One of the fruits of meditating is a greater tolerance of others. It sometimes happens, even with close friends, that one of them will suddenly turn on us, or seem to reject us. It is then all too easy to withdraw and break off the relationship – unless we learn to recognise that our friend is nearly always projecting onto us some problem of their own. All we need to do is bide our time, keeping the relationship open. As a former Abbess of Stanbrook Abbey once wrote, ‘What a mystery is friendship. Some we have to carry, while others carry us.’ This is what Jesus meant by inviting us to love our neighbour as ourself. We are all journeying men and women and need to be there for one another.
Tag: love thy neighbour
Loving our neighbour
Jesus’s command to his followers is not as simple as it sounds. We have first to learn how to love ourselves before we can love anyone else. That does not mean being self-obsessed, but learning to come to terms with our own contradictions, hidden aggressions, lusts, vanities – with what Jung termed our shadow side. Only then can we love our neighbour as ourself, without any projections or expectations, but simply to be alongside them when needed.
We once seemed to have lost a sense of community and neighbourliness, especially in towns and cities; but the lockdown of 2020 during the pandemic has begun to revive awareness of our neighbours, as people reach out to each other in ways that have not been seen for many decades.