Daily Affirmations - Day 1- The Greatest of These: Who Qualifies?

This week's Theme: The Greatest of These

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Day 1: Who qualifies?

We were sad when our grandparents moved from "The Blue House" to another house farther up on Back Street. But in time we got used to it.

It was an old house, and not nearly as exciting as the other house. This one did not have a sealed off lower story, dark, mysterious, wide open to every kind of imaginative invention— adventure, horror, dark fantasy, or spellbinding thriller.

But it had rooms with enough space between the Celotex [i] walls and the ceilings for us to vault ourselves into locked rooms and forbidden spaces. And next door at the top of a dark, winding staircase, lived the three mysterious landladies who seemed to be altogether from a time and place far removed from our own "modern" world.

Their mystique, was of course, fuel for our active imaginations, especially for the younger pair of us. My eldest sister lived full time with our grandparents and had a much broader view of life, (relatively speaking), but to my second sister and me, tucked away most of the time in the far rural north, the main reference point for anything strange and unknown came from books.

Had we known Dickens at the time, the landladies would definitely have been a sort of "Miss Havisham"[ii] — with their lofty, intimidating presence and the thick veil of distance and preservation that had settled over rooms full of books, old musical instruments, and other antiquities. Instead, we borrowed from Greek mythology— a major part of story time with our dad— and they became to us the Gorgon Sisters.[iii]

We rarely saw the Gorgons, and never outside their secluded enclave. A thick wall separated their main house from the rental property our grandparents occupied. An even thicker wall of class, and means, and circumstances separated their lives from ours.

Years later, I marvel at it— the artificial barrier that separated two worlds that might have both benefitted from connection. It could be my over-active, little-girl imagination still running out of control, but I would love to go back to questions that were never voiced, and conversations that never happened, about rooms full of antiques and novel things that represented worlds and people I never knew.

"Do you really play that harp in the corner?"

"And what about the piano?"

"Did you know anyone on the Titanic?"

(Perhaps they could have told us more about how the passengers sang "Nearer my God to Thee" as the Titanic was sinking; and all the other fascinating things our neighbor in the country had told my sister from her time working as a maid with an English family).

But those conversations never happened, and I am left wondering, Who were the "Gorgons," really? Were they lonely? Were they happy? Could the chatter and curious questions of three little girls have opened a doorway to mutual enrichment from sharing and exchanging?

I'll never know. But I do know that fear, uninformed opinions, false paradigms of superiority and inferiority, and hyper-focus on differences continue to divide and separate and vilify. They continue to create Gorgons out of harmless neighbors, and who knows what out of ordinary little children. They continue to create walls of hate and hostility, apathy and indifference.

In Jesus's parable of The Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37), it is noteworthy that the Samaritan, the one who stopped to show compassion to the one beaten, bruised, and bloody, is the one who would least likely have corresponded to our perspective of "neighbor" — (for Jews do not associate with Samaritans) — (John 4:9). And it is equally noteworthy that this is the example Jesus gives us to follow: "Go and do likewise" (Luke 10:37).

The apostle Paul speaks to changed perspective when he gives the "before and after" mindset of those who are truly transformed by the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ: And [Jesus] died for all... So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view (2 Corinthians 5:15-16).

In his discourse on love written in another letter to the same group of believers, Paul conveyed the same idea: When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me (1 Corinthians 13:11).

And as he concludes his teaching on love, he highlights faith, hope, and love as the virtues that will outlast all the gifts and special abilities we have been given: "But the greatest of these is love" (1 Corinthians 13:13).

So as I look at those around me in full kaleidoscope, I resolve to actively guard against looking for loopholes in God's commandments— against setting up filters to determine who qualifies as my neighbor. And I pray that I would leave all my Gorgon imaginings in the childish past, and love my neighbor as myself (Luke 10:27).

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[i]  A common building material that was later the subject of litigation around its safety

[ii] A primary character in Charles Dickens’ novel, Great Expectations

[iii] From Greek mythology – three monstrous sisters – Stheno, Euryale, and Medusa