Love Your Crooked Neighbor

There is a song on Mumford & Sons' record Prizefighter called "Conversation With My Son (Gangsters & Angels)." Marcus Mumford has said he wrote it as a kind of letter to his son — words for a boy who has to grow up in a world that can feel like it is living under threat. I cannot hear it without thinking of my own children, and of the thing every parent eventually runs into: the discovery that he cannot hand his child a world that is safe. Two parts of it will not leave me alone.

The place where we are right

The verses convict me before the refrain gets its chance.

The song leans, almost from its first breath, against the sin of being too sure of yourself — the person so settled in his own rightness that he has stopped being able to hear. I feel the pull of that immediately, because certainty is the thing I have always trusted least. Show me someone who has every question perfectly answered, who has never once been ambushed by a doubt, and I will show you a person I instinctively hold at arm's length.

And there — right there — is the trap the song is quietly setting for me. Because I am quickest to judge the ones I have decided are judgmental. I look down on people for looking down on people. I am proud of my humility and certain about the dangers of certainty, and I love most freely the people who already love the way I do. The Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai has a poem that says flowers will never grow in the place where we are right; the ground there is trampled hard. And the hardest, most trampled patch of all is the little rise I like to stand on when I feel right about not being like those people.

Jesus met this posture more than any other, and he was never once taken in by it. When a crowd was sure enough of itself to reach for stones, he stooped and wrote in the dust and said that the one among them without sin should throw first — and the certainty drained out of the oldest men first, because they had lived long enough to know better. He told us to pull the log out of our own eye before reaching for the speck in someone else's, and said that only then would we see well enough to help. Paul says it flatly to the respectable reader: in judging another you condemn yourself, because you do the very same things. The gospel does not merely forbid us to judge; it kicks away the platform we were standing on to do it. There is no high ground. There is only the level ground at the foot of the cross.

Crooked hearts

Which is why the song's next turn is so much wiser than mere tolerance.

It reaches back to a hard old blessing of W. H. Auden's — the charge to love our crooked neighbour with our crooked heart — and sets it against all our machinery of self-justification. We would sooner be ruined than be changed, the song confesses; we will nurse our dread before we let mercy undo us. It is the truest thing about the human heart I have heard in a popular song in years. We do not resist grace because it seems too good to be true. We resist it because it asks us to stop being right.

And the song knows what the alternative costs, and what it looks like, because it says of the finest person the singer ever knew that he was someone who owned nothing and gave it all away. That is not the description of a strategy. It is the description of a Man. Though he was rich, for our sake he became poor, so that by his poverty we might become rich. He emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, and went as low as death. The best any of us has ever met had nothing and gave everything away — and it was the giving, not the having, that saved the world.

There is a line buried in the verses that says it more starkly still: I get higher and higher, the lower I go. It sounds backward until we remember whose life it describes. In John's Gospel the cross is never only a descent; it is a lifting up — and I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself — one phrase holding the crucifixion and the exaltation at once, and drawing all of us to it: tumblers and beggars, gangsters and angels alike. The way up ran straight down: down into the dust, down to the dirt of a borrowed grave, as low as death can go — and it was precisely there, at the very bottom, that God highly exalted him. It is the whole logic of God turned against ours: what looks to us like weakness and folly is his wisdom and his strength, for the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. We climb to get higher, and measure ourselves by how sure and how strong we have become. He got higher by going lower, and made the descent itself the throne.

To love a crooked neighbour with a crooked heart is only possible on the far side of that. As long as I imagine my own heart is straight, my love will really be inspection; it will arrive with conditions and a faint air of rescue. It is grace — being loved while still crooked — that finally lets me climb down off the platform and love another crooked person as precisely what I am: a fellow patient, and not the doctor.

Where heaven starts

And then the refrain, which is where I come apart.

For most of two minutes the song does almost nothing but repeat one thing: a reaching across the distance between two people, over and over; a hand laid over another's heart; a vow to stay to the very end. And it makes an astonishing claim about that reaching — that heaven does not begin somewhere else, or someday later, or after the world finally stops breaking, but here, in the reach itself, in the place where the line between where I end and where you begin goes soft.

I once thought a refrain that plain, repeated that many times, was a failure of imagination. I have come to believe it is the opposite. Some truths do not develop; they repeat, the way a heartbeat repeats. I am here. I am here. I am here. You cannot argue a frightened child into peace. You can only stay, and keep saying it, until the saying has become the thing itself.

And this is the whole gospel, hidden in plain sight inside a lullaby. The entire story of God is a reaching across an unbearable distance. While we were still sinners — while we were still crooked, still sure of ourselves, still hiding the real face — Christ reached across and died for us. The Word became flesh and moved in next door; God did not call out directions from a safe distance but came near enough to lay a hand over the heart. And the last thing the risen Christ says to his terrified friends is that refrain in other words: I am with you always, to the end of the age. That is where heaven starts. Not in being right. In being with.

With you till the end

Which brings me back to a father, and a son, and a world that can feel like danger at every edge.

Every parent reaches, sooner or later, the end of what he can fix. I cannot make the world safe for my children. I cannot hand them certainty — and if I am honest, the certainty I could hand them would probably be one of the counterfeit kinds the song is warning against. What a father can actually give — the one thing that holds when everything else is shaking — is his presence. Where you begin, I am. My hand is over your heart. I am with you to the end. That is not a small consolation offered because the great rescue failed to arrive. It is the great rescue. It is the shape of the only love that has ever finally helped anybody.

And it is a shape we did not invent; we can only pass it on. We can say it to our children because it was said to us first, and is being said still, by a Father who reached across every distance, whose hand is over our heart, who has promised — over the gangsters and the angels, over the whole tilted world — to be with us to the end. The song is a father comforting his son. Which is precisely why it can bring us to tears: because underneath the father's voice, faint and unmistakable, we can hear our own Father, saying the very same thing, over us.