Good Fences, Good Neighbors?

Rev. Mark Stringer

First Unitarian Church of Des Moines

March 3 and 4, 2007

 

“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.”
–Robert Frost, “Mending Wall”

 

Meditation

“In Betweenness”by Richard S. Gilbert

 

We live in betweenness:

In between festivals of gratitude and joy,

In between seasons of contrasting color,

Between floods of brightness

And seas of whiteness.

 

We live in betweenness:

On a remote island outpost in fathomless space,

Between stars and moons and planets and voice,

Surrounded by meteors, comets, rays and

nothingness

In which there is no right or left, up or down,

Only betweenness.

 

We live in betweenness:

Not quite atop apex of joy,

Or in nether of sorrow,

Rather, in the moving space between,

Uncertain of our location.

 

We live in betweenness:

Walking from city of birth to death,

Hoping along the way

         To see something of beauty

         To touch hands with those we love,

         To give more than we get,

         To make some sense of it all.

 

We live in betweenness.

 

Reading
“Telephone Repairman” by Joseph Millar

 

All morning in the February light
he has been mending cable,
splicing the pairs of wires together
according to their colors,
white-blue to white-blue
violet-slate to violet-slate,
in the warehouse attic by the river.

 

When he is finished
the messages will flow along the line:
thank you for the gift,
please come to the baptism,
the bill is now past due:
voices that flicker and gleam back and forth
across the tracer-colored wires.

 

We live so much of our lives
without telling anyone,
going out before dawn,
working all day by ourselves,
shaking our heads in silence
at the news on the radio.

He thinks of the many signals
flying in the air around him,
the syllables fluttering,
saying please love me,
from continent to continent
over the curve of the earth.[1]

 

Sermon

I’ve been having a quarrel with myself for these few weeks since I decided to work with my theme today, a theme inspired by the Robert Frost poem, “Mending Wall,” a poem with the memorable line “Good fences make good neighbors,” which has been quoted (in opposition to Frost’s purpose I think) by fence lovers everywhere.

 

Let’s listen to Frost’s words.

 

He wrote,

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.
The work of hunters is another thing:	5
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,	10
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.	15
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
"Stay where you are until our backs are turned!"
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.	20
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
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.	25
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.	30
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!" I could say "Elves" to him,	35
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there,
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,	40
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."

 

Where is the quarrel in me with this theme, you may ask?  I am, after all, a minister following a calling that it matters that we bother to know each other, to coexist through our differences as best we can, to try, as Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hahn suggests, “to awaken from the illusion of our separateness."  Why wouldn’t I just follow Frost’s lead and suggest that fences are the refuge of those who “move in darkness”, who seek to alter what is natural by maintaining artificial boundaries that do little more than divide us?

 

Well, a couple of years back, my wife and I showed our pro-fence colors by having a fence built on our side of the invisible line that runs between our neighbor’s property and ours. It may be true, as Frost suggests, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.  That wants it down!”  But, I have to confess, that something is not me.  At least not when it comes to the cedar fence we had built.

 

The fact is I am grateful for our fence.  It has enabled us to transform a backyard that once just seemed like an appendage of our neighbor’s driveway into an urban garden with clusters of plant material and a future private patio that we plan to enjoy on a regular basis.  It has given our daughter and our cat free reign of the backyard without the temptation to get into mischief by wandering next door.  And, to be honest, it has cut down on intrusions into our lives by a neighbor who had previously shown a little too much interest in us than we would prefer…interest in our approach to yardwork, our home maintenance, our outdoor projects, and so on.

 

If I sound a little defensive about our fence, it’s because I am.

 

And therein lies the heart of the quarrel I’ve been having.   I don’t think either side (pro-fence or anti-fence) is always right.  I think it all depends on the type of fence being built…on what is being fenced in or fenced out.

 

I’ll explain.

 

It took my wife and I a couple of years and a couple of testy exchanges with our neighbor before our fence was finally erected.

 

And once we had it built, I wondered why we had waited so long.

 

But, of course, I knew why we waited so long.

