From “Love Your Neighbor: How Psychology Can Enliven Faith and Transform Community” by Katherine M. Douglas and Brittany M. Tausen
Your Neighbor Is Wherever You Are
The encounter becomes increasingly perplexing when considering the proximity and propinquity effects. The Samaritan and the Jewish man should have never ended up in the same place at the same time. The Jewish man was likely going out of his way to avoid passing directly through Samaria, as most Jews did, and yet, it was a Samaritan who came to his rescue. What this seems to imply, then, is that the people whom we come across and randomly bump into, even those who don’t like us and actively avoid us, are our neighbors. The next obvious question, then, is, Where am I? Am I putting myself in spaces to spontaneously engage with others? What about others who don’t like me? In the world of theology, this has been called enacted space. This concept recognizes that the environments in which we live, the places we frequent, the paths we travel, and how we travel them, all promote or prohibit connection with others and thus our opportunity to participate in the work God is already doing around us. This was certainly the case for the good Samaritan, who could have never been “a neighbor” to the Jewish man if it were not for the fact they were traveling along the same road at the same time.
According to this parable, neighbors are not just those who live around us, and not just those who are different from us, but anyone and everyone with whom our paths cross. Studies on proximity help us to see how narrow our scope of neighbor has become, limited to (maybe) those who are immediately next door. The propinquity effect emphasizes how incredibly important it is to locate ourselves in spaces that give us the opportunity to be neighborly. Those who are near me at any given point in time – they are my neighbors. Those whose paths I cross virtually online – they are my neighbors. Those whom I drive past on my way to work – they are my neighbors. Those whom I encounter when traveling abroad – they are my neighbors. Those whom I actively try to avoid and still bump into running errands – they are my neighbors. Jesus challenged a traditional definition of neighbor, teaching us that our neighbors are wherever we find ourselves at any given point in time.