"And who is my neighbor?" — Luke 10:29
I know how that phrase can sound. People use it to mean ours and not yours — my kind, my blood, my side, and the rest can freeze.
But I don't think the men who say it are wrong about what matters most in it. The instinct underneath is a good one: that some people are your responsibility, that you don't get to walk past, that you show up whether or not you feel like it. That's not tribalism. That's the beginning of a life worth living.
The instinct is right. The radius is wrong. We have to widen the circle.
Here, our own is whoever is in front of us. The man in the cell. The woman across town whose name we don't know yet. The addict who has burned every bridge he had, including with men in this room. The difficult one, the strange one, the one who voted the other way, the guy at the register who's never once said hello. All our own.
Both traditions I've trained in are relentless about this. A lawyer asks Jesus who counts as his neighbor — a fair question, and the one we all want answered, because we're hoping for a list. Jesus tells a story instead. A man is left half-dead on the road. A priest passes. A respectable man passes. The one who stops is from the wrong tribe entirely, a man with no duty in the matter at all.
Then Jesus refuses the question. He doesn't say who qualifies. He asks: which of these three was a neighbor to the man?
The question turns around. It stops being about who deserves my care and becomes about what kind of man I am on that road. There is no list. There's just whether you stop.
What kind of person am I?
The Zen vow is harder still: beings are numberless, I vow to save them. Numberless, and all of them. No line to draw.
Why do both insist on this? Not because it's the rule. Because the line you draw doesn't protect you — it shrinks you. Every boundary you set on who gets your care deforms you more than it costs the people outside it. A man who has decided in advance who doesn't count has made himself smaller, and he will be smaller in his own kitchen, with his own children, for the rest of his life. Widen the circle and something opens up in you that can't be got any other way. That's the whole strange bargain.
So yes. We take care of our own. All of them.
We're not volunteers. A volunteer's obligation ends when his shift does.
What I want to build is a company of men — company in the old sense, men who go together — who take this on as a standing obligation of their lives. Trained for it. Honest with each other. Still doing it in ten years. Showing up for one another. Bonded. The care we offer isn't service. It's the training itself.
And it takes a kind of man that, speaking for myself, I am not yet. Which is exactly why I want you to come and work with me. We can't hand out a steadiness we don't have.
The training is for the work. The work is the training.
Come and see.