2-13-25

All of the white men in their blue suits with the flag pins on their lapels keep blathering on about how we need to be more Christlike, and read our Bibles (or rather, their Bibles), and talk about prayer and family values all the time, but even as they are speaking, their eyes are shifting from right to left to find someone who dares to disagree, and their postures are rigid and angry, with little room for any love to find its way around the sharp corners.

They shake their fists at the sky and talk about America First, and I can’t help but wonder how they could possibly forget that there wasn’t even an America when Christ was walking the Earth, and if there had been, he surely would not have been promoting it above all others. As a fallen Roman Catholic, I am of course, no Bible scholar, and I would surely fail any exam given on bible verses and quotes, but I really remember the line from Matthew about God’s second greatest commandment, which simply put, was to, “Love they neighbor as thyself.”

It goes on to say that on those two commandments (the first being to love God with all you’ve got in you) hangs the law and the prophets. To me, those white men in their blue suits with the flag pins are the law and the prophets – or at least they’re pretending to be, much like they were back when Jesus and his boy band was touring. And to me, they’re not doing a very good job of even those two commandments, what with all the rejection of immigrants and trans people and insisting that there only they have all the answers, when clearly, they can’t even get the plank out of their own eyes.

So I was thinking about all this while driving Mom to an appointment yesterday, and we were talking about the neighbor kid we’ve been helping through another relapse. It’s been a really hard road, and both Dan and I are completely exhausted, discouraged, and feeling like maybe we’re being enablers by doing anything other than simply slamming the door in the kid’s face. I asked Mom what she thought, and I guess she’d been waiting for me to ask because she definitely had an opinion to share.

“That girl is using and abusing you both, and she should be ashamed of herself,” she railed, clearly just getting started. “You and Dan have done so much for her, given her so much of your time and your money, and she doesn’t appreciate a single thing. She doesn’t even offer to make her bed or help clean when you let her stay with you, and you drove her all the way across the state to another rehab last week, and I’ll bet she didn’t even say thank you! She should know better.”

When I tried to explain that based on having met and observed the girl’s family for the past several years, I was quite sure she’d never been taught any of those simple, social graces, it didn’t matter. I even tried explaining that only the day before I’d taught the young woman how to address an envelope and write her first-ever Thank You note. But that didn’t help either because Mom said, “She should have known those things. I didn’t grow up with parents who taught me those things, but I learned them, didn’t I?”

It’s hard to argue with that logic because she’s right; she did learn those things, but she learned them in Catholic school, where if you didn’t learn them – along with your Bible verses and basic CCD, your knuckles paid the price with a whack from the ruler hidden below the folds of the nun’s billowy habit sleeves.

I love my mom, and I know she has a good heart, but it’s a limited one. I’ve also known for decades that a lot of my own family’s deep religious faith had more to do with show than do. I fear my mom would be very comfortable wearing a dark blue suit with a flag pin and standing shoulder to shoulder with those men, singing the hymns to God and his greatness while allowing the poor to be left to die of starvation or cold because, “they’re not my problem, and we need to take care of our own first.” It’s the biggest reason why I left the Church and indeed, why Dan and I don’t subscribe to any organized religion at all. I’m okay with Jesus being a great role model, and I often try to consider WWJD before I do, and the whole “America first” agenda simply does not fit into that at all.

I keep thinking of that other famous Bible story – the one about the Good Samaritan – I think it’s from the Gospel of Luke. It kind of starts out with a lawyer asking Jesus, really sly and casual about how to achieve eternal life, like he’s asking for the secret code. In Luke’s version, Jesus, of course, answers the way he did in the Matthew version, saying that you’ve got to love God with all you’ve got, and then you have to love your neighbor as yourself. Well, remember I said the dude asking the question was a lawyer, right? Of course, he’s got an angle or a loophole in mind, so he has a follow-up question. “And who is my neighbor?” he asks,” probably giving his best Speaker of the House look.

That’s when he thought he had Jesus, but Jesus started to spin the story of the man traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho who was attacked by robbers, beaten, stripped, and left for dead. He talked about the holy priest when ambled by and crossed to the other side of the street, probably tut-tutting along the way in total disdain. Then a Levite, a big important guy in Biblical times, probably much like a senator or Speaker of the House-type, came by and he also kept on going. Maybe he sent ‘thoughts and prayers,’ but it doesn’t say that in the story.

It wasn’t until a Samaritan (the Biblical equivalent of an immigrant or worse – a minority!) happened by that the poor nearly dead man got even a second look. The Samaritan used his own clothes, money, and traveling goods to care for the injured man, and even found the guy a safe place to stay and recuperate for a few days. When he’d finished telling the story, I’d like to think that Jesus winked before asking the now-chastened lawyer, “Which of these three do you think was the neighbor to the poor guy who fell among the thieves?”

I don’t expect the Speaker of the House, or even my mother for that matter, to have a change of heart or begin to see how far we have fallen from being a compassionate people – if we ever really were. But even though I know it means I’ll probably end up ridiculed and mocked or sent away by the men in the blue suits with the flag pins and the closed hearts for being one of the ones who fed the hungry and offered shelter to the poor and broken, I hope that knowing who my neighbor is will be enough comfort to cushion the blows of hate that will befall all of us whose hearts are filled with compassion and who really do try to ‘walk the walk’ and not just blather on about Jesus while crushing others under our heels as we climb what we think is the stairway to heaven.