The Sunday school teacher had a tough job, getting a bit of ethics into the skulls of a restive crowd of youngsters on a hot, lazy Sunday morning when the outside world with swimming holes, games and cool gardens called stridently. She, and subsequent teachers synthesized what they thought we should know. Love your neighbor. Honor your parents. God has a plan for you. Don't rock the boat. Obey your teachers, the Police, the Government.

I was puzzled. Who is my neighbor? I had doubts about a pimply guy from the next class who seemed to get on with a cute chick I never had the courage to greet. Then there was the class bully, surely he was not a neighbor? I was greatly puzzled by the family, and society's reaction when I wanted to greet our dearly loved Swazi nanny, Juliette, on her return from holidays, with a kiss. Surely she was a neighbor? But I was told that a white boy should not kiss a black woman, it was not proper.

Society tries to make us conform. South African kids were taught that God was in favor of Apartheid, that people were created differently and should remain separate. And that our leaders received guidance from God, to rule justly and fairly. That the war against the opponents of Apartheid was a war against the evil, atheist Communists. But were they not our neighbors, then?

I naively asked a sympathetic Minister of religion who my neighbor was. He soon found himself unable to answer my questions. Other leaders, those who were supposed to enjoy divine guidance, ducked and dived.

Of course we know, today, that Apartheid was wrong, that the leaders of our society were not divinely inspired. But that still begs the question: who is my neighbor?

A Buddhist guru offered an answer: Whomsoever fate puts across your path, he or she is your neighbor. And that has worked for me. My family, my colleagues, the people who came across my path, they are my neighbor. The vagrant in the street, begging for money to go and buy liquor, he is my neighbor, and if I love him I will not help him in his folly, but give him food instead. Which he threw into the gutter with a curse. The worker desperately trying to have his work permit renewed. The immigrant trying to build a new life.

There is a second question that depends on the first: If they lied to me, as a child, as to who my neighbor was, what lies are being told to us, to society today? What lies are my grandchildren being fed as the word of God? What would they, in fifty years, find as evident lies in my teaching them?

Make sure you know, this Christmas, who you should love.