyer, the politician, the homosexual, etc. as our neighbours. But we at least recognize that we should be striving to love them… in whatever fashion that may appear in this moment. But you can read the story of the Good Samaritan and take it bigger… and wider… way wider… way bigger.


So, who is our neighbor? Who should we love as ourselves? Well, take a look around you… Take a look at the plants in your backyard. Take a look at your pets. Take a look at the earth. Take a look at the oceans. They are your neighbours too. How do you love them as yourself?

Well, sure, I mean we’ve always thought that nature was there for us to “dominate” and “subdue”. But that’s kind of suicidal in the long run, and doesn’t really reflect our own love for ourselves. “Well, yes, I love myself and I love my human neighbours… but I’m going to pollute the oceans past the point of recovery”. Kind of silly isn’t it? “I love myself so much, that I’m going to get an 8 litre gas guzzling Hummer SUV, even if oil/gas addiction is killing our world”. Kind of sounds a bit backwards doesn’t it?

If we really loved ourselves… I mean, really loved ourselves… we’d start with the small things. We’d love the creatures around us… the life all around us… and we’d care for it, because we’d recognize that we are not islands. We are NOT self-sufficient beings, no matter how much we might like to think we are. We depend on the air, the earth, the water, the plants, the animals.

And ultimately… everything comes from the hand of the Creator. We are all created from the divine… We are all part of the One… Even creation is part of the divine… That dandelion that was just poisoned with Round-up is part of the divine… That fish that is now sterile because of too much Round-up run off in the river is part of the divine…

Can you see the Divine in the world around you? Can you see yourself in the plants, animals, earth, oceans around you? Can you recognize the neighbours beyond the frontier of the human species? Neighbours who are not there for us to abuse and use… but are there for us to be partnered with… Can we open our eyes, our hearts, our spirits that wide? Can we see a new thing… or are we seeing what we’ve always seen? What we’ve been told to see?