The Family On The Second Floor

You would describe them as the family on the second floor.

That is what you call them in your own head and it is what you called them to your sister on the phone in the spring when the boiler went. The family on the second floor. Four years.

You know a great deal about them without knowing anything.

You know the boy is about nine because of the school jumper. You know the older one plays something because you have heard scales through the ceiling on Tuesdays and Thursdays, badly at first and then quite well. You know the mother works nights because of the pattern on the stairs. You know that in February there was a fortnight where the door was answered by a woman you had not seen before, an aunt maybe, and that the mother came back looking thinner.

And you nod. Twice a day, going up and coming down, four years, and it is a warm nod and she does one back and it has a genuine friendliness in it.

You have never said a word beyond hello.

Here is what has been on you since February, since the fortnight, since the woman who was not the mother.

Something happened to that family and you were forty feet away and you had no way whatsoever to ask, because you do not know their name, and you have been in that building four years and you do not know their name.

A lawyer asks the question and Jesus turns it round

There is a man in Luke who asks a question that sounds like sincerity and is actually a way of managing the size of an obligation, and Luke says so directly.

But he, willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus, And who is my neighbour?Luke 10:29

Willing to justify himself. That is Luke's own comment and it is unusually blunt.

The lawyer is not asking for a definition because he cannot think of one. He is asking for a boundary. He wants a category with an edge on it, so that he knows where the obligation stops, and everybody who has ever asked that question has wanted the same thing.

And the answer Jesus gives does something the man did not expect. He tells a story and then reverses the question entirely: not who qualifies as your neighbor, but which of these three was neighbor to the man.

The word stops being a category and becomes a verb.

So take this now, on your own landing. You are already neighbor to that family, and the written word makes it a thing done and not a status assigned, and the Holy Spirit put you forty feet from them in a building with one staircase.

There is no boundary to work out. There is only a stairwell you use twice a day.

The nod is not nothing and it is not enough

Now let me be fair to you, because I do not think you have been cold, and neither does the written word, and neither does the Holy Spirit who has kept you both on those stairs.

The nod is real. It is not a small thing in a city to have a face that is glad to see you on a stair. That woman has, twice a day for four years, met a person who is pleased she exists, and in a building where nobody speaks that is worth more than people think.

You have done something for four years. It is simply that it has a ceiling, and you hit the ceiling in February. The written word settled that, and His Spirit has been carrying it ever since.

Because a nod cannot ask. That is its limit. A nod is a lovely thing that carries no weight, and the moment something happens that requires weight, a nod is standing on the wrong side of a door with nothing in its hands.

And what has kept you at the nod for four years is not indifference. It is that after about the eighth month, asking a name starts to feel like an admission that you should have asked earlier, and the longer it goes the worse that gets, and by year four the question is enormous.

It is not enormous. That is the thing. You have made it enormous by carrying it, and it is four words long.

You are neighbor to them by the written word's own definition, and the Holy Spirit is the one who arranged the staircase.

What that hall in Los Angeles did with the people nearest it

There was a hall near the middle of Los Angeles in 1895 where a man named Phineas Bresee refused to let anybody rent a seat, and the work it became known for was rescue work in the streets immediately around it.

Immediately around it. Not a district chosen for strategic reasons. The buildings you could see from the door.

And the whole thing rested on something so ordinary that people writing about it usually skip past: those workers knew names. They knew who lived where and who was ill and whose husband had gone, and they knew it because they were in the same streets every day and they had, at some point, asked.

Knowing a name is the smallest possible unit of this work and it is also the door to all of it. Nothing else can happen until it does.

You have been in the same stairwell twice a day for four years, and the written word makes neighbor a verb, and the Holy Spirit is the one who put you both on that staircase.