 

We needed to make sure that we did it right, or else we might face a lawsuit.

 

At least that’s what our neighbor threatened one evening on our front stoop.

 

I can’t remember exactly what had brought him over to our house that night.  As I recall, he had, earlier that day, dropped off a letter outlining how erecting a fence between our properties, as we had told him we were planning to do, would violate some imaginary city code, threaten his ability to open his car door, and basically jeopardize his pursuit of happiness. “What else did he need to say to us?” I wondered when I heard him knock on our door that evening. Perhaps he had stopped by to make sure that we had read his letter.

 

I greeted him at the door and invited him onto the porch.  I assured him that we had been trying to be responsible neighbors by telling him that we were planning to build a fence, that we would not trap him in his driveway and that whatever we built would be built within the bounds of the law.

 

“Yeah, well that’s a good thing,” he said.  “Cause I don’t want to have to sue you.”

 

Stunned by the threat and wanting to treat it like the affront it was, I responded, “Now why did you have to go there?”

 

And then he stormed off our porch.

 

Meanwhile the fence that had already been slowly rising between us, a fence of the spirit you might say, with the potential of being far stronger than any cedar fence ever could be, continued to take shape.

 

I suppose the foundation of our spiritual fence was laid not long after we moved in.  He had made some generous overtures of neighborliness—inviting us over for birthday cake with his wife, loaning Susan a book, sharing with us the kind of small talk that is necessary in healthy neighborhoods and civil society—and we were happy to reciprocate.

 

And then the construction project began…a major addition to his home that took over a year to complete...over a year filled with nearly constant clatter of hammer and saw.

 

Susan and I had moved to Des Moines from Chicago…and New York City before that…so we were not unaccustomed to noise.  Still, I’ll admit that something about the project got under our skin.  Maybe it was the building materials that he left on our lawn.  Maybe it was the backhoe that he operated late into the evening.  Maybe it was the two-story purple addition that we now had to see where there once stood a beautiful tall pine tree.

 

Or, then again, maybe it was something else altogether.

 

Looking back, I think things started to really go sour between us when, after the construction was mostly done, for several mornings straight, he had let his dog outside at sunrise to relieve herself, and then either forgot or refused to let her back in, leaving her to bark and cry for several minutes at a time.  I had mentioned this to him one afternoon, explaining that his dog was waking us up, and asked him to do us the favor of keeping an eye (and ear) on her.

 

A day or two after the conversation, the dog was again whimpering at length to be let in. I stumbled out of bed, gave his phone a ring and ended up leaving a message that I’m sure sounded unhappy, because…well…I was.  No doubt, evident in that message were months of built-up frustration…frustration that to him probably seemed misplaced.

 

The noisy dog dilemma went away.  But the tension between us didn’t.

 

A few months later we had an exchange with repercussions I’m sad to say that we are still working through.  On a December Friday morning before sunrise, he chose to operate a leafblower in his driveway.  In a state of exasperation, I stormed outside and confronted him with a few choice words, and he responded in a similar fashion. Immediately regretful over the insanity of my impetuous communication strategy, I tried to backpedal and approach the situation more respectfully, but by then the damage had been done…putting our already frosty relationship into what felt like a deep freeze.

 

I did send him an e-mail of apology for the cavalier way in which I approached him, and he did thank me for making the effort, but we still mostly avoided each other for months.  Even in my certainty that my grievances against him were justified…similar, I am sure, to his certainty of his own grievances against me…the memory of our cross exchanges haunted me. When I found myself retrieving the morning newspaper off our front stoop with my back intentionally and unnaturally turned toward his house so I wouldn’t have to see him, I knew that not only had I sunk to a new low of immaturity, but that the spiritual fence between us was now complete.  And I was ashamed.  The energy I was expending to creatively avoid my neighbor had become greater than the energy it took to simply co-exist with him.  In my reflections on this, I acknowledged that I didn’t have to like my neighbor.  I didn’t have to swallow my concerns about his behavior and just passively tolerate anything that he might do.  However, I had come to see that I needed to open myself to the truth that, in the way I was choosing to deal with our relationship, I was not being the person I wanted to be.  And I was not contributing, in this relationship at least, to building the world in which I want to live.

