THE SMALL TOWN BLESSING
Robert Meyers

Many people chafe at having to grow up In a small town or in a small family, but G. K. Chesterton claims in a book called Heretics that both are the best possible training ground for people who want to learn to widen their sympathies. Curious as it may sound, he argues that the one advantage of a small town is that the man who lives in it lives in a much larger world than the one who lives in a big town.

Obviously, that remark requires support. Chesterton provides it by explaining that the person who grows up in a small town knows more of the varieties and differences among men (that is, lives in a “larger world”) because he cannot choose his companions. He is forced to rub shoulders with all kinds of neighbors. In a large city he can pick his friends; in a small town they are chosen for him.

In big groups, or clubs, existence is founded on similarity, which can shut out the real world as sharply as a monastery gate. This can be illustrated by showing the difference between the clan and the clique. Men are born into the clan. They live together because they all wear the same tartan, or came from the same sacred cow, but in their souls, by the divine luck of things, they have more different colors than in any tartan.

But the men of the clique live together because they have the same kind of soul, and their narrowness is that of choice and contentment, like that which exists in Hell. A big society is a society for the promotion of narrowness. It seeks to guard the solitary and sensitive individual from all experiences of the bitter, but stimulating, human compromise.

Remembering this, I think of many I have known who sought the big city on the grounds that they wished to escape from provincialism but who actually ended up living in a narrower world than the one they left.

What they had really wanted was to find more people like themselves so that they could form a little clique. Once it was formed, they could shut themselves off from all the unpleasant people who weren’t like them.

This can be managed in a big city, but not easily in a small one, and there is one experience which most people have had which illustrates the point. If it snows so much one night that all of us are absolutely confined to the street in which we live, we enter suddenly into a much larger and much different world. We walk to the grocery store with people to whom we have never done more than simply nod.

Actually, Chesterton argues, modern man is forever trying to escape the street in which he lives. He goes off to the ends of the earth, he pretends to shoot tigers, he almost rides on a camel. And if you ask him why, he says that he is fleeing from his street because it is dull.

But he is lying. He is really fleeing from his street because it is a great deal too exciting. It is exciting because it is exacting, and different, and because it is alive. If he visits Venice, he needn’t be excited, for these people are only Venetians. But the people in his street are men. He can stare at the Chinese because they are passive things to be stared at, but if he stares at the old lady in the next garden she becomes active all of a sudden.

“We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next-door neighbor. Hence he comes to us clad in all the careless terrors of nature; he is as strange as the stars, as reckless and indifferent as the rain. He is Man, the most terrible of beasts. That is why the old religions and the old scriptural language showed so sharp a wisdom when they spoke, not of one’s duty toward humanity, but one’s duty toward one’s neighbor.”

So speaks Chesterton, wisely as usual. Duty toward humanity may be relatively easy compared with duty toward one’s neighbor. Duty toward humanity takes the form of some choice we make. We may fight for peace because we like to fight. We may love Negroes because they are black, or the’ poverty-stricken because they challenge our sensitivities so much. But we have to love our neighbor because he is there. He is a sample of humanity which is actually given us. Probably nothing we are called upon to do is any harder.

I suppose that every church group represents an attempt to find a company that will be congenial because they are all alike. The degree of insistence upon likeness varies, but in some groups—as readers of this journal know well—it requires a deadening and monotonous conformity.

Perhaps we should be glad that in our human family we haven’t much choice. We accept our brothers and sisters and learn to put up with their eccentricities, just because they are there. We may escape from them with sighs of relief some day, but it was wonderful discipline for us to have to endure members of our own family who simply would not shape their lives the way we knew was proper.

If we can really see the church we are part of as a family, if this is more than just a cliche, then perhaps we can see them as people God has given to us without consulting our wishes. In such a spirit we might not only learn to tolerate the differences existing in such a family - we might even learn to love them for the variety they furnish and for the proof they give that life is varied, incalculable, and infinitely interesting.—Wichita State U., Wichita, Kansas