Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Fences and Neighbors

Reverend Amy Zucker Morgenstern
August 26, 2007
Palo Alto, CA

First Reading: “Mending Wall,” by Robert Frost
Second “Reading” (Song): “The Christians and the Pagans,” by Dar Williams

Should we mend the walls or let them fall? It’s the poet’s prerogative to slant the argument of the poem, and in “Mending Wall,” we’re clearly supposed to see things the narrator’s way. His neighbor “moves in darkness,” looking like an “old-stone savage.” For his opinion that “good fences make good neighbors,” he gives no good reason, actually no reason at all. It’s just a cliché, passed along from his father. And we are already biased toward the poet’s view that walls and barriers of all kinds ought to come down. Unity is our ideal: we want to live as one people, one planet, indivisible and united in a peaceable kingdom. Like the Christians and Pagans of the song, we want to sit together at the table and find common ground.

And yet it seems to me that we are more akin to the poet’s neighbor than we like to think. The saying “Good fences make good neighbors” is inscribed on much of our daily living. We have so many fences that keep us from coming into contact with each other, and they show signs of having been carefully, if sometimes unconsciously, erected. Most of us live in neighborhoods that are segregated by race, ethnicity, or class, so that the encounters we have with people who are very different from us are few and superficial — quick conversations through the fence, you might say, instead of sitting at our leisure around the living room. At work, we keep our conversations light for the most part, talking about the weather, sports, celebrities, the trivial aspects of our personal lives, but seldom speaking of grief, love, despair, transformation. Even among family and friends, we often erect smiling barriers, avoiding topics of conversation that cut too close to what we most hold dear. “Don’t talk religion or politics at the table” — it’s bound to lead to conflict and spoil our digestion. Don’t share fears and secrets; our trust might be betrayed. If not a blunt “No Trespassing” on barbed wire, we at least have a polite sign on a nicely painted fence: “For your own safety, keep out.” It’s as if we believe that if we really knew the people on the other side of that wall, we might not like them, and they might not like us; if we really had those deeper conversations, we might end up in an argument, even a down and dirty fight. Much better to keep the wall up and wave from a safe distance to the folks on the other side. Good fences make good neighbors. And a world without fences is very uncomfortable, even terrifying.

Now, fences have their place. A co-worker who shares every detail of his weekend makes it hard to get down to work. You don’t really want to know about the love life of the woman sitting next to you on the train just because you happen to be traveling in the same direction for half an hour. And it’s true that you may digest your Thanksgiving dinner better if the family calls a moratorium on the abortion debate for the evening. However, we often swing so far on the pendulum from sharing to separateness that it seems we must be motivated less by discretion than by simple fear. Walls are a protection. What are we protecting ourselves from? And what does it cost us to maintain those barriers?

A neighbor of mine helped break down a barrier for me. It happened late last fall, when I ventured outside the literal wall around my house because one of our trees had already done so, trailing branches so low over the wall that neighbors passing by on the sidewalk were in danger of getting poked in the eye as they walked underneath. (Something there is that lures us beyond walls, and it was in my plant this year.) So out I went with my hedge trimmers, quite a sight, I’m sure, reaching as high as five-foot-four and five months of pregnancy would allow.

A man coming up the street stopped to say hello. “You live here, yes?” he said in an accent I couldn’t identify and won’t try to imitate — inflected with French, maybe? When I said yes, he said he’d seen me working early in the morning. I’m often up around five and working at the computer in our home office, which is the front room of the house and has an eight-foot-wide window. When the light is on inside at that still-dark hour, it’s like being on a stage. “I walk by on my way to pray to God,” he explained. We talked a few minutes — he goes to the mosque a few doors down, and the first prayer of their daily five is before dawn. “I put your recycling boxes in your yard,” he added. I said, “So that’s you! Thank you!” I had wondered who had moved our emptied bins off the street so many weeks, before we got around to it, reaching over the low fence in the front yard to get a jump on our chores for us.

