[Are you good?]
…. I'm a good person and I try to do my best by everybody, but I'm shocked at the way my neighbours are carrying on…. the sons coming home drunk in the middle of the night, the husband and wife shouting at each other in front of the neighbours, the daughter dropping out of school…. My husband and I have our own ways and it’s very upsetting for us to see all that carryon. Our daughter is very good and when she’s here I'm telling her about these neighbours of ours. She always says the same thing – take no notice. But the last time she said I should write to the internet about it. To write a letter and she would send it off for me. It’s a fright that good people’s lives can be disturbed like this. I hope you can tell me something or do something that would stop them. Maura
Dear Maura,
Your daughter sent me that message, and here I am. I’m not the internet, I'm just another neighbour, like someone living at the other side of you. I only have ordinary common sense to share with you, but maybe that’s what we need in ordinary common situations.
Lots of people get on one another’s nerves, and it’s by the grace of God that we don’t kill one another. But if your neighbours are not doing anything illegal, or anything against you in particular, you have no case and you’ll just have to try and be a good influence on them. There’s immense variety among human beings, as there is among all living things. People have individually different backgrounds and different life experiences, even as they speak with the same accent. We shouldn’t be surprised at this; we should be surprised rather at the amount of harmony there is in our neighbourhoods. If you had an eye for this, it would set your mind more at ease.
It sounds a bit desolate, if you don’t mind my saying so, to describe yourself and your family alone as good. It would be very lonely to be the only good people around. It's surprising how much goodness we can see around us when we are open to it. Whenever I'm tempted to call myself good I become suspicious and I take another look. Then I see so many people who are better than me in so many ways that I'm amazed once again at the variety of gifts – strengths and skills and virtues, and powers of endurance, and powers of recovery – that people have.
But there are so many sides to everything… we’re the most complex creatures in the world. What seems good to one person can seem bad to another; and what seems good to you at one moment can seem bad the next. So when thinking about goodness, it’s helpful to narrow the focus, to take a simple example first, some particular and limited kind of goodness, a skill (driving a car, for instance) and try to find some clarity there. Then we can come back to the full picture.
It is dangerous to say, “I'm a good driver!” If I were to keep telling myself I'm a good driver, I would soon come to believe that I drive well on all occasions. I would feel that it was second nature to me to drive well – that it would, in fact, be impossible for me ever to drive badly. That's how the worst accidents happen. I made a resolution many decades ago when I did my first driving test that I would never tell myself I was a good driver: that I would always say instead, “I’m a careful driver.” If you keep telling yourself that you’re a good driver, you can come to feel so secure in that ‘goodness’ that you take it for granted. But if you say, “I’m a careful driver,” you have to be careful on every occasion and you take nothing for granted.
Now, enlarging that to full scale, it is clear that we should never call ourselves good. Even Jesus said that he shouldn’t be called good. ‘ “Why do you call me good?” he asked. “No one is good except God alone”’ (Mark 10:18, Luke 18:19). The other side of that: we should never call other people bad. They are all struggling in the best way they know at present. A practising alcoholic, for example, doesn’t know a better way at present. But he may well learn a better way tomorrow. Listen to the way he talks about his past struggles and miseries, years later, as a recovering alcoholic. I have listened to many of them over the years. It is deeply moving. It is a school of compassion.
So, to be brief, Maura, I think the advice your daughter gave you is the best: take no notice of those neighbours. Their noisy antics will annoy you only if you focus on them. Let it pass. But I would add something too: do them a kindness any time the opportunity arises. And notice them enough to say a short prayer for them. It’s amazing how that works. It’s not magic, but it works like magic. It’s impossible to have the same fervour in condemning someone after you have prayed for them. If you do it regularly, all condemnation will fade out, and you will be left instead with a deep vein of compassion.
God bless, Maura.
Donagh