Apprenticed to Love

Our life and our death is with our neighbor.

Jun 28, 2025

“Our life and our death is with our neighbor. If we gain our brother, we have gained God, but if we scandalise our brother, we have sinned against Christ.”

-Abba Anthony

“If a man does not say in his heart, in the world there is only myself and God, he will not gain peace.”

-Abba Alonius

These twin sayings of the desert fathers have been having a tacit conversation in my bones lately. They seem to be working together towards Meaning that I only catch glimpses of in my peripheral from time to time. The cornea is thicker there, I’ve been told, and so our vision is better out of the corner of the eye. As my friend

Andrew

helpfully pointed out: these sayings work together like blinking and seeing, the one bringing the Sea back to other, back to focus, after too much air has dried the senses.

One such rinsing of the eyes happened a few weeks ago, a very real meeting between myself and God which came unexpectedly by way of a defunct water tower. Mystery. I’ll just say for now that the water tower was a good neighbor to me. Here are a few more.

Neighbor #1 - Brother Bird

One day early in summer long ago I came home from a run. At the backdoor of our old brick walk-up I found myself staring at the rubber mat. There was something there besides the usual Welcome.

It was a piece of brown fluff. A murmur of pity came unbidden to my lips. Another one of those baby birds had apparently fallen from the nests that clung to the side of the building. There had been storms and we’d found a pathetic skeleton or two in past days. As I crouched down, one of his minuscule eyes blinked at me. Still alive. I poked him gently with my house key, and he tried to inch forward, but tumbled onto his side. He wouldn't last a few short hours. I should let nature take its course, right?

As if on cue, an orange tabby started slinking against the back wall of the garden. He would make quick work of my little friend. I just couldn't watch it happen. Against all I've been told about the survival rate of wild animal babies in well-intentioned but bumbling human hands, I took him in and put him in a shoebox.

We fed him on the hour, and every time he hungrily gulped down the wet kibble I bought at the corner grocery. He soon grew out of his shoebox into a shipping box. We called him Oliver. Please sir, may I have some more? We brought him to the green grass so he could learn to hop and flap his wings. No two parents could be prouder than we to see him flutter for the first time. He eventually got into the habit of perching on our shoulder or head with that same inquisitive look. I think he saw us as some kind of magical combination of his flock and his favorite tree. He did, as they say, imprint on us; and we too were changed. We were both somewhat inexplicably devoted to this little creature. It was downright fun.

For those who are wondering, he finally began to make good friends with the other birds and flew away one day for the last time. We waved goodbye with a somewhat wistful thank you on our lips.

When we gained Brother Bird, we gained God.

Neighbor #2 - Sister Water

I have long been intrigued by a passage from Simone Weil where she suggests the universe itself as a Tool by which one apprehends reality. When we submit ourselves to different facets of our lived experience — it could be a baby bird, a checkout aisle, a canoe paddle, stinging nettle, my kid’s hysterics, the local pool — we agree that we are apprenticed to the Universe. By these lights, every Thing is a Someone who ought not be mastered and controlled but learned from humbly. It’s a respectful conversation. She says:

Let the whole universe be for me, in relation to my body, what the stick of a blind man is in relation to his hand. His sensibility is really no longer in his hand but at the end of the stick. An apprenticeship is necessary.

To limit one’s love to the pure object is the same thing as to extend it to the whole universe.

To change the relationship between ourselves and the world in the same way as, through apprenticeship, the workman changes the relationship between himself and the tool. Getting hurt: this is the trade entering into the body. May all suffering make the universe enter into the body.

Of course, it’s pretty easy to think about how a darling little bird made my heart grow a few sizes. Harder to think about the child who nearly drowned this week. But if she’s right, it’s through pain that reality enters our bodies and changes us.

So there I was, waiting for my son to follow me down the waterslide. We’d done it before, but it was a brand new experience. My little guy just barely tops out at 42” which is pretty good for his age plus represents about two years of anticipation for this qualification but he can barely touch there. Yay! I can go on the big slides! And the lifeguards will catch me.

To my surprise, it wasn’t my son who came down the slide, but someone else. Huh, must’ve gotten the jitters. I kept loitering on the pool deck. Here we go…nope, a tiny kid but not mine. But wait. That tiny kid is stuck under. The lifeguard is not there. I’m yelling. I jump in. Sweep him up. Lifeguard still not looking.

Whoa.

The kid I’m holding is not my own and we stare at each other in mutual bewilderment. Another little Oliver. Or am I the bird? Who is rescuing whom? I’ve been pulled from a lake before, right before I lost consciousness, and it’s all blending together.

Somehow I manage to pull it together, let the kid go find his mom (where the *&e$a& was his mom, pardon my French), and go back to fussing about how my own child has still not come down the slide. He finally does…and it happens again. He goes under, and the lifeguard is oblivious.

