Loving our Neighbors as ourselves today

Loving Our Neighbors Around the World

On Easter Monday the world learned that Pope Francis had died. A champion of interfaith relations was no longer with us. While we mourn his passing, we take this opportunity to reaffirm his teaching.

In his last “Urbi et Orbi” address read in Saint Peter’s Square on Easter Sunday on April 20, 2025, the day before his death on April 21, Pope Francis said:

I would like all of us to hope anew and revive our trust in others, including those who are different than ourselves, or who come from distant lands, bringing unfamiliar customs, ways of life and ideas! For all of us are children of God! 

Here Pope Francis was echoing Jesus, who commanded us to love our neighbor as ourselves. This commandment appears in one form or another more than 36 times in the Torah, including in the Holiness Code in the very center of the Torah, Leviticus 19:18.  This is also a central tenet of faith for Muslims appearing in many ways in the Quran. But what does it mean?

Francis showed us in his own ministries, by traveling throughout the world spreading hope and love among not just faithful Catholics, but all peoples. He washed the feet of Muslim women, he visited the birthplace of Abraham in Iraq, he traveled to Jerusalem, he visited and ate with the homeless, the divorced, the sick and the destitute, he reached out to members of the LGBTQ community, he visited war torn regions and slums. He showed by his example the power of loving your neighbor, all of humankind.

He was equally clear what loving your neighbor didn’t mean. On February 11, 2025, Pope Francis sent an open letter to United States Cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church, rejecting a medieval Catholic theological concept (espoused by some conservative Catholics) of “ordo amoris,” the idea of a hierarchy of duties that prioritizes immediate obligations to one’s family or community over more distant needs.  In the letter, Francis said:

Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups. . . The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception. (As reported by Emma Bubola in the New York Times)(Emphasis added).

Indeed, in our baptismal covenant, Christians are called to “seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself.”  We are called to “strive for justice and peace among all people and respect the dignity of every human being.”

Loving the stranger requires us to be in relationship with those different than us, to embrace the opportunity to learn from another, to listen and authentically share one’s experiences while hearing from the other. Loving one’s neighbor begins with proximity, with learning about the other. As Bryan Stevenson has observed, proximity, being in the same space and time, teaches us things about our fellow human beings that we simply cannot know if we remain distant.

What does proximity look like? How can we move into relationships with others different from ourselves?

A few days ago we completed our spring holiday cycle with almost 40 participants (Jews, Christians, and Muslims), many strangers to us, sharing an instructional Interfaith Passover Seder at our local Episcopal Church. At least 10 of the participants had never before attended a Seder meal. We celebrated the Israelites’ release from bondage with song and ritual and lots of food and drink. During our festival meal, we talked about times we had taken action in faith, not knowing how it would turn out, and talked about ways we could build relationships together.

One story has stuck with me. One of our Board members, Oktay Erbil, commented that when we invited him to work with us to extend our interfaith dialogue programs to Muslims, he was moved to do so, to take a chance on this new and untested idea, because he had faith that God would steer the project toward good.  He expressed his joy that we have together built a vibrant nonprofit from our shared faith in God. We were all taking a chance, believing that God will steer our work toward good.  Faith requires us to take the first step to realize our goal.

I also heard a wonderful story about Pope Francis last week. He preached a sermon right before the conclave began that would elect him as Pope twelve years ago. He preached on the text that Jesus is knocking and how many of us interpret this as us being called to let Jesus into our hearts. He observed, what if Jesus is knocking, asking us to come out into the world to form relationships?  This simple and powerful message of Jesus inviting us to reach out to others is credited by some as one key message that moved his fellow cardinals to elect him as Pope. 

So what if we are all being called to move out and form relationships with “the other?”

We all left our Seder dinner last week with more friends than when we came. Isn’t that the way we’d like the world to be? It requires us to reach out to others different than us and share some of our own stories while hearing those of our neighbors different than ourselves. 

Being in proximity with those with different lived experiences isn’t so easy these days.  We are segregated by our neighborhoods, our workplaces, and our habits to a subset of humankind.  To reach out in response to our faiths’ calling, bringing new people with different lived experiences into our life requires intention.  Relationships are built over time with people who begin to trust each other, to feel like we have some common ground, that we share values.

Intention is not enough, we also need access to those with different lived experiences, and chances to build up our relationships together.

One way to do this is through our Interfaith Bridges™ programs. These programs can be held through faith communities, interfaith organizations, community organizations or colleges and universities.  Our programs are not “once and done.”  Building relationships takes time and sustained effort.  Our programs rely on shared meals and structured, facilitated small group dialogue sharing authentic personal experiences. This is “heart work,” not “head work.” Through sustained dialogue, we build allyship and friendship.  As our participants learn to listen to each other’s stories, attitudes change and soften, and we begin to dream of ways we can work together.

As our nation struggles with how to confront hatred, including antisemitism, Islamophobia, and intolerance toward our LGBTQ community, and serious political divides, we need to learn how to work together and build a better future.  We know that the most effective antidote to bias and prejudice is relationship, and that comes through proximity.  As a starting point, we can together develop opportunities to listen to each other’s songs and stories.

Please reach out if you are interested in offering one of our Interfaith Bridges™ programs in your faith community, community organization, college, or university, or if you are interested in learning more about our work.

You can reach us at info@buildingbridgestogether.net or check out our website here. And if you can support our work, please donate at our website here. 

We wish you peace and many new opportunities to form relationships with those different than you in this coming year!  Let’s see if we can remember Pope Francis’s last words to us, and work together to develop trust and relationships, and heal our fractured world.

Diane Frankle, co-founder, Building Bridges Together™