Love thy neighbor. Along with the sweeping idea of loving God, all of human history hangs on that concept of doing something nice for the man who lives next door. Unthinkable. Leviticus 19:18 and Matthew 22:36-40 say as much. Anthony Esolen has a great big piece in the Touchstone archives about the matter. He says what most of us already know, that in America, we seem to be very detached neighbors. This isn’t the case everywhere, to be sure. But as a rule, there it is. We used to be good neighbors, and now we are not. Esolen thinks it’s a matter of economics.

If your house needs a new roof (ours does), every man on your street has at one time or another put a new roof on his own or a neighbor’s house. If the pump to your well needs to be filled and primed and started (ours did), the fellow up the road is good at that and will come over to show how it’s done.

If an enormous half-dead spruce is hanging over your house (one is) and needs to be dispatched, the old man with the perpetual yard sale, who once lived in your house and enlarged the kitchen and dug the well and hung swings in the barn, will bring back his chainsaw from his grandson’s in Halifax and gather a couple of men to help you chop it down. That man is on the yonder side of eighty.

And he makes an even better point: “There is yet another cause of neighborlessness, one so obvious it surprises me that no theologian I know of has remarked upon it, not even the pope, keenly attuned to the bodily nature of man though he be. Home-schoolers know what it is. Simply this: You cannot have a neighborhood when no one is home. Neighborhood life does require the fostering arts of wives and mothers.”

This is why my wife and daughters are now best friends with the two elderly men who live on our cul-de-sac, and why our property values have increased: because my family keeps criminals off the street during the day and makes the place seem a little more alive, when they are in the front yard, or sitting by the large living room windows, or walking to the park. Neighborhood watch, for real.  But, we can’t go back. We can never go back. But we can move forward and figure out some kind of way to become better neighbors, to be more involved, to welcome the new family to their new home, to ask to borrow something just to have a reason to talk to the man. A great essay.