 

Looking back on our history together, I knew that something had been violated between us. And that something, I can now clearly see, was trust.  I saw him as inconsiderate and disrespectful.  And I’m thinking he saw me as hotheaded and impatient. But underlying it all, was the feeling that we simply could not trust each other.  We both thought of ourselves, I am sure, as good guys who were just being misunderstood, but our actions betrayed the impression we had of ourselves.  We simply could not see things from the other’s perspective…at least not enough to convey that we could be safe in each other’s presence…that we could co-exist without fear of the other.

 

Now I know that the tension I have experienced over the years with my neighbor is mostly small potatoes.  When preparing this sermon, I found entire websites devoted to problems with neighbors and boundaries…and the legal advice that is often needed to keep people from doing things they really shouldn’t do.  Let’s face it:  there are oftentimes very serious issues between neighbors.  Issues that go far beyond barking dogs, leafblowers, and cranky conversations in driveways.  Issues that may require the construction of clear boundaries to insure peace of mind if not safety.

 

So, I still contend that physical fences between neighbors are not necessarily inappropriate things.  My experience has shown that, while Susan and I built the fence mostly for landscaping purposes, having it in place has enabled our exchanges with our neighbor to be more intentional and friendly, since some of the issues between us are no longer so evident, and we now have a means to more easily remove ourselves from each other when we feel a need to.

 

But the real lesson I have learned from my interactions with my neighbor has more to do with my reflections on the spiritual fence I helped build between us and how it did very little to create the sense of safety that I thought it was creating.  I helped build this spiritual fence by embracing my indignation at him rather than searching for where I may have betrayed my intentions of who I want to be in the world. I helped build this spiritual fence by my refusal to approach him with the kind of compassion, understanding, and respect for his humanity that I expected from him.  I helped build this spiritual fence by focusing less on what I could learn from him and with him, and more on what I felt I needed to teach him.  

 

I do believe “something there is that doesn’t love” this kind of fence…this spiritual fence that we build to deny that we are all more alike, and in need of love and respect and compassion, than we might want to accept.

 

I’ve come to believe that this kind of spiritual fence, the fence that we may think we must construct or fortify to be safe, is actually the fence that most jeopardizes the safety we seek, because it keeps us defensive, on edge, and nervous for the next attack.

 

I return to the words of Thich Nhat Hanh.  I came across an essay of his this week in which he suggests that if we truly want to be safe…to have our inherent worth and dignity respected and honored (on both a personal and a global level)…we have to “build safety” both for ourselves and for our neighbors.

 He writes,

 

"We can learn to build safety with our in-breath and our out-breath, with our steps, with the way we act or react, with a smile or a word, with our effort to restore communication.

"You cannot feel safe with the person who lives with you if you cannot communicate with him or her. You cannot feel safe when the other person does not look at you with sympathy, when you are not capable of looking at him or her with compassion. Safety can be built with your way of looking, your way of smiling, with your way of walking. It can build confidence. Show the other person that you are truly not harmful, that he is safe in your presence, in the way you think, the way you breathe, smile, and walk. Everything you do is peaceful. So by expressing your peace, your compassion, the other person feels very safe. And when the other person feels safe, you are safe. Safety is not an individual matter.” [2]

Our cedar fence may not be going anywhere.  But maybe, just maybe, when that patio is done, we may one day enjoy it with our neighbor, and take one more step toward the removal of the other fence between us, the fence that has done nothing but further divide us.

Before that day, there will need to be lots of little steps, lots of smiles and simple words to be shared between us.  They may be hard to come by.  But I’m thinking that each one will be worth it in the end. 

Each one will be worth it in the end.

 

Closing Words from 19^th-century Universalist minister Hosea Ballou

 

If we agree in love, there is no disagreement that can do us any injury, but if we do not, no other agreement can do us any good. 

Let us endeavor to keep the unity of the spirit in the bonds of peace.