Meet thy neighbour

We have never met H’s neighbour. There were some stories circulating at the pub that he is a bit weird, that his daughter smokes quite a lot of pot and that once, last year, they had some problems with rats. Don’t get me wrong, we are not being cautious or keeping to ourselves, if we had even bumped into him we would have said hello, we just never saw him (or at least I never did).

Last week a friend of the neighbour’s daughter gave H. a bit more background. The man had been a successful academic, but was involved in a car accident that killed his wife when the daughter was a baby. He never recovered and basically began to drink. That was more than 25 years ago.

Oh God, I thought. This situation clearly warranted a lot of accompaniment before it got out of hand. Why did his community let that happen? Twenty five years of isolation and alcohol addiction? And where were the bloody Christians?

They were trapped in liberal norms that warrant that we simply don’t get involved in strangers’ lives. Trapped in a neoliberal panopticon of sorts. Trapped in a dis-membered church. They were just as isolated as he was.

And I too am trapped in these norms. I too operate within their bounds. Sometimes I try to budge these norms a bit, I try to be approachable. If people want my company, they can have it. But I’d still feel weird knocking on this guy’s door. I feel compelled to function within the realm of what’s expected.

Incidentally, I think that this might be one of the reasons why Western Christians "worry" so much about the homeless. The homeless’ plight is highly visible; it seems to call for immediate action. When travelling to remote places in the countryside, you’ll find that socially-minded people "worry" about the inner-city ghettos. The visible poverty functions as a reminder that we should be doing more to help.

But the sad truth is that we simply don’t have fellowship at all, within or outside the church. Without fellowship, the visible poverty is the only one we’ll see, and the only one we’ll seek to intervene against.

If you’ve been following this blog for a little while you’ll have gathered that my favourite sport these days is to communicate to “the mainstream church” exactly what I think of it. So I wondered, what was the mainstream church going to do in our neighbour’s case?

Turns out that it doesn’t take all that much for the church to be interested in your fate, but they need to know about you, and they also need a half-decent reason to suppose that you would welcome their help.

All it actually takes for people to get a visit from their chaplain when –say- they’re in hospital is to specify on a form that their religious affiliation is Anglican, or Catholic, or Presbyterian or whatever. Similarly, if they’ve seen you in church maybe just a couple of times, and someone informs them of the stuff you’re going through, they can (and will) get in touch. In its own clumsy ways, the mainstream church is also trying to be present and to not let people face these kinds of tragedies on their own.

But at the end of the day, what worries me is that I don’t have a clue how to communicate with H’s neighbour without breaching the usual social norms of polite indifference.