Keeping up with the Samaritans.

Sometimes the best way to change your neighbors is to become just like them.

I LIKE TO THINK there's not much about grown-ups and their faith that would surprise me. For a good part of the past 20 years, I've been involved in adult religious education and parish administration. I've taught incoming Catholics, and spent some time with outgoing ones, too. I've even done some tours of duty with returning Catholics, which just about completes the cycle. Preparing for baby Baptisms, or weddings, and often for funerals, adults come to the church looking for a lot of things, like answers, guidance, permission, paperwork. Sometimes, they even look for God there. It's a great privilege to share their journey.

Comparatively speaking, I know much less about the spiritual journey of children. I read a great book by psychologist Robert Coles, The Spiritual Life of Children, which traces the spiritual lives of children all over the world by cataloging their stories, drawings, and use of religious imagination. It appears kids think a lot about God. And they listen a lot more than we think they do to all the stuff that goes on in church. And they try to put that together with what goes on outside of church. If the pieces don't fit, they notice.

Kids have very definite ideas about God. They are braver about this than adults, perhaps, because they haven't fully developed the ability to think abstractly. This may be their salvation, too, because they can't subtract the literal, concrete world from their religious ideas. The God of a child has to be incarnate. Ask children to draw God, and they will get right to it, with very little hesitation. There's a joke going around about a teacher who asks a child what she is drawing. Without looking up from her paper, the child replies, "God." And the teacher objects, "But nobody knows what God looks like." And the girl replies: "They will in a minute."

Because I understand so little about the spiritual world of children, I felt unprepared when a publisher first approached me about writing religion books for use in parochial schools. So I defaulted, as grown-ups do, to reading up on the matter, which is how I found Coles' book. But realizing that wouldn't be enough, I also arranged to sit in on some religion classes at the local parochial school. The children and their teacher were happy to fill me in on how kids think and talk about God.

But my final resource for the project became the children I know best: my sister's kids. By now, my nieces are used to the idea that Aunt Alice is a little strange. Their aunt asks them to turn their inner world inside out on a regular basis with her weird questions and requests. The oldest, Megan, was a third grader, the same age as the book's audience. So she became my laboratory specimen for about a year.

I would call her up and say things like, "Hey, Megan, tell me the story of the Good Samaritan." I wanted to get it on her terms, in her language, as much as possible. It was important to hear what the story sounded like to her, what it meant from an 8-year-old perspective, not what scripture scholars say it's supposed to mean. And being a long-suffering child, my niece would interrupt her game or her homework to satisfy her aunt. If her eyes were rolling, I couldn't see that on my end.

On this occasion, surprisingly, she recited the story of the Samaritan to me almost word for word as we might hear it in church, even using elegant phrases like "they went off leaving him half-dead" and "I shall repay you on my way back." Her rendition was so fine, I was prepared to leave the story out of the third-grade book, thinking it must have been overdone up to now. After thanking her for her excellent job, I was about ready to hang up when something occurred to me. "So, Megan," I asked casually, "what's the point of the story about the Samaritan?" "It's about being a good neighbor," she said easily. And then she added, "It's best to live next door to a Samaritan, because they make real good neighbors."

Ah. And then I saw it, the little fragment left out of our religious education. We teachers do such a great job telling the stories, and driving home the lessons, that we forget how much depends on the many meanings of the word neighbor. My niece paid wonderful attention in school, but still came away thinking that a neighbor is the person next door. She understood that Jesus has a neighborhood development plan for his followers, and he's advocating we share a duplex with the Samaritans. And it all makes sense to her, of course, because if you end up in a ditch, don't you want a Samaritan handy to pull you out?

"Megan," I asked again, "what's a Samaritan?" "I don't know," she admitted. This is a problem, this business of definitions. What a Samaritan is, and who a neighbor can be, are central to the parable Jesus is telling. In fact, the reason Jesus launches into this story is because someone asked him the question, "Who is my neighbor?"

So let's take it from the top, even for those of us older than 8.

THE STORY OF THE GOOD SAMARITAN REALLY BEGINS BEFORE the parable is told. It concerns a scholar who stands up while Jesus is teaching and poses a question: "What must I do to inherit eternal life?" Many people, it seems, had this question on their minds. A rich man asks Jesus this question in several of the gospels, and though Jesus looks on him with love, the man is unable to accept Jesus' reply "because he had many things." The scholar, who likewise questions Jesus, is presented in shifting colors throughout the different gospels. In Mark, for example, he accepts Jesus' answer with joy and enthusiasm. Jesus, impressed by the man's understanding, pays him the highest honor of anyone in the gospels when he says, "You are not far from the reign of God."

