When Disaster Hits: We Are All Neighbors.

“Neighbors bring food with death and flowers with sickness and little things in between.”

--Harper Lee

It was a fire but it was so much more than just a fire.

It was a nine-alarm inferno that called forth firefighters and fire companies from sixteen area towns and cities. It was a fire that started small but then exploded into a huge conflagration, one that in just thirteen hours destroyed a block’s worth of businesses, local shops that had been as steady and dependable as daybreak, for so many years. The fire took away a printer, a dance studio, a knitting and fabric store, a religious reading room, and a Chinese restaurant. It erased familiar landmarks, places easy to take for granted, storefronts we pass by daily. The fire wiped away years of commerce: livelihoods lost, lifelong dreams of starting a small business brought down by a spark.

And the fire broke our hearts: the hearts of all of us who love that downtown, the hearts of a whole town and even region and why?

Because it hurt our neighbors. Because even if this Main Street was not your Main Street, we each still know how important it is to be a neighbor and to love and be loved by the neighbors we share this world with.

Neighbors: the friends we know and are known by in a specific geographic space, that we call our neighborhood. That’s the special place where we are bound one to another: not by blood, not by profession, not by pedigree but instead by myriad points of social connection, the profound and everyday relationships we share with all of the people who make up our lives. The man who serves us a hot cup of morning coffee at the corner shop, the kind woman who cuts our hair and does it just so, the school crossing guard who watches out for our kids with gentleness and safety, the coach who teaches our kids and gives them the confidence to play ball, the wise and patient craftswoman who taught us how to knit.

These neighborly relationships form us into community and bind us one to another. In church and synagogue and mosque. On the playground and at the town dump. At town meeting and at the local July 4^th parade. Neighborhoods are where we learn (or do not learn) how to be a good citizen, how to help out a neighbor in need with a casserole or a ride to the doctor, how to know it is our civic responsibility to volunteer in our local community, and to live a life not just for self alone.

Sometimes our neighbors even become our family.

This past weekend I officiated at the wedding of my niece and her fiancé and there in the assembly of guests were so many neighbors, friends who had grown up side by side with each other in a town that they love and call home.  Many of them had moved to town from far away, and were separated from their families of origin by distance and so many miles.  Yet they were with family on that joyous Saturday afternoon: the friends and neighbors who are their family. The folks next door or the next block over who watch out for each other’s kids and carpool to faraway soccer fields and vacation together and celebrate holidays and holy days, and all because are neighbors.

In one of the most profound of sacred passages from my faith tradition, a man asks a wise teacher asks, “Who is my neighbor?”  That is the question, and not just for when a fire strikes. This just may be the question for these days, when the bond of neighbor is under great strain, as cynical and hard-hearted politicians try to convince us as Americans, that the definition of neighbor is very narrow. To them, neighbor is only someone who looks like you or talks like you or votes like you or worships like you. No one else need apply.

Me? I need my neighbors and they need me. I need a neighborhood where people know my name, where I feel at home. I need friends who are like family. I need to remember that I cannot get through this life alone, that instead my God creates me to be connected to others, as a good neighbor.

The sad part is that sometimes it takes a disaster like a fire to remind us of this truth. So, go forth and be a good neighbor today. A little bit of neighborly love is all it takes.