Who is my neighbor?
Reflections on the Heart, Mercy, and the Gaze of the Divine
Sometimes, we look for God in the sky when we should be looking closer, in the face of a stranger, in the ache of someone hurting, or in the quiet labor of those who love without needing to be seen.
There’s a story in the Gospel of Luke where Jesus is asked by a legal expert, What must I do to inherit eternal life? He answers with something simple but deeply layered:
Love God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind and love your neighbor as yourself.
But the man presses further. Who is my neighbor?
And that’s where Jesus tells the parable of the Good Samaritan. A man is beaten and left for dead. Two religious men, a priest and a Levite, walk past him. But a Samaritan, a social and religious outsider at the time, stops. He tends to the wounds, puts the man on his own animal, brings him to shelter, and pays for his care.
When Jesus asks, Which of these three was a neighbor? the answer is clear, not the ones with the titles or rituals, but the one who acted with mercy.
That’s the heart of the message.
Your neighbor isn’t just the one who looks like you, believes what you do, or fits inside your comfort zone. Your neighbor is the one whose pain you’re close enough to see and the real question is: will you be the one who stops?
It reminded me of a teaching from Abu Yazid al-Bistami, the 9th-century Persian mystic, referenced by The Knowing Heart, Kabir Helminski. Someone once asked him for the shortest path to God. He replied:
Love those who are loved by God, and make yourself lovable to them so that they love you. For God looks into the hearts of those He loves seventy times a day and perhaps He will find your name in the heart of the one He loves, and love you too, and forgive your mistakes.
That image overwhelmed me.
Not because it’s poetic, though it is.
But because it reframes love as the most intimate path not just to connection, but to Divine attention.
In other words: the way God reaches for us may just be through the heart of someone else.
The Sufis mystics speak of hearts as mirrors. A clean heart reflects the light. A foggy one distorts it. A broken one, paradoxically, can reflect it best if the cracks are open. And there’s a deeper teaching here, one I’ve been sitting with:
Divine love isn’t somewhere “out there.”
It moves between us, refracted in compassion, carried in mercy, and activated when we show up fully, even when it’s inconvenient or costly.
One of my absolute favorite Sufi, Shams‑e Tabrizi text adopted from Rumi’s Sun, speaks of three kinds of hearts:
A heart that’s always a home for the devil — trapped in ego, resentment, and separation.
A heart that shifts between angel and devil — drawn one moment to light, and the next to shadow.
A heart that belongs only to the angels — so full of remembrance, humility, and mercy that darkness can’t enter.
And how does that third kind of heart stay lit? The text says:
It is because of what is written on the Preserved Tablets. They never turn their eyes from it.
To me, that means the heart stays aligned by keeping its gaze fixed on truth, not opinion. On essence, not image. On love, not fear. One of those lessons we keep circling back to.
So this is what I’m attempting to carry right now and maybe it’s something you’ve felt too:
The world doesn’t need more cleverness.
It needs more people who are willing to stop.
To see. To tend. To bear witness.
To open their hearts in the messy, hard, inconvenient moments and say: This too is my neighbor.
And maybe, just maybe, in doing that,
God will catch our name in the heart of someone we’ve loved,
and say: I see you.
Sources referenced:
Parable of the Good Samaritan: Gospel of Luke 10:25–37
Teaching of Kabir Helminski, The Knowing Heart
Three Kinds of Hearts adapted from Rumi’s Sun, compiled and translated by Camille Helminski