Our Neighbor's Fence

During worship this past Sunday, Rev. Parsa extended the theme of wholeness to a consideration of our attitudes and behaviors towards human difference. Despite the valiant banners of global peace and inter-cultural understanding that we may carry, living in right relationship with our neighbors is rarely comfortable or easy. Too often we succumb to the specter of fear and suspicion that haunts the horizon of beloved community. We take refuge in excuses instead of trusting that love will guide our way.

Somewhere in the rocky sea of daily living, you have likely sailed upon the proverb ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’ In common parlance, of course, the aphorism functions as a caution against excessive intimacy and prescribes a ‘healthy dose’ of distrust. You keep to your side, I’ll keep to mine. By extension, then, peace amounts to little more than the absence of conflict: so long as we don’t fight, we’re golden.

A cursory glance at the source of that saying reveals a rather different outlook, however. In his poem, Mending Wall, Robert Frost playfully describes the exchange between two neighbors as they discuss the rebuilding of a stone barrier separating their respective properties. The speaker repeatedly chides his interlocutor for resorting to his father’s suspicious rationale: “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.’” Frost’s speaker is not convinced by this logic – he adds in jest: “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.” Fences cut off, dissect, block out. “Why do they make good neighbors?” Frost wonders.

I would imagine that we all have encountered individuals in our lives whom we initially would prefer to fence out. But wholeness, and peace, demand of us something greater, something deeper, than distant tolerance. I am reminded of a Turkish proverb, which reads: She who builds a fence, fences out more than she fences in.

Take a moment to reflect: what might I be missing when I hold back from human relationships? Who am I really fencing out – or fencing in?

The French mystic Simone Weil takes us deeper: "To love our neighbor as ourselves ... [means that] we should have with each person the relationship of one conception of the universe to another conception of the universe, and not to a part of the universe."  

So often, neighbors trouble and surprise our premature judgments once we greet them face-to-face, in their beautifully fractured totality, instead of merely glaring at their shadowy forms through the narrow slits of our fences.

Reflection for the week: Fences prevent us from seeing ourselves and others as wholes.