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4.9 – Neighbors & insiders: The Good Samaritan
James examines the story of The Good Samaritan.
Receiving a new story
Share ways in which you have noticed the content, questions or insights from the previous Module showing up in your lives.
Evolution
Join the conversation around these questions:
- Describe someone who has been a mentor in your life. What about this person inspired you?
- What qualities or abilities of your mentor did you try to incorporate into your life?
- How did those qualities or abilities express themselves in your life?
Food for thought
- The approach in Paul’s letters is not “do X, and then you will become Y”, but rather, “Because you are finding yourself X, so do Y”.
- How does this change your approach to being good?
- What is the use or function of a moral code in Paul’s configuration?
- How does this change your approach to being good?
- Discuss the perspective of the Priest and the Levite: How was it possible for them to see their own actions as good and Godly?
- In what ways might we be falling into a similar pattern of goodness?
- What was so “good” about the Samaritan?
- How – and who – was he imitating flexibly and not mechanically?
- What was so “good” about the Samaritan?
- In what ways might we be falling into a similar pattern of goodness?
- What was important about having a Samaritan be the bearer of truth? In what ways did it challenge or stretch the lawyer?
- What “bearer of truth” might challenge or stretch you in the same way?
Wrap-up question
What prejudices or moral codes prohibit you from showing mercy to a hated other or unheard voice?
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In the Discussion Forum of this unit, share ways in which you have noticed the content, questions or insights from the previous session showing up in your lives.
Sheelah, thank you for your comments and for sharing James’s quotation regarding the ‘grandeur of creation erupting through subtle changes in the relationships among ordinary people.’ I notice this reality as an inner peace that I don’t talk much about yet, but which is more and more present in my life. This quiet reality replaces conditioned (social other) personal responses at unexpected times and places. For example, when I stand in a grocery store check-out line, or when I present in front of a large group, or when I respond to what previously would have been unwelcome interruptions to cherished daily routines. This inner sense of peace and gratefulness expands the space for me even as it finds room for itself through me. Is this the experience of secondary beacon-ness? I read “secondary beacon” but haven’t until now connected the term to real time and real events happening to me. Now I am grateful to sink into this new, and most ancient, way of being.
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In the Discussion Forum for this module, join the conversation around these questions: Describe someone who has been a mentor in your life. What about this person inspired you? What qualities or abilities of your mentor did you try to incorporate into your life? How did those qualities or abilities express themselves in your life?
When April arrives each year, as it has now, I begin my daily four-mile pilgrimages. Rain or shine, I walk through nearby Mason City’s neighborhoods http://bit.ly/2nfLUPt accompanied by Harry Caldwell, Professor of Geography and my graduate advisor at the University of Idaho. Harry was a significant mentor in my life. Although Harry died many years ago, he remains with me on my walks because it was he who introduced me to the significance and meaning of borders in spatial analysis.
Now as I walk through Mason City, I search for evidence revealing the many natural and artificial boundaries that signal the end of one and the beginning of the next neighborhood. I wonder how and why these areas of town differ as I cross the boundaries separating one region from another. What’s it like to live in the central business district? How would my life change if I lived in nearby, expensive areas like Rock Glen or River Heights? Homeowners there surround their communities with stone walls. One wonders if they allow pilgrims to walk along their secluded bluffs or down below in the river valley.
How then can I relate my urban area walks to my faith journey? Jesus, the Forgiving Victim, walks alongside in my daily peregrinations firmly yet lovingly encouraging me to engage the people I meet. The Rev. Marlin Whitmer, another of my mentors, used a Greek term for Jesus’s companionship – ‘parakaleo,’ which means walking alongside. http://bit.ly/2nNSxF7
I thought of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales when I began writing this. Now, equally as unbidden here in the last paragraph, Gerry and the Pacemakers’ 1963 song “You’ll Never Walk Alone” http://bit.ly/2oIiXMB comes to mind. We all need neighbors as we walk through life, whether we live in the fourteenth, the twentieth, or the twenty-first century. Daily walking “restoreth my soul” http://bit.ly/2pd71hT as the Psalmist wrote. Mentors; chance encounters – human and canine; the past, present, and future all dance within the steps of each daily pilgrimage.
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How very true Rich, community is essential on the spiritual path. We live today in a world that vaunts individualism, which has resulted in a great deal of isolation and self absorption. In Girardian circles the word interdividual is so much more relevant, that is, the web of interconnectedness which is community, with all its messy difficulties and rivalries, but where we learn to care for, and find God in the other.
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In the Discussion Forum for this module, join the conversation around – “The approach in Paul’s letters is not ‘do X, and then you will become Y,’ but rather, ‘Because you are finding yourself X, so do Y.’ ”
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Rules that say Do X to become Y, until I took this course, described my approach to personal morality. It took me a while to complete this particular post because I acknowledge here a release from dependence upon unstated external rules to manufacture goodness.God’s creative love, the only real foundation of righteousness, is not about producing virtue or based on any particular morality code. St. Paul writes that goodness comes like this – Because I find myself X, so I do Y.
Because this course introduced me to a new way of knowing and experiencing God’s love, now I share that love with others. I first became conscious of this change during daily walks through the same neighborhoods where I’ve lived the past forty-two years. Jesus, the other Other, walks alongside me on these rambles. Then, as close as my breathing in and my breathing out, I remember Christ-Presence throughout the remainder of the day.
What I feel while walking calms and energizes at the same time. I feel loved walking and so find myself acting lovingly toward others at later times and in other places. I remain calm in the company of ‘social situation shoulds’ that before would only have irritated. Now as my fears evaporate, some quickly and some not so fast, I speak and act with a loving purpose that becomes apparent through no mental gymnastics but in the words and the actions themselves.
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