Take Good Care of the Garden and the Dogs by Heather Lende

Author:Heather Lende
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2010-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

Good Neighbors

Love one another

as I have loved you.

— John 13:34

On Sunday, Nancy Nash played all the evangelical hymns, including every verse of “Amazing Grace.” One former Holy Roller, as my mother would have called him, couldn’t help raising his hands in praise. His faith was pulling on them with a spiritual force the opposite of gravity. He couldn’t keep them down if he tried. This doesn’t happen in most Episcopal churches, and rarely in ours. It has never happened to me, but while I used to snicker a bit at such open displays of faith, now I admire them. I know what Anne Lamott means when she says she may just slap one of those fish stickers on her car. (I have put a very small THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH WELCOMES YOU decal on mine.) This was also not the day to point out pet peeves with fellow worshippers. It was what I call “Love Your Neighbor Sunday.” The lessons and the sermon were the ones in which, Jan says, “the rubber meets the road.”

This was the annual Sunday where we are reminded of the two rules that define our duty as Christians: loving God and loving our neighbor. All the rest are details. The Gospel reading was from John and included the story of Jesus giving his followers a new commandment: that we love one another as he has loved us. Expanding on that in her homily, Jan reminded us of the words those of us raised in the Episcopal Church used to hear at the beginning of every service (and that we sometimes still do). They’re from the 1928 prayer book:

Hear what our Lord Jesus Christ saith.

THOU shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it; Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.

It’s pretty clear that if we all obeyed these commandments we would live peacefully and, most likely, happily ever after. The trouble is that while it sounds so simple, it is very hard to do. Especially when March comes in like a tsunami and goes out like a chicken.

A few days after the service, I was washing dishes and listening to a story on NPR about tourists finally returning to Thailand and Sri Lanka after the Christmas tidal wave a few years ago that killed about 225,000 people. It is hard to grasp that kind of grief. All those babies, old people, and even a little boy climbing a tree — all suddenly dead in the most traumatic of ways. You’d think that much loss on one day would forever alter the way the whole planet feels, in the same way forest fires affect global warming. You’d think it would trigger global keening.

I was also thinking of friends with cancer and heart-aches, about the untimely death of another friend, and

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