Loving our neighbours is a fairly important theme of the teachings of Jesus. In fact he sums up the whole of the Judaic law with just two sentences, one of which is about neighbours and harks back to the injunctions in Leviticus 19 . In Mark 12:31 Jesus makes is clear that loving our neighbours is as important as loving God! But I notice that few of our hymns celebrate our neighbours.
That may be because it is harder to love our neighbours than love our God. With God we have a certain amount of latitude. I would not be the first to say that we can make God in our own image. However with our neighbours it is a different matter. There they are, certainly not transcendent, in all their humanity and the evidence suggests that they are not all than lovable. Above all they are just like us and sometimes we find it hard to even love ourselves.
The HSBC bank has recently released a fascinating survey on what we Brits think of our neighbours. Alas it is hardly out of the pages of the Bible - Old or New Testament! I have a feeling that much could be found in similar surveys in most other countries and cultures.
Here is the UK the survey found that one in six (16%) of people have complained to their neighbours directly about a grievance, one in ten (10%) have complained about one of their neighbours to other neighbours and more than one in twenty (6%) have gone so far as to call the police to complain about them.
Top gripes include:
That may be because it is harder to love our neighbours than love our God. With God we have a certain amount of latitude. I would not be the first to say that we can make God in our own image. However with our neighbours it is a different matter. There they are, certainly not transcendent, in all their humanity and the evidence suggests that they are not all than lovable. Above all they are just like us and sometimes we find it hard to even love ourselves.
The HSBC bank has recently released a fascinating survey on what we Brits think of our neighbours. Alas it is hardly out of the pages of the Bible - Old or New Testament! I have a feeling that much could be found in similar surveys in most other countries and cultures.
Here is the UK the survey found that one in six (16%) of people have complained to their neighbours directly about a grievance, one in ten (10%) have complained about one of their neighbours to other neighbours and more than one in twenty (6%) have gone so far as to call the police to complain about them.
Top gripes include:
- Being noisy early in the morning or late at night (28%)
- Playing loud music or learning musical instruments (23%)
- Stealing parking place on road (20%)
- Being nosey / interfering (19%)
- Poor upkeep on their gardens / house exterior (18%)
- Being noisy in their garden (18%)
- Having parties (16%)
- Noisy children / trampolines / balls coming over fence (15%)
- Pets (14%)
- Always wanting to speak to me when I'd rather not (11%)