Now he gestured to a pickup nearby and said, “That’s my truck. If you put the branches in there, I’ll take them away for you. Or you can just leave them piled here and I’ll put them in the truck.”

I like living in my neighborhood because of its diversity, but even when I’m outside the literal fences around my house, I’m shy about breaking down the invisible ones. Help a neighbor with his chores unasked? Confess that seeing him working in his front room was part of my daily routine (as it is)? Tell him about my religion? I wouldn’t have done any of these, but in five minutes this stranger-neighbor of mine did them all. Maybe he doesn’t love a wall. He knocked a few stones off one that day.

I did pile my trimmings into his truck, very appreciative that I didn’t have to deal with them myself. And it’s nice to look out, now, when I’m up early, and see people walking to their first worship of the day. I’m grateful to my neighbor for reminding me that there are interesting lives being lived right on my street. He’s inspired me to get to know more of my neighbors better, to stop and chat, to share not just our property lines, but a bit of our lives, our cares and hopes.

The need to break down some walls and know each other more closely is most pressing right here, in the worship spaces, the classrooms, the gathering-places, the meeting rooms and offices of this church. Even here, the place we come to explore the most important questions of our lives, how much do we share those questions, our answers whether tentative or positive, our spiritual experiences, our beliefs, our doubts and dreams? Not as much as we could. If we can’t talk here about the things that matter most to us, where can we do it?

Someone who helped me to do that here at UUCPA was Julie Cockroft. Julie was a great one for taking down the walls of unfairness and poverty, and led us in our affordable-housing work, in her dogged and compassionate way, for years, until her death this past April. The moments I am thinking of took place in other settings: two writing workshops, a series of gatherings called Evensong where we talked about spiritual questions, and other small groups. Julie was not a frequent talker, but almost invariably, once in every session she would speak, and when she did you got the sense that she had been listening very carefully and choosing just what to say to add to the conversation. And it was well-chosen: always something deeply personal, and spoken with such modest conviction that it carried the conversation to a deeper, more meaningful level. I can’t recall her ever contradicting or even questioning anything I had said, yet I felt profoundly challenged by her in a completely positive way. She was just so honest and clear that she cut through all superficiality. I live for moments like the ones filled with Julie’s words, when the walls come down and we sit face to face and speak heart to heart.

This is a church for seekers. We come here seeking new truths, a different way of seeing things than we did before. We are here not just to recollect what we believe but to question it; not just to practice our favorite rituals, sing our favorite hymns, but to learn others’ ways and sing a new song. If we are more intent on keeping things safe and secure than on being challenged, learning, growing, changing, then our search for truth at church will hit a wall. And we will leave here after each Sunday service, after each discussion group, contentedly confirmed in what we already believed, secure in the illusion that everyone around us thinks exactly the way we do, or at least, undisturbed by their different ways of seeing things. That’s not the Unitarian Universalist ideal. It is absolutely central to our creedless faith that none of us has the complete truth and that we therefore have a great deal to learn from each other.

“Before I built a wall,” Frost writes, “I’d ask to know / What I was walling in or walling out.” What a Unitarian Universalist approach — ask first, always ask!

When we wall out discomfort and conflict by keeping our neighbors at a cool distance from our innermost selves, there are some unintended consequences. We also shut out connection and inspiration, the spark of exchanged ideas, the expansion of our understanding, the deep love that comes only with close knowledge of another person. And ultimately, we wall out that peace that we seek. Martin Luther King said that peace is not just the absence of conflict, but the presence of justice. He was thinking, perhaps, on the level of cities and nations. Closer in, in the personal sphere, I would interpret his words to mean that peace is not just the absence of conflict, but the presence of true compassion and understanding. If we wish to feel at ease with our neighbors, a strong wall is not sufficient. In the end, it is a barrier that keeps out not only conflict, but connection. For true peace, the wall must come down and understanding take its place.

