Mending Wall

[excerpts]

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

...No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.

...We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.'

...He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

Robert Frost

Sermon - "For the Love of God"

            "Good fences make good neighbors," said Robert Frost - in five words pinning down something that so much passes for the truth, especially among us New Englanders, that we've been drawing lines and building walls and organizing lives around it for almost 400 years, or maybe 4,000.

            Almost everyone knows that one line.  But the whole poem aims at a slightly different target.  (In case it's not familiar to you you'll find it printed as an insert in your bulletin.)  Frost is remembering a walk in spring on his side of a New England stone wall, his neighbor on the other side, each of them heaving boulders back into place that have been dislodged by winter weather.  But Frost says he resists the exercise a little, and he keeps turning it over in his mind like a boulder, wondering whether it fits.  Walking with his neighbor, with the mending wall between them, he says,

                        ...Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder

                        If I could put a notion in his head:

                        'Why do they make good neighbors?  Isn't it

                        Where there are cows?  But here there are no cows. 

                        Before I built a wall I'd ask to know

                        What I was walling in or walling out,

                        And to whom I was like to give offense.

                        Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

                        That wants it down...

            Well, with those first trickles of thaw in our Presbyterian polity and (we earnestly hope) a full-scale meltdown of 6.0106b on the way, I guess spring is the mischief in me, too - for lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone.  And I say - with that other poet, the pilgrim in the strange realm of sacred fleshly love who wrote the Song of Songs - I say, Arise my love, my fair one, and come away.  ...For love is strong as death - its flashes are flashes of fire.  Many waters cannot quench it, neither can floods drown it.  Even generations of discrimination and hatred cannot dampen it for long.  And if you build a stone wall down the middle of it (a very New England thing to do), you run the risk, in the long run, of hefting up a boulder into the place where your heart once was.

            But alas, the building of walls seems to be a habit, not just among New Englanders, but among Christians in general.  I keep trying to persuade the students at Williams that communities of faith really do have something to offer them.  But they keep reminding me that the Christian family has a long history of walling in and walling out - using the foundation stones of our faith to wall out blacks, or to keep women down.  And some of those students - beautiful, beautiful Muslims and Jews and Hindus and Jains and Sikhs, remind me that Christians are still actively and eagerly throwing their foundation stones at people who practice one of the other noble faiths of the world.

            Maps have lines to keep us worlds apart, another poet said.  Every summer of our childhood, my siblings and I were stuffed into the back seat of the car for a two-days' drive across half the U.S. to a New England beach.  We fashioned our summer mischief into a game that told more truth than we realized: as we crossed Indiana, Ohio, interminable Pennsylvania, we'd watch like hawks for the sign marking the state line - and when it came, we'd lift up our feet to keep the car from tripping over the line.  Now, as an adult, I watch the world tripping over lines drawn to keep us worlds apart.  Urban neighborhoods are ruled with all kinds of powerful lines you can't see, and the game is: on which side of the line does a piece of property gain $50,000 in value - or lose it?  On which side of the line are the public schools considered good - or not good?  Which workers have jobs that come with health care - and which ones have to fend for themselves?  And fearful nations barricade themselves behind higher and higher walls built of bricks or wire or policies or weapons or money, and only then feel the greater fear of utter loneliness.

            Some people find it comforting when the lines are well-drawn and the boundaries clear.  The trouble comes when the one who draws the line gets to wield power over what it divides.  And it's that power that seems to connect our line-drawing exercises with God.  Ever since Genesis when God "divided the light from the darkness" and then wielded the power of naming - the darkness, night, and the light, day - we've pictured God drawing lines - between clean and unclean, between orthodox and heretic, between chosen people and godless people, between races and religions, and between male and female.  But do these lines tell us about God - or about ourselves?  They have a tendency not so much to reveal the power of the Holy but to conceal the unholy power of one over another that someone is trying to protect.  And if you go looking for that line between night and day, you won't find it.  If you watch a dawn or a sunset, you can see the deeper truth: darkness and light are two aspects of the same reality with no line of scrimmage between them.  When night and day touch they reach deeply into each other's natures indivisibly and enflame the sky with the passion of their intimacy, aching to be understood as part of a beautiful whole!

            Some lines, some walls, some boundaries need to be drawn - for safety, for clarity, for guidance.  And given the hard weather that sometimes heaves up under these lives of ours, there are a few places that probably need to be marked with good fences and healthy boundaries...  That other biblical love poet reminds us that Love is patient and kind, it is not jealous or boastful, it is not arrogant or rude.  We draw a line on this side of affection that is coercive, or predatory, or that insists on its own gratification at the expense of another's weakness.  There is a boundary between love and any attraction that manipulates or seduces or seeks to cover its tracks in shame.  These things are not love, writes Saint Paul - for love gives itself away freely and flagrantly, without thought of recompense.  If you're wanting to figure out whether a leaning of the heart is self-giving or self-serving - there are ways to tell.

            It's just that, with Robert Frost, before I built a wall, I'd want to know what I was walling in and walling out.   With respect to sexual orientation, the church needs to talk about the power that's at stake when people draw their pious, self-righteous lines.  Whose power is being protected when people try to build walls right down the middle of love to keep other people worlds apart?  In our denominational arguments and our civic debates about the citizenship and the basic integrity of gay and lesbian folk, there are people who claim for themselves the power to divide what they think is the light of love from its darkness, calling the love on each side of their line by names they think they get to choose.  It's always heterosexuals who insist that marriage is for them and not for others.  It's always biological parents who insist that same sex couples are unfit to adopt and care for a child.  They need their lines to keep us worlds apart.  All of them, walking the walls, are petrified.  Petrified.  They strain to heft the boulders that once were, one assumes, their hearts.

