The 31 Days of Ridiculous Awesomeness have come to a close – the preaching conference was amazing, the UUA Appointments Committee retreat was fruitful and delightful, and wow-oh-wow the first two intensive classes for my D.Min. were both incredibly enriching and utterly exhausting. I am still catching up on sleep and making sense of the many and varied ideas and conversations. Meanwhile… back to the opinions!
Over the weekend, I read a thread on Reddit (which I can’t seem to find now) by a person who moved into a new home in a suburban neighborhood; they discovered very quickly that the older neighbors had no qualms about coming into their back yard when they saw a member of the family there. After multiple requests to honor their boundaries, their older neighbors kept inviting themselves to their backyard gatherings. So they built a privacy fence… which did not keep the neighbors out. So they put up signs about private property and trespassing… that these older neighbors blatantly ignored. So they put locks on the gates… which resulted in them finding a neighbor actually working to dismantle the lock so he could get in. This offending neighbor quoted Robert Frost to them, affirming that people in this neighborhood don’t believe in fences and are quite offended that this family would want to keep people out.
While clearly there are legal issues here around trespass and damage of personal property, what struck me was how misguided the neighbors were about Frost’s poem “Mending Wall” – which is very much about communication, human contact, and understanding (and became a part of the debates on nationalism, international borders, and immigration).1 It’s not about personal privacy.
Which then made me think about how many boundary issues we face in our congregations – particularly (although by no means exclusively) between younger ministers and older congregants. But instead of physical boundaries, we are talking about boundaries of time, of personal details, of finances, and yes, sometimes even physical living space (especially when there’s a parsonage).
And it makes me think that perhaps some of us gleaned the wrong lessons when learning “Mending Wall” – which I’m pretty sure every American read at some point in high school, beginning likely during the first World War and continuing certainly through the Cold War, if not still today. We learned that it is really about a stone wall that gets broken down by hunters every year, and once a year he and his neighbor go to rebuild it, and in that moment make connections and consider the effectiveness of walls. And we learned how it contains larger questions – the larger questions we faced in the 20th century (and still do today). We considered it on a global scale, seeing the need for breaking down walls. And we also considered and the irony and the nuance.
So why do some people think it’s about removing walls that preserve personal privacy? And is that why this kind of personal boundary breaking happen so often? The story our Redditor told seems almost too hard to believe – and yet so many of our religious professionals (particularly those brilliant, young, queer religious professionals who are not dudes) could tell even more extreme stories from their lived experiences.
What is so scary about walls? Why does it make some of our older congregants so nervous? I can’t help but wonder if the lessons they were taught about pluralism, diversity, and world community lead them to think about individuals in the same way, forgetting that what makes our world safer and stronger is removing the walls that keep us from world community while maintaining the personal boundaries that help people feel safer and stronger. Maybe this mistaking the micro for the macro is why some folks have such a hard time with congregational and behavioral covenants – it’s simply contrary to what they were taught.
There’s enough doubt in Frost’s poem that makes me think the neighbor in the poem isn’t entirely wrong – when it comes to personal privacy, good fences really do make good neighbors.
There is this wonderful piece at the Poetry Foundation about the poem, its meanings and usage, and even Frost’s own opinions, wishes, and doubts.