The Neighbor

Love Your Neighbor

The hardest spiritual work in the world is to love the neighbor as the self–to encounter another human being not as someone you can use, change, fix, help, save, enroll, convince or control, but simply as someone who can spring you from the prison of yourself, if you will allow it.

Barbara Brown Taylor

Source: An Altar in the World

Respect among friends

Here's a video shoot of the giant meal we enjoyed last week just down the street from "the Porch."

The idea originated during a conversation I was having with a homeless friend.  

"You know what?" he declared as we spoke.

"No, what?" I replied.

"We need to throw a big-ole party out here for everyone!"

So, we did!

The event included about 300 homeless neighbors, construction workers from across the street, local business owners, students from Abilene Christian University, CitySquare team members, folks from bcWorkshop and passersby!  In all, thanks to Edd Eason and his amazing, gigantic smoker on a trailer,  we provided a great lunch for about 400 folks.

But the event wasn't about feeding.  It was all about enjoying real friendship.  It was a luncheon thrown in honor of RESPECT.

Simple as that.

RIP, Andy

I grew up on Andy Griffith right in the middle of Mayberry, USA. My hometown was so much like Mayberry that I've always believed that sleepy little place reflected much of what our community building work in the inner city aimed to achieve, but with a lot more cultural and ethnic diversity. So, I post my favorite episode of The Andy Griffith Show in memory of Andy who passed away earlier
this week.

 

Human mediation to loving God

It is not enough to say that love of God is inseparable from the love of one's neighbor.  It must be added that love for God is unavoidably expressed through love of one's neighbor.  Moreover, God is loved in the neighbor:  "But if a man says, 'I love God,' while hating his brother, he is a liar.  If he does not love the brother whom he has seen, it cannot be that he loves God whom he has not seen" (1 John 4:20).  To love one's brother, to love all persons, is a necessary and indispensable mediation of the love of God; it is to love God:  "You did it for me, . . .you did not do it for me." 

We find the Lord in our encounters with others, especially the poor, marginated, and exploited ones.  An act of love towards them is an act of love towards God.  This is why Congar speaks of "the sacrament of our neighbor," who as a visible reality reveals to us and allows us to welcome the Lord:  "But there is one thing that is privileged to be a paradoxical sign of God, in relation to which men are able to manifest their deepest commitment--our Neighbor.  The sacrament of our Neighbor!" (pages 114, 115)

Gustavo Gutierrez

 A Theology of Liberation

The face of a neighbor

"For a compassionate man nothing human is alien: no joy and no sorrow, no way of living and no way of dying . . . This compassion pulls people away from the fearful clique into the large world where they can see that every human face is the face of a neighbor."

Henri Nouwen

CitySquare engages neighbors

Foundation principle for community building

"So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets."

Jesus

Matthew 7:12