            But for the love of God - we are talking about love!  Not property!  And this anguished disagreement has come home to roost here in the church more than anywhere else because what's at stake is the truth and trustworthiness of things we all have been talking about for generation upon generation here in church.  "Beloved, let us love one another - for love is of God, and the one who abides in love, abides in God."  We learned that here.  "Greater love has no person than to lay down life for a friend."  We learned that here.   "Set me as a seal upon your heart - for many waters cannot quench love."  We learned that here.  Carrying these things we've learned we walk the lines others who came before us drew across the map of the world - and even before we could quite name what was going on, something inside us knew another truth: something there is that cannot love this wall.

            And we know something else. 

            We know another true thing about love.  And if we own this truth, and tell it, and offer it to everybody who ever honors this house of God by crossing its threshold, it will, I believe, remake the map of the world.  We have begun to see that over time, all the loves we have learned - the love of friends, the love of  spouse and partner, the love of nature, the love of children, the love of humanity and the love of beauty, the love of Christ, the love of God - over time, as we live more and more deeply into the meaning of our lives and learn to make more and more responsible and careful choices, over time all those loves simply and quietly and slowly become harder and harder to tell apart.  All those loves slowly become part of one great love, which as time deepens is revealed like the dawn and sunset to be singular, whole, clean - and indivisible.

            Some Religious People who want us to know how Religious they are say that the love of God has boundaries as though it were a piece of theological property over which their church holds title.  They, of course, have plotted those boundaries and can tell you precisely where they are.  And maybe, to be fair, their desire to mark the boundaries begins with the same kind of instinct for responsibility and clarity that got those New England farmers stacking boulders along the edges of their fields.  But fences like that are something which God never seems to have wanted - from the time God pleaded with David not to build a temple to separate God from the rest of the landscape to the time Jesus pleaded with people not to keep the Sabbath separate from the work of love and justice.  There's nothing irreverent about the way our loves in time start to blend together with God's love above all time - for reverence is the spine of all true love, the breath within all true love.  And time is love's medium.

            Any parent knows this is true - knows what happens over time: how you think you are so exhausted that you have not one thing left to give, and then there is a cut on your child's finger, and in the most elementary act of first aid you not only give a love you couldn't imagine you'd have any more of to give right then, but you receive a love you wouldn't have known how to ask for.  And there, sitting on the edge of the bathtub with a bandaid sticking to your finger and tears dampening the shoulder of your shirt, you realize that you are in the presence of the Love at the center of the universe.

            Any lover knows what happens over time - how you look up from your book on some rainy night to see your beloved there, dozing over his own book, or balancing her checkbook, and just for an instant  the seal on the mystery of life itself is there in the room with you, in a love you barely ever deserved for one day of your life but which is right here across the room from you, of all places in God's green earth - yours just because you share the gift of life and breath - and you realize that you are in the presence of the Love at the center of the universe.

            Anyone who was at the Table that last night must have known it was true - must have seen it in Jesus's face there, in that upper room with such powerful lines being drawn in the shadows all around them.  They must have seen light and darkness meeting in his face, lighting it up like the sky when, in the very midst of his expectation of death, he took bread and blessed it, and broke it, and gave it to them - and in that moment all of them realized that they were in the presence of the Love at the center of the universe, which no death could ever kill, from which no lines that the world could ever draw, nor principalities, nor height nor depth nor anything else in all creation, could possibly separate them.

            Anyone who has loved a long love, or loved a deep love, or a wide love, knows that in the careful choosing of what is good and responsible and in the wearing away of things that don't matter, all these loves are finally becoming translucent to the love of God.  As though, in the fullness of time, God were loving us through the love of the other.  As though it were God loving the other through us.  Anyone who has shared God's hope for this poor denomination of ours - that it might become transparent to the love of God over time, in its worship and its learning, its pursuit of justice and its embrace of every life that ever honors a house of God by crossing its threshold - anyone who has loved what this church might become knows how the light begins to shine through us when we realize that all those loves are becoming part of one great love.

            So every so often, probably we should let the changing of the season be the mischief in us, and walk the boundaries to see what invisible lines might have gotten drawn when we weren't aware of it, and ask ourselves again what we've been walling in and walling out.  Every so often we should probably walk the walls to see how the weather of God's love has been Eastering, heaving boulders around, remaking the world.  It's done that before, after all.

            So - Arise, my loves, my church, my fair ones!  As followers of the One who loved us so supremely, we are called to set holy love as a seal, not only upon one another's hearts, but upon the heart of the world.  And this love is stronger than death, brighter than fire, longer than time.  The winter of scorn and hatred is past, the rain of tears of loneliness is over and gone, the time of singing has come, and with the help of this church the voice of love will be heard in our land.  Lo, the best loves we love in this life are all becoming part of the love of God!

The Rev. Richard E. Spalding

Chaplain, Williams College

Williamstown, Massachusetts

Bible References:

Song of Songs 2:8 ff., 8:6 ff.

I John 4:16-24