The Wall

“Before I build a wall I’ll ask to know what I was walling in or walling out, and to whom I was like to give offence.” Robert Frost

This feels like a wide-open generation in which fast-moving things make sweeping changes. Old institutions like ours that are having credibility and usefulness problems right now feel they are compelled to keep the doors open. Anything in the net is better than nothing in it.

Twenty-five hundred years ago when the Jewish community returned home from years in exile they walked into an open society too. The first thing they did was to repair the walls around their sacred centre. It seemed to them vital to anchor themselves first and then to adjust to their times. They may have been correct. There is a distinction between openness of heart and cultic desperation.

My premise about this present generation may be incorrect. It may not be wide-open. People cling together by age, shared experience, ethnicity, social class, education, temperament, and geographic and cultural history. We are tribal by nature as always.

We fend off fast-moving things or make use of them through the walls around our cluster-groups.

Perhaps it is a mistake then for us to cast a wide net with little concern for our sacred centre and its wellbeing. Perhaps it is time for the wall repairs.

We need a wall around worship and praise. These are among the most intimate things we ever do. Those who do not understand or value them are not welcome to pass through the walls invited. Public worship always presumed a whole community, though perhaps widely scattered, that understood what worship is. Open worship and public worship are not the same. Our public selves and personal selves express very different things.

We need a wall around the Gospel. It is a precious jewel that needs time, contemplation, and adoration. Jesus, and the gifts of Messianic imagination and spirit are not fodder for galleries, malls and public stages. They are crown, orb and sceptre in the rule of eternal things. Repair the wall.

We need a wall around the intimacies of our testimony, our living and our dying. As we open ourselves to faith and let it work its ways in our lives we become different from other people. We discover and know things differently. Our witness is first for our own community. That is how faith is heartened. I will not whisper my secrets to strangers. Build the wall.

We need a wall around our integrity. We need not survive, or fit in, or flourish under a foreign agenda in a foreign land. Once we know who we are and why we do what we do, we must build a wall to protect us from lesser things and cheaper pursuits. It is too easy to be spread thin by trivial preoccupations.