"Love the Lord, your God, with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this: Love your neighbor as yourself." (Mark 12:30-31 NIV) The Ten Commandments in a nutshell. The prickly part becomes "Who is my neighbor?"
The Maori have a greeting ritual called the hongi, where the greeters press noses together. The essence of the hongi is not that noses touch, but that each breathes into themselves part of the other. The air I breathe out becomes part of the air you breathe in. Your neighbor, in fact, becomes a part of yourself.
I wonder what the world would be like if we realized that each person we encounter - family, friend, stranger, or foe - now carries within them just the tiniest bit of us and that we carry within us a part of them. If we recognized that bit of each other in ourselves, perhaps we could treat each other with the respect, dignity, and support we ourselves would want. then our lives would indeed be richly blessed, wouldn't they, neighbor?
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