Pastor Paul
A few years ago, I remember hearing an architectural anthropologist talking about something so obvious that it completely escaped my attention. However, upon hearing it I smacked my head with an “of course.” He was saying that one of the most significant changes to the sense of neighbor and neighborhood came with the advent of the air conditioner.
His point made me immediately flashback to stories my mother told me about growing up in the 1920’s in New York City, and matched by my experience growing up in Milford, Connecticut in the 1950-60’s. In the spring and summer weather when it was warm/hot most houses were uncomfortably warm, even with fans in the windows. In New York the stoop became the “comfortable room” and on a hot summer day/night stoops were crowded with people, streets filled with kids playing stickball, ringolevio, jump rope. People in multi-family New York apartments (my mom’s was a three-family house) often sat on the stoop with their housemates and folk from houses on either side, parents of playmates and others would gather to chat, share a drink, a little “nosh” and the local gossip. People knew one another, people knew everyone’s kids and their names. Recipes, opinions, tools, cups of sugar were shared, home maintenance tasks were discussed, and problems solved by the collective wisdom. They were an informal “block watch” before the term existed. They knew about and cared for one another. They got to know people, who like them were from foreign countries, spoke English through thick accents. And they learned about “the other” and they learned about their common longings, dreams, and struggles. They turned foreigners into friends.
It was repeated in 50-60’s Milford. Even the elderly couple next door and the one across the street were often porch (houses in Milford didn’t have stoops!) mates of my parents. All the people within shouting distance of my mom, knew our family. But slowly air conditioners began to appear, and the neighbors began to disappear. Now the cool comfort of the den lured my neighbors to relate to their television on a hot summer night rather than the families around them. We were one of the last to get an air conditioner – but so many had already disappeared it went virtually unnoticed. My dad preferred to stay in, my mom, a New Yorker at heart, continued to prefer to sit on the porch/stoop. But very few joined her. When she left that neighborhood in 2017 no one was on the porch and she knew the names of only a handful of the people on either side of her house.
The lawyer in Luke asks Jesus, “and who is my neighbor” because he doesn’t know. We sadly don’t either. The architectural anthropologist noted that our sense of community began to break down at that point and we are now a culture of folk who prefer being inside our own homes to being outside where others are. (I might add that I heard this analysis 25 years or more ago and the use of cell phones, internet, streaming services and Covid have compounded the issue.) Oh, the loss when we installed the new Fedders air conditioner!
Churches stopped stoop sitting a long time ago. We know folk inside the doors. We spend lots of time in the hallowed, sacred, traditional walls. We love our church home and are quite welcoming to folk who venture in. But we don’t spend a lot of time sitting on the porch, seeking out our neighbor, getting to know the folk around us and consequently creating a curiosity about what happens in our home. I am not just referring to those on Ledge Hill Road, but those on the street where we live. What do we know about our neighbors in other parts of Guilford, or Durham, or Branford or (agh) New Haven, Hartford or Waterbury? What do we know about our neighbors in Mexico, Somalia, Ukraine or Malaysia?
Too often our churches prefer living in the air conditioned comfort of our habitat and decline Jesus’ mandate to go out into the heat of life, where people cry out for a genuine engagement that leads to understanding, compassion, caring. We avoid going into the places that may make us sweat for the Gospel. And we therefore rob the world full of our neighbors of the joy of the Gospel of God’s love and we deprive ourselves of the fullness of life in getting to know and love those outside our doors.
We should try it – the air out there is rich with possibility. Anyone for a neighborhood game of stickball?
His point made me immediately flashback to stories my mother told me about growing up in the 1920’s in New York City, and matched by my experience growing up in Milford, Connecticut in the 1950-60’s. In the spring and summer weather when it was warm/hot most houses were uncomfortably warm, even with fans in the windows. In New York the stoop became the “comfortable room” and on a hot summer day/night stoops were crowded with people, streets filled with kids playing stickball, ringolevio, jump rope. People in multi-family New York apartments (my mom’s was a three-family house) often sat on the stoop with their housemates and folk from houses on either side, parents of playmates and others would gather to chat, share a drink, a little “nosh” and the local gossip. People knew one another, people knew everyone’s kids and their names. Recipes, opinions, tools, cups of sugar were shared, home maintenance tasks were discussed, and problems solved by the collective wisdom. They were an informal “block watch” before the term existed. They knew about and cared for one another. They got to know people, who like them were from foreign countries, spoke English through thick accents. And they learned about “the other” and they learned about their common longings, dreams, and struggles. They turned foreigners into friends.
It was repeated in 50-60’s Milford. Even the elderly couple next door and the one across the street were often porch (houses in Milford didn’t have stoops!) mates of my parents. All the people within shouting distance of my mom, knew our family. But slowly air conditioners began to appear, and the neighbors began to disappear. Now the cool comfort of the den lured my neighbors to relate to their television on a hot summer night rather than the families around them. We were one of the last to get an air conditioner – but so many had already disappeared it went virtually unnoticed. My dad preferred to stay in, my mom, a New Yorker at heart, continued to prefer to sit on the porch/stoop. But very few joined her. When she left that neighborhood in 2017 no one was on the porch and she knew the names of only a handful of the people on either side of her house.
The lawyer in Luke asks Jesus, “and who is my neighbor” because he doesn’t know. We sadly don’t either. The architectural anthropologist noted that our sense of community began to break down at that point and we are now a culture of folk who prefer being inside our own homes to being outside where others are. (I might add that I heard this analysis 25 years or more ago and the use of cell phones, internet, streaming services and Covid have compounded the issue.) Oh, the loss when we installed the new Fedders air conditioner!
Churches stopped stoop sitting a long time ago. We know folk inside the doors. We spend lots of time in the hallowed, sacred, traditional walls. We love our church home and are quite welcoming to folk who venture in. But we don’t spend a lot of time sitting on the porch, seeking out our neighbor, getting to know the folk around us and consequently creating a curiosity about what happens in our home. I am not just referring to those on Ledge Hill Road, but those on the street where we live. What do we know about our neighbors in other parts of Guilford, or Durham, or Branford or (agh) New Haven, Hartford or Waterbury? What do we know about our neighbors in Mexico, Somalia, Ukraine or Malaysia?
Too often our churches prefer living in the air conditioned comfort of our habitat and decline Jesus’ mandate to go out into the heat of life, where people cry out for a genuine engagement that leads to understanding, compassion, caring. We avoid going into the places that may make us sweat for the Gospel. And we therefore rob the world full of our neighbors of the joy of the Gospel of God’s love and we deprive ourselves of the fullness of life in getting to know and love those outside our doors.
We should try it – the air out there is rich with possibility. Anyone for a neighborhood game of stickball?