Loving Your Closest Neighbor

My friends talk a lot these days about how to spend more time with others in person. We sincerely wish we could be more present with the people we care about most. And we all acknowledge that our screens get in the way. We want to be personally attentive, but battle the incessant magnetism of our phones.

In Alone Together, Sherry Turkle explains that we’re inclined to prefer digital screens to conversing in person—we’d rather text than talk. We might rather text a person than talk with them face-to-face, especially when we anticipate a difficult conversation. Or we find ourselves texting someone else rather than talking to the person right in front of us, “Wait, I need to send this text.” The trouble is, we tend to interact with our phones impulsively, without ever making a decision. But sometimes we even do it on purpose.

Why? Through myriads of interviews Turkle identified a painful everyday reason and common refrain that we can’t blame on our phones: “people are so disappointing.” But it’s not just any people. The reality is, it’s me and my people. My people are disappointing and I’m a disappointment, even to myself. So, we tend to turn away from one another without thinking it through. The phone just provides a handy escape mechanism.

Disappointing relatives, colleagues, and friends did not arrive on the scene in 2007 with the first iPhone. As C.S. Lewis remarked in 1948, “Either at work or at home, either the people who employ you or those whom you employ, either those who share your house or those whose house you share, either your in-laws or your parents or children, your wife or your husband, are making life harder for you than it need be even in these days.”

Lewis writes retrospectively, household disappointments started in our first family, with our first parents. As Adam said immediately after the Fall, “The woman whom you gave to me to be with me, she gave me the fruit of the tree, and I ate.” The alienation is palpable. And forevermore, we can and do disappoint one another, remembering that we ourselves disappoint our loved ones as well.

Lewis describes what we might call “prime relationships,” everyday relationships that we either must maintain or most want to maintain with family members, friends, neighbors, co-workers, colleagues, and clients. Strangers don’t disappoint. When disappointed, we might say, “This is not what I signed up for!” And we’d be right. We don’t “sign up” for prime relationships, we’re born and brought into them. The few close relationships we do choose quickly become like all the rest. The people who disappoint us are “givens” in our lives—they’re essentially inescapable. In fact, we do love them and yet we may struggle to be fully present even when we know they deserve and need our presence.

If we’re going to become more personally present with the people who matter most, we have hard work to do. How do we start? What should our expectations be? Enter the Gospel. The good news is that God will bring reconciliation we cannot accomplish ourselves. But to better turn toward others we have to turn to Him first and ask for help. Our reconciliation with God and man should show up at home first. We’re right to want to be more attentive in our close relationships, in close quarters.

In The Four Loves, C. S. Lewis introduces God’s expectations and standards through what he refers to as “domestic courtesy,” true affection in practice.

Affection at its best practises a courtesy which is incomparably more subtle, sensitive, and deep than the public kind. In public a ritual would do. At home you must have the reality which that ritual represented….Hence the old proverb “come live with me and you’ll know me.”

Who we are in the privacy of our own homes is who we really are. And the people in our prime relationships who are with us every day know it. The gospel standard is clear: we are called to love our neighbors as ourselves. And our closest neighbors are not next door. They’re in the house.

So, what are God’s standards at home?  Lewis says that the root principle is, “that no one give preference to himself.” Simple to understand; simple to remember; impossible to do in our own strength. When I’m at home, my phone gives preference to myself over presence with my family. I’m not really “in the house,” even if I’m telling myself I want to be.

But truthfully, we do long to live in a world where our closest relationships are marked by trust and love. Practicing domestic courtesy introduces a humble grace that loves through the moments when our loved ones disappoint us, and through the moments when we disappoint our loved ones. If  we learn this courtesy at home, we’ll be able to practice it everywhere. If we don’t practice it faithfully at home, over time we will disappoint people everywhere.

Domestic courtesy allows us to practice a form of presence that faces up to disappointments rather than screening them out. It introduces patterns of life in which we turn toward others faithfully, seeking their good, not our own good; considering their interests more highly than our own; and outdoing one another in showing honor. And when we practice it even modestly well, we build trust and love.

Calvin Troup is the President of Geneva College in Beaver Falls, PA and he is a ruling elder at Grace Reformed Presbyterian Church. Calvin and his wife Amy have four married daughters and many grandchildren.