For those of you who prefer to read off paper rather than a screen, I have converted this entry into an easily printable pdf file:
I’m sitting in the shadows of a nameless and overcrowded city, watching the janitor at the motel take his smoke break.
The ancient wisdom teaches us to love our neighbour as ourself and also to forgive our enemies. But what about the multitude who fall into neither category? I don’t have many enemies (that I know of) and ‘neighbour’ always feels like it applies to people who are more connected to me, whether it’s friends, colleagues, relatives, congregation members, the local barista, or my literal neighbours. What about all the others?
Learning to love a total stranger, someone we have no connection to, owe no obligations to, can ask no favour from, whose only relation to us is that they exist on this small planet at the same time we do — maybe that gives us a view into the mind of God and a less self-centric model of loving. And when I say ‘learning’ to love, what I mean is realising that we already do love the strangers around us; and not in a generic, ‘we are all one human race’ kind of way, but in a personal, individualised way.
But all this is just a roundabout way to avoid the pressing question: what do I do about the love I feel for the motel janitor sitting on the plastic deck chair in the shade, smoking a cheap cigarette for fifteen minutes before his break ends? Why do I love him? And why is the love I have for him different from the other types of love I have for my wife and my family and my friends?
This is a strange love, less emotional than other forms, but also less rational. The janitor can do nothing for me, he doesn’t even know I exist. And yet I am happy for him. Happy he is smoking that cigarette, happy he gets to put his feet up for a few minutes, appreciative that he does the job he does, a job I would find demeaning and perform poorly. I am grateful for his humility, for his work ethic. But I’m not composing a hagiography. I don’t know if he’s a ‘good person’ (or whether I’m even qualified to judge that), or how he treats others, or even if he’s content with his life. He might be miserable and vengeful, he might abuse family members and steal from his employer and lie to his friends. And yet I love him.
There’s something about other human beings, something we can’t shake no matter how many times we call ourselves ‘dog moms’ or advise our friends to ‘cut out toxic people’ or enter into relationships with AI chatbots. We are drawn to other people and we eventually tire of their poor alternatives and imitators. And our desires to be loved and accepted and understood and supported each have a mirror-image, another set of needs that we often forget: we all need to not only be loved but to express love, to be forgiven but also forgive others. We have a pressing need to support others, care about others. Our souls become malformed when we only receive and do not give.
There is a lot of airtime spent on ideas of ‘giving too much’, about ‘not setting yourself on fire to keep others warm’, but my observation has not been that we live in a world where people are giving too much and caring about themselves too little. I doubt you actually know a lot of really selfless people who need to take a break from all the giving they’re doing. We live in a primarily self-centred world, which must mean that most of us are self-centred people.
Anyway, back to the janitor on smoke break. In an instant, I realise that I love him and that I care about him and that I’m happy for him — that he is alive, that he has a job, that he can sit and rest for a few minutes with a cigarette. Small joys? Maybe. But not half-bad when you’re scraping through life in a poor and corrupt country. But there is a strange and nuanced element: my care for him doesn’t require me to intervene in his life. I see him sitting there, sucking in chemicals that are poisoning his lungs, indulging in an addiction that increases his chances of contracting horrible diseases, and yet I am happy for him. I am happy for him even though he is doing something I would never do, something I would advise every friend to quit. So what is this kind of care if it doesn’t compel me to tell him the error of his ways? That doesn’t even make me feel concerned for him?
I think this is a type of love which I’m not familiar with, a love that doesn’t centre on me and what I should be doing, how I am feeling, where I need to alter my behaviour or decide what I want to say or do. It was a love that briefly recognised the fully independent, sacred, wondrous humanity of another person without anything that needed to be fixed. The janitor is no more lost or broken than I am, and if smoking a cigarette in the shady corner of the dilapidated carpark made him a sliver more content, then there was joy in that.
This is not the only form, or even the main form, that love takes. We do have obligations and responsibilities when we are part of a family or a church or a community. And other forms of love do compel us to take action, to have difficult conversations, to caution the people we love about their behaviours. But realising the inherent loveliness of each person, not as a project to fix or as a soul to save or as a new relationship to build, but simply as another precious human, an image-bearer of the divine spark, a fellow passenger on the boat, a bewildered traveller on the same road — maybe that is a starting point to change how we interact in the world and the billions of our brothers and sisters within it.
Good reflections that mirror my own. I particularly like "It was a love that briefly recognised the fully independent, sacred, wondrous humanity of another person without anything that needed to be fixed. The janitor is no more lost or broken than I am... realising the inherent loveliness of each person, not as a project to fix or as a soul to save or as a new relationship to build, but simply as another precious human, an image-bearer of the divine spark, a fellow passenger on the boat, a bewildered traveller on the same road...' Very nice.
Reminds me of a story the character Zosima recounts in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov:
“My young brother asked forgiveness of the birds: it seems senseless, yet it is right, for all is like an ocean, all flows and connects; touch it in one place and it echoes at the other end of the world. [...] Let it be madness to ask forgiveness of the birds, still it would be easier for the birds, and for a child, and for any animal near you, if you yourself were more gracious than you are now, if only by a drop, still it would be easier.”
Do you ever experience that feeling you had for the stranger with life more generally (i.e., with stranger-ers)? Or, do you feel there’s something about your shared humanity with this stranger that strikes something different?