On loving my neighbor

I met Blanca when I was two months postpartum with my oldest, Clarence. We were living in Boston, and it had snowed a big, wet, New England bomb cyclone. My husband was away filming, so I strapped Clarence into the carrier, zipped him into my coat, and went out to shovel. I had cleared a small portion of our driveway when I heard someone above me shouting “Aren’t you the woman with the baby? Are you crazy? I’m going to tell your husband what you do!” 

It was Blanca, our neighbor next door. I loved her immediately. She came and helped me to shovel the rest of the driveway and one parking spot, then had me quickly move my car into it before any of the other neighbors could take it. A few weeks later on Valentine’s, we brought her a slice of strawberry cake as a thank you for her help. She became quite emotional accepting it. It was then that we learned Blanca was a widow. Her husband had died more than fifteen years ago while her children were still in elementary school, suffering a heart attack after shoveling snow. Little wonder she had been so stressed by a newly postpartum mother shoveling alone.

After that, we made frequent visits to Blanca’s home, stopping by for half an hour on Sundays normally to chat and show her our growing baby. Blanca was our first neighbor to learn about Clarence’s allergies when he was diagnosed. Every Halloween for the next three years, Blanca had a bowl for the trick or treaters, and a bowl full of treats specifically for Clarence. When I protested that she was too generous, she waved off my concern “I don’t know what he likes, so I just get some of everything.” Every Christmas, Blanca would purchase Clarence a new coat, a treat, and a toy, often police themed.

That’s because Blanca’s son Alex was a police officer. She told us the story of how he joined the force. It was Alex, she said, who found her husband’s corpse on the floor. Alex who called the police to report an emergency. Alex who saw police officers refuse to let his mother in to identify the body until she stopped crying. “You’re upsetting your kids,” they snapped at her. Alex determined that day to become a police officer, and to do the job better. And he did. I have so many memories of Alex sitting with Clarence on the floor, passing a toy car back and forth across the linoleum. He is a good man. A gentle man. He and his younger brother Jason were Blanca’s joy. Blanca’s refrigerator was plastered in pictures of friends and family, but her living room was a celebration of her children.

 

Then COVID hit. As the shelter in place orders were instituted and remained for months and months, our 600 square foot apartment began to feel claustrophobic. So we made a picnic table on a patch of dirt in the back. Blanca donated some wood to the project, with the stipulation that we must make a mini picnic table for Clarence as well. It was probably the most adorable thing we’ve built to date. 

It was from this picnic table the afternoon before a large protest was scheduled in downtown Boston that I watched Alex boxing alone outside, clearly very stressed. Riots had been happening, and relations between the police and the public were explosive. Blanca came out with a plate of dinner and entreated him to eat. There was an intense, silent communication between them, and then Blanca nodded, put the plate on a chair, and returned inside. What a mother wouldn’t do for her son, I remember thinking. She later wept as she told me she had never seen Alex like this. Work was so bad, and he was trying so hard.

But it didn’t slow her down. All through COVID, Blanca frequently brought us groceries which she had received after waiting in lines many blocks long at the Catholic Church. Blanca had temporarily lost her job during the lockdown, and these weekly grocery drops kept her afloat at the time. She didn’t have much then, but what she had she loved to share. I would sometimes bring her homemade bread. And so she asked if I could teach her how to make Pan Sobao, a Puerto Rican bread she grew up with on the island. We spent the afternoon in her small kitchen together. Blanca brought over half the loaf when it was baked, and made two more the next day. It was, she told me after, her first time making bread.

A year later in July, a few months after Cal was born, we met up with Blanca to see the Independence Day fireworks. We took a picture together, and I thought about how grateful I was for the good people we had met over the last few years. People we loved deeply and would miss profoundly when we moved. We walked home together, and Blanca greeted each of the police officers as we walked. They were Alex’s friends. Her friends. The familiarity was beautiful.

 

Two weeks later, after a false child abuse accusation was levied against Josh and me, some of these same police officers would appear on our doorstep at 1AM on a Saturday morning to take our children from their beds and remove them to foster care. I recognized them. I asked if they knew Alex. They did. I told them we loved Alex and his mother. We were neighbors, friends. We begged them to reconsider. To come back in the morning when our children would be less confused and terrified. We called Blanca. We thought if only they could see her, maybe they wouldn’t do this. Miraculously, she answered. She came out of her house at 1:30 in the morning and watched for an hour while our life became an agony. And then she held me as I sobbed into her chest. This is my friend Blanca.

I hope you’ll forgive the long introduction, but it is necessary for you to understand what comes next.

I’m flashing forward more than a year. It has been months since we won back custody, packed up our one bedroom, said our tearful goodbyes to Blanca, and left her with a bread maker to remember us by. Months since our big adventurous move to rural Idaho. We have found a law firm and filed a lawsuit against the individuals involved in the removal of our children. The hope is to change policy. To set a precedent that you can’t show up with armed law officers and no warrant or paperwork and demand someone’s children. It is an important cause, I think. The change will offer protections to families far less fortunate and resourced than ours. And it’s a big case. It reaches headlines in national newspapers. 