Why don’t we bring down that wall, even sometimes in our closest relationships, even here at church? Well, we might be afraid of finding out that we disagree. The people we like to talk to when we come on Sunday might turn out to have some ideas that trouble us. They might turn out to believe things we dismiss as superstition, or they might dismiss as superstition the things we believe. They might even vote for a different Presidential candidate than we do. We’re afraid that the better we know each other, the less we’ll connect.

Our faith was founded on the hope that the opposite is true: that in knowing each other we grow in respect and regard. That’s one reason I call it a faith (which is a better term for us, anyway, than “denomination”) — we’re a faith because we have faith that if we “only connect,” in the words of another “poet,” ¹ we will discover that our connections go deeper than our conflicts. For all our differences, and the very real and painful disagreements that arise from them, our core hopes and needs are all ones that everyone shares. (One of the central concepts of Nonviolent Communication, which is being taught here in our Adult Religious Education program starting two weeks from tomorrow, is exactly this: that deeper than the level at which conflict occurs is the level of needs and feelings that we can all understand in each other.) If the Christians sit down with the Pagans, they will probably all encounter some discomfort. When they say grace, some might pray in different words that the others find strange. The Christian child might ask tricky, tactless questions like “are you a witch”? He might even decide to become a Pagan himself. But maybe in the end his parents won’t be so dismayed as they might have been, having seen the essential humanity of these odd Pagan women … or maybe, as Dar Williams has, they’ll all at least see the humor in the situation instead of taking their beliefs so dangerously seriously. And they might all learn some new ways and, from their connections as they hold hands around the table, draw some warmth from each other in a world that is all too cold.

We are Universalists not because we believe that all religions are the same, but because we have learned the wisdom in many approaches to truth and want to learn more. We are Unitarians not because we believe that we are literally all one, all the same, but because we trust that our unity will be as strong as our difference.

We are Unitarian Universalists because we believe that the different lives on each side of the wall all have something of value to offer the others; that each person has some wisdom, some quirky (and possibly irritating) way of seeing things from which we can learn; and that we must therefore come out from behind our safe walls. It is not an easy faith to live by. It means that even here in our religious home, where we come to be with like-minded people, we do not all think alike. But it also means that, in the wise words of the 16^th-century Unitarian Francis David, we need not think alike to love alike. When we place our faith in that love, we can endure the challenge of each other’s very different ways of thinking. We don’t need to keep the walls up any longer.

Here is my faith: I have faith that if the walls keeping us safe come down, it will be all right. It will be very much more right than our safe, separate existences ever were.

I have faith that the “something there is that doesn’t love a wall, that wants it down,” is just exactly what we need.

Frost teases us a little, speculating that it might be elves — or “not elves, exactly,” but he’d rather we said for ourselves what it is. I have no single word for the force that brings down the walls between us and lets in the air and the light, and most important, the view of each other’s faces. I know it’s powerful, though sadly, not omnipotent. Some call it God. I prefer “the holy” or “the sacred,” or simply “spirit of life,” and you may have some other words for it or no words at all, but I know this: it’s real; and when I pray, that’s what I’m praying to. I’m asking for help bringing down the walls that keep me apart from other beings. I want to love them more, help them more, be more open to their teaching, and I’m summoning help from that force, whatever it is. Whatever sends the frozen-ground-swell under walls and brings us together is a holy thing.

When we lift up our voices to the universe and try to open ourselves to more wisdom, more kindness, to making a life from which more love flows, we are putting our shoulders to the walls that stand between us, and joining our strength to that force that brings them tumbling down.

So, in the words of one of our beloved hymns:

Spirit of Life, come unto us. […]
Blow in the wind, rise in the sea, move in the hand.

And when we would seek to build walls between us, work against us, Spirit of Life. When we try to mend them, keeping a safe distance from our neighbors, go rolling under those walls, send the stones falling, and bring us together. Bring down the walls and let us rejoice in our complicated, troublesome freedom, and in each other.

 

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