Lest you, dear reader, think what sort of poorly managed pool is this? let me assure you that this was utterly out of the ordinary, out of the known. We frequent this place and their strict rules and attentiveness are a frequent refrain of neighborhood pride. But this was an utter failure. A betrayal. We met the frayed edges of the unknown. So my son and I spent a few days crying, on and off. Suffering had entered our bodies, Sister Water lapping at our mouths and shoulders. What would come of her touch?

In a book I’ve lately embarked upon with friends, Loving to Know by Esther Meek, she talks about how our overemphasis on knowing through our eyes — ah, I see! — has made us forget about the power of touch in knowledge. And it’s really quite extraordinary when you start thinking about it. The speed of light may be quite fast (186,000 miles per second) but touch is both immediate and reciprocal.

What makes the skin unique as compared with all other organs is that is communicates in both directions. It can communicate what is inside outwards, and what is outside inwards. It can do that, presumably in a single act, especially if that which is being touched is and touching is another person (25, Loving to Know).

It is true that when one pair of eyes lock with another’s that much intimacy can transpire. Every mother and lover knows this. But Esther’s point is that the ocular metaphor has so dominated our pursuit of knowledge that the tactile one has been left behind. To my surprised delight, she also brought up a blind man with a cane, which she gets from the scientist and philosopher Michael Polanyi (to whom she has apprenticed herself extensively).

My dad has also said as long as I can remember that when it comes to understanding ourselves and the world around us, I’m just a blind man tapping around with a cane. For most of us this is going to be an unlived but vividly imagined metaphor. (Most of us are sighted individuals.) But there are other things we’ve done. Have you ever paddled a canoe, for instance?

At a cabin near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area in northwoods Minnesota, I stood on the end of the dock and tried to size up the situation. One island, many distant clouds showing early rain streaks, the wind kicking up, but four children hungry for a canoe ride. Who is wise enough to know? How is one to know if there are no risks taken? At a certain point I had to stake a claim which was that we could paddle out a ways and then come back in. Could we go to the island? clamored the cousins. We would have to wait and see. Get on the those lifejackets, then we’ll talk.

What I didn’t mention was that our cousin who owned the place had told me about the neighbor who had flipped her canoe and died by drowning just last year. They pulled the body out on my property he said, shuddering. This is a remote place and because of that, neighbors look out for each other, he has insisted. Tragically, her life hadn’t been able to be netted by the community.

These thoughts flitted around like dragonflies in my mind as we learned to feel water movement through the paddles. Even the littles tried, toying with the waves. My eldest annoyed me by splashing us on purpose, but really all of it was an apprenticeship, a finding of our strange place in the middle of the lake with a bit of wood in our hands.

Touch moves us, via this paddle, through the water. Once we’ve tried, we are changed and our bodies learn. This is knowledge. Inexplicably, if we gain a friendship with the water, we gain God.

Neighbor #3 — The Scandalised One

“Neighbors I have met” is another way of saying “gifts I have received” — so many of them! But the second half of Abba Gregory’s saying — if we scandalise our brother, we have sinned against Christ — rings loudly as of late. Scandalize feels like a word with very specific meanings, but it comes from Greek skandalon meaning "a stumbling block, offense; a trap or snare laid for an enemy.”

We have been forced to reckon with such a hatred demonstrated outwardly toward Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, plus Senator John Hoffman and his wife in my home state these past two weeks. It was just as we were packing up the van to leave for the cabin that the ugly news seeped through the cracks of my phone, getting around my “notifications off” settings. Our life and our death is with our neighbor I whispered to myself.

The most staggering part about that event is that I saw a connection with how I had been scandalizing my own children lately; critiquing, picking at, yelling, anything to exercise control and dominance. There are longish seasons of temptation like this as a parent; I don’t know any exception. (If you are one, please tell me your secrets!) Though I tried to ask forgiveness each time, it was really weighing on me how very angry I could become. Why do I lay snares for the people I love, as if they are enemies? If that is already a problem, how much more impossible will it be for me to love my enemies?

One evening the little guy was completely ignoring my voice and I was about to lose it again. But instead something in my body instructed me to touch. I reached out and gently placed my hand on his back and an immediate, unspoken conversation was initiated between us. I took a bit of his tension into my body, his relaxed, and almost instantaneously this loosened his lips. What came out was —-

I want to go home.

I waited. We were already at home.

I want to go to bed, he corrected himself.

Yes. I didn’t even say yes out loud. He turned to me and wordlessly asked me to pick him up. But I knew that there was a layer of truth in his first response, too. Somewhere deep down in our bones, we all long for home. And inevitably it’s the Neighbor we learn to love who points us back. Sometimes we are drowning and need a rescue; sometimes we provide the rescue. Either way, we end in an embrace of a brother or sister, and so we embrace God.