Blanca sees these headlines, but she hears the news first from her son, Alex. His friends are listed as defendants, and he is worried for them, unsure what the lawsuit will mean for them personally and professionally. Blanca calls me. She says she does not understand. The police, they were just doing their jobs. Alex could have been there. His friend were there. Blanca’s friends. What happened was wrong, but surely this was wrong too? I hope you can see the goodness in her perspective. I can, even as I believe completely in the importance of our lawsuit.

I did my best to respond, but the end of the conversation felt like a death to me. I knew I would not hear from Blanca again.

 

This is my story but I do not think the experience is unique to me. All of us have and will find ourselves at odds with other people. Good people. Even people we love and who love us. Sometimes it’s a simple misunderstanding set right with better communication. Usually, the situation is more complicated.

Often, conflict is much more complicated than someone’s sin or moral failure. Usually, it isn’t as simple as who is right and who is wrong. Frequently, it arises out of complex situations with competing goods and competing approaches of doing and achieving good. The remarkable and difficult to stomach reality is that most people, most of the time, are not trying to harm each other. Most people, most of the time, are trying to be good. That is true of you, it is true of me, and it is true of the vast majority of people we dislike, people we disagree with, people we are in conflict with. Faced with the reality of other people, we remember that the purpose of life is not to be correct, but good.

I was reminded of this late last night when we were driving back from UT with a trailer we had just purchased off Facebook Marketplace. The trailer blew a tire. We pulled off the highway and tried to figure out what to do. We weren’t sure we’d be able to replace the trailer tire with our car’s spare. There were some men noisily occupying the street parallel to us, so Josh went over and asked if they might be able to help us. The men were obviously drunk. They had a flag with an expletive hanging outside their house. Their speech slurred. They made graphically inappropriate jokes. I didn’t like them. But they helped us. They lifted the trailer by hand. They removed the shredded tire. They attached the spare. And then, completely unprompted, they apologized. They were helping us, and they apologized several times for being drunk, for swearing, and for being a redneck. One of them said “You know, my dad was a bishop and my mom was a relief society president, and now look at me.” There was a real shame behind that admission. It surprised me. The human desire to do and be good always surprises me. 

I care a lot about peacemaking and depolarization. But in reality, in my actual interpersonal interactions with people, I find I am painfully and unattractively bad at it. As Dostoyevsky writes, love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams. 

I get defensive. I get tribal. I blanch, I bristle, I retrench. And all of this is very human, and understandable. And all of it comes, I think, primarily from a place of fear. Fear that this thing that I care so much about is being harmed, or that this issue I feel passionately about is being dismissed, or that this world view I’ve developed isn’t welcomed, or that this person I love will not love me past this disagreement.

 

But the message of Jesus is peace, and love. And love is the height of vulnerability. Love requires us to look at our fear and have conversations with it. And we can’t do that until we are willing to look at each other, because we are the embodiments of each others’ fear. The people we disagree with are the embodiment of the thing we are terrified of and we will continue to react fearfully towards them until we finally trust enough in Jesus’ grace and God’s love for us and for them to face each other and talk. Talk together until we begin to see each other as humans again. Friends. Good people. Children of God.

If we want to make our church a place where love can flourish, where we can raise our children to carry on Jesus’ work in our chapels and neighborhoods and communities, we have to learn how to disagree, and how to de-escalate disagreement from a place of fear to a place of vulnerability. Because love is not just thinking nice thoughts or having nice feelings. The depth of love requires us to look directly at fear, expose our deepest vulnerabilities, and carry them together as a peaceable community of Christ. This is how love casts out fear.

I have found that disagreement is an inevitability in any community. Rather than allowing differences and disagreements to become a wedge driving us apart, let’s use them as an opportunity to open difficult, necessary, respectful conversations across differences. Let’s allow each other to disagree, frankly and passionately. Let’s talk about those disagreements vulnerably, without strawmanning or calling each other names, or walking away from each other or from our pews entirely. And, at the same time, let’s work together to build a civil and compassionate community, anchored together in the love of Christ, the Prince of Peace. 

 

Shortly before Christmas, we received a package. It was from Blanca. Inside were two new coats for our boys, a matchbox police car, a Paw Patrol siren headlamp with sound capabilities that we discovered exactly five seconds after Clarence did at 5:30 the next morning, too many dairy free treats, and this note:

Dear Clarence, Cal, Sarah, and Josh,

I hope the coats fit the boys. I don’t know what size they are now. They must be so big. Tell Clarence I miss seeing him and hearing him play and ride his bike. I hope you are all happy in your home and that you have a great, happy Christmas. We miss you all.

Love,

Blanca, Alex, and Jason

PS Have also a Happy New Year.

I am forever grateful for my friendship with Blanca. She has changed me, not just by being kind, but by being vulnerable. By her willingness to disagree honestly, frankly, passionately, and her charity and fortitude to continue a relationship anyway.

I believe in Christ’s promise “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.” I believe that there is no fear in peace, but peace is also not the absence of disagreement. Peace is loud. Peace is work. Peace is the result of good people working and loving and maintaining relationships even when compromise seems out of the question and when returning to the tent again, and again, and again feels impossible. I see it happening day in and day out throughout the world. Remarkable people, quietly doing good, choosing again to be vulnerable. 

I put my faith in a Zion of the big tent. A Zion where all sorts of people can live together, and disagree together, and work together, and make peace together, and build God’s kingdom on earth together.