What About Thy Neighbour?

You've heard the story
You know how it goes
Once upon a garden
We were lovers with no clothes

Fresh from the soil
We were beautiful and true
In control of our emotions
'Til we ate the poison fruit

And now it's hard to be
Hard to be
Hard to be a decent human being.

- David Bazan, 'Hard To Be'

On my street, living over the road from me, there are two families. On the right, at number 25, are the Parkers -- Mr and Mrs Parker, and their four sons. They're a white, middle-class, christian family, involved in the YWAM (Youth With A Mission) organisation down the road. We have lived opposite them for about ten years.

The house on the left, number 27, is home to a large family of Afghani refugees. They are a muslim family, not at all wealthy, and their children go to the local school. At one stage, there were about fourteen people living in the average-sized suburban house. They have lived there for about five years.

A couple of years ago, when my parents decided to put down paving stones beside the house, the Afghani boys and their father were over like a flash. They brought their slightly uncertain smiles and their hardworking generosity, and within an hour or so, the job was done.

In the evening, the middle daughter, Fatimeh, brought over warm, Afghani-style flatbread, with a smile and her long winter coat and her hand-me-down ensemble of clothes in the hot evening sun. It was not the first nor the last time that they would bring over food, or gifts from father's trips back home.

Countless small kindnesses have passed between our two families over the past years. We sponsored Fatimeh to go to a better intermediate school -- she fed and visited our cat religiously and collected the mail and watered the plants when we went on holiday. They borrowed our lawnmower, we gave them our childhood bicycles. And all the while, the Parkers went about their lives, busy with their churches or their jobs or whatever they did, the boys in the driveway, having loud and juvenile shouting matches with their father while packing the car to go to their christian music festivals.

And then my mum's illness began to get worse, and my dad began to have to transfer her from the car to the chair each morning and evening, and vice versa -- a change that was plain for anyone to see, especially those living in perfect line of sight. And if ever the Afghanis were on their driveway in the afternoons, from time to time, one of them would be sure to make the crossing over the road, offering forth their broken English. "Not good, not good," they would say, gesturing at Mum concernedly -- "We very angry for you."

But the Parkers, all throughout the past five years of Mum's deterioration, have never said a word. Barely a hello, let alone any kind of expression of concern or neighbourly interest. While they busily go about their church lives, evangelising and enabling and supporting missionaries off all around the world, it seems that they have forgotten the most basic christian ideal. Loving thy neighbour.

It's not as if it's difficult. No-one can offer a cure for suffering, nor try to explain it away. There is no justifying what my family is facing -- three terminal illnesses. People have said to Mum, "It's not God's will that you're this way." That just makes me angry. It is a redundant platitude. When you are suffering, and it is something beyond your control, you don't need people to tell you that it's all some cosmic mistake. How are we ever going to know why things happen the way they do? The act of simply noticing, acknowledging, and expressing regret is enough.

We're united by our collective ignorance, our common suffering. And when you strip it away, all you can do is love your god, and love people. I don't know about the rest. Maybe, today, I don't really want to.