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In 1968 the philosopher Hannah Arendt published a book entitled ‘Men in Dark Times’. The title sounds gloomy but in fact each chapter is dedicated to an individual whose life had been a ‘flickering light’, throwing the darkness into relief. In dark times, Arendt wrote defiantly: ‘we have a right to expect some illumination.’ Arendt dedicated one chapter to Pope John XXIII. She was no fan of the Church or the papacy, but Arendt admired deeply a courage, simplicity and deep freedom she saw in Pope John . She entitled the chapter wrly ‘A Christian on the Chair of St Peter.’

Recently, the current Pope, Francis, issued a letter that speaks in starkly similar terms about both the darkness of the times and the need for lives that illuminate. “Fratelli tutti’ [brothers and sister all] talks about the ‘dark clouds’ of the pandemic, of closed forms of populism, of new inequalities, of hunger as a scandal, of the environmental challenge and of a deep social grief the Pope thinks we are living with. Francis draws hope for lives of illumination from his reading of the Good Samaritan passage. The encounter between the wounded man lying by the side of the Jericho road and the Good Samaritan suggests that the antidote for what is most inhuman – violence in all its forms – is a good dose of what is most truly human. What is most truly human is to be connected to others in relationships of love and care. We find ourselves by going beyond ourselves.

The Pope says that he was inspired in his letter partly by Martin Luther King Jnr. In King’s final speech he also turned to the story of the Good Samaritan. King spoke of his belief that what causes us to walk by on the other side is often not indifference but fear. We justify walking by because to accept responsibility feels dangerous. King explains that Jesus places the generic ‘who is my neighbour?’ question into the realm of the real, ‘on a dangerous curve between Jerusalem and Jericho.’ The sharp neighbour question is often on the dangerous curve in the road. But we cannot rely on compassion by proxy, nor deny the call to neighbour love and imagine we are ourselves fully human or alive. The fear we feel is only conquered only by the choice to live what King calls beautifully ‘a kind of dangerous unselfishness’. A neighbour is someone we become by choice. The lives that illuminate the dark times are those that claim this dangerous freedom, and turn the question round: not what will happen if I stop to help, but what will happen if I do not stop, what then? Who then?