John Guzlowski: Love Your Neighbor?

In Matthew 22: 34-40, a Pharisee asks Jesus what the greatest commandment is.  Jesus’s answer is one of the most quoted passages in the Bible.  He says, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself.”

I’ve been thinking about what Jesus says in this famous passage because I was reading something recently about all the wars that are being fought right now.  There’s the Russian-Ukrainian war, of course, and the ongoing Israel-Gaza conflict, but there are other wars as well: the wars in Sudan, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Myanmar, and Thailand and Cambodia.  Wars and the possibility of more wars seem to be something that’s always with us.  I read the paper everyday and expect to hear about the conflict between Venezuela and the United States being declared a war.

Yes, Jesus said, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” but, of course, he’s not the only one who said it.  Almost every religion has that phrase or something like it at its core.  In the Old Testament, there’s a passage in Leviticus that reads, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”  In the Muslim holy book, the Quran, we have a similar passage, “Worship Allah … and to parents do good, and to relatives, orphans, the needy, the near neighbor, the neighbor farther away, the companion at your side, the traveler, and those whom your right hands possess.” Even Buddhism stresses the importance of loving one’s neighbor saying we should love each other the way a mother loves her children.

All of this raises the absolutely central question: Is it possible to love your neighbor if your neighbor is different from you?

I think so.  

And I think so because I lived for 25 years in a Chicago neighborhood that had an unbelievable diversity of neighbors.  

Growing up in the Humboldt Park area in the 1950s and 1960s, I lived among people of different religions, different nationalities, and different cultural backgrounds.

Let me tell you about religions first.  I went to a Catholic Church, St. Fidelis.  A block away there was a Greek Orthodox Church named St. Haralambos.  A couple blocks from that was a Jewish synagogue and a Norwegian Lutheran church.

And this religious diversity pointed to a general diversity. My parents and I lived in an apartment building with neighbors of different religions and ethnicities.  Two Jewish women – both Auschwitz survivors – lived in one of the apartments.   In the apartment above them there was a Russian family. In the apartment above them there lived a Mexican family that was in the US illegally.  In the apartment across from them was a biracial family from Louisiana, a white husband and a black wife and their 3 kids.  In the apartment below that, there was a Greek American family who came to the US after WWII.  And then there was my family, Displaced Persons from Poland who came to America by way of the refugee camps in Germany after WWII.

The whole neighborhood was as diverse as our building.  As a kid, I had friends who were Polish and German and Ukrainian and Russian and Mexican and Puerto Rican, and I also had American friends, kids who had been born in Kentucky and Tennessee and West Virginia.

How did we get along in that neighborhood crammed up to the max with such diversity?

It was simple.  We ignored our differences and treated our neighbors like people.

I recently saw a sign in a neighbor’s yard.  It pretty much summed up what I’m trying to say here about what I learned growing up in Chicago and what I would like the neighbors warring around the world to consider.  

Here’s what the sign said: 

Love your neighbor 

who doesn’t 

look like you 

think like you 

love like you 

speak like you 

pray like you 

vote like you 

love your neighbor 

no exceptions 

That’s it.  Love your neighbor – regardless of who your neighbor is.

~

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Copyright 2025 John Guzlowski

John Guzlowski’s poems about his parents’ experiences as slave laborers in Nazi Germany appear in his award-winning Echoes of Tattered Tongues.  His most recent books of poems are Mad Monk Ikkyu, True Confessions, and Small Talk: Writing about God and Writing and Me.  His novels include Retreat: A Love Story and the Hank and Marvin mysteries.