IT HAS TAKEN me a long time to realise that

my snap judgments of condemnation aren't always just. There's nearly always another point of view that I have not seen which can modify my thinking.
Take bingo. I can't abide it --a witless waste of time, whether you think of it as commercial or as propping up the Church. I don't like gambling, and bingo comes very near to it, and I wonder about the ethics of making money out of the unskilled addictive game that has hooked so many people.
And I was ready to rejoice when I read of 200 bingo halls being closed down. Mrs Thomas. who comes twice a week to help with the house cleaning, would have less opportunity to waste her hard-earned money.
She arrived a little jubilant one morning. "It was a near thing," she told me, "but after all they are keeping the old Jubilee Bingo Hall open. It gave us a bit of a fright. "If it shut down, where'd our little party go? Near enough for Mrs Bates's had leg and Brenda Jones's office cleaning? I'd find it a bit out of the way at the Mecca — it'd be hard to get there in time to queue up for the others and make sure we got our front seats.
"I'd have to go by bus and that'd be a bit awkward with the cushions I take to keep the places. That's my job. I get there an hour before the door opens. Then we can get together and have some good talks.
"The bingo people know mc and are very pleasant --old customer, they say. It cheers you up when you get to know people and our little group have all come together at the Jubilee Hall. They're nice. Do anything for you. I'd miss them if we hadn't bingo to go to."
Mrs Thomas suddenly made me feel bad about my having no use for bingo: you see, I've a family and Friends and houses where we can meet each other, and all this time bingo has been talking loudly to my deaf ears about the human needs of lonely people and about the need for a caring community and places where we can get together to share our living.
Who is my neighbour? I'm not sure that Mrs Thomas with her arms full of cushions queueing up before the doors open in the cold or the heat isn't being more Christian than roe. And the old Jubilee Bingo Hall may be at least a smudged blueprint of a bit of our Father's House.