But in Luke's story, this fellow gets rougher treatment. He is portrayed as one who has come to test Jesus, perhaps to trick him into a false teaching. When he asks his question, Jesus gives him the same answer he always gives, steering the man to the Great Commandment: to love God completely and to love your neighbor as yourself. When the scholar gives the right answer, Jesus seems rather abrupt with him, saying only, "You have answered correctly; do this and you will live." Evidently Jesus knows a faker when he sees one.

Then Luke's story takes a novel turn, because the scholar hangs onto Jesus like a dog on a pork chop. "And who is my neighbor?" he asks coolly.

Let's be serious: An 8-year-old might have trouble defining the nuances of the neighbor, but a scholar? If the matter at hand was, say, transubstantiation, we might have a little sympathy for an educated man asking for more information. If Jesus had chosen to split hairs about heavenly hosts or the Last Judgment, a scholar could be forgiven his tenacity in pursuing the details. But this question about the neighbor reveals his coyness and his duplicity. The command to love our neighbor as ourselves is not difficult to understand. It is only difficult to do!

Jesus is not about to "go there" with this fraud, so he tells a parable instead. As Jesus often reminded his disciples, he told stories to enlighten those who could hear and to confound those who refused to hear. This scholar, we can be sure, was tone-deaf to the kingdom.

So the [Illegible Text] that day, the memorable ones even our children know by heart. The man who falls victim to robbers on the way to Jericho. The priest and the Levite who see his distress but have no time or compassion to give him. And finally the Samaritan, who is never called "good" in the story but who is forever remembered for his goodness. Even the scholar has to admit that the one who showed mercy that day was the only one worthy to be called neighbor.

And yet, under normal circumstances, no one else in the story (or among Jesus' listeners) would have called that man neighbor. You don't really have to understand the politics between Jews and Samaritans to get the point. It's a peculiarity 9f our us-versus-them world that we only name the people on the other side of the hyphen. The man who falls victim is never called a Jew, but of course he was. We know this because he is not called one, and Jesus is speaking to a Jewish audience. In the same way, white people never identify others as white in their stories, though they are quick to note when others are Black, Hispanic, or Asian. In the Jewish world, two people a fellow Jew should be able to count on are the priest and the Levite. But in this case, that expectation is in vain.

SO THE OUTSIDER COMES ALONG, A SAMARITAN, A MAN WHO belongs most definitely on the other side of the us-and-them hyphen. Does this man look down in the ditch and say, "Ah, a Jew has been injured! The enemy of my people has been taken down!" No. All he sees is another's suffering, and the sight moves him to compassion. And he gets involved, personally, grittily, at the cost of his time, energy, and money.

Today, you or I might look down into the metaphorical ditch and see a gay man with AIDS, an alcoholic, a junkie, a mentally ill woman, or a homeless family living on the street with their dog. And we might mentally cross over to the safe side of the hyphen and say "Not my kind" and not be moved. We might see illegal immigrants that way (or strangely, considering the roots of this country, even legal immigrants). In our view, punks and Goth kids, or anybody under 30, might deserve the Samaritan category--especially if they have a face full of metal studs. The first time I walked into the waiting room of the radiation wing at the hospital and saw all those incredibly brave and sick people waiting for treatment, I found myself trying to throw up a wall of hyphens to prevent their identity from having too much to do with mine.

Hyphens happen. But we can choose to take them down. The punch line of Jesus' story is that the Samaritan turns out to be the neighbor. And how does he get to be the neighbor? Because he is the one who shows compassion. So the real question is not, "Who is my neighbor?" but rather, "For whom will I be neighbor?"

The more I've thought about it, the more I like my niece's original answer. I too want to live next door to a Samaritan. I'd like to believe someone will be there for me when I am the one in the ditch. But I can't change my neighbors. The best I can do is choose to become a Samaritan myself.

By ALICE CAMILLE, author of Seven Last Words (ACTA, 1999) and a collaborator on the homily series "This Sunday's Scripture," available through Twenty-Third Publications.