Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Transforming Boundaries


Human-created boundaries have a very different meaning to the divine I Am.

We humans work so hard to live as boundary people.  Boundaries just seem so necessary to us . . . good fences make good neighbors, we say, quoting Robert Frost . . . wrongly . . . for Frost hated the very idea of walls and fences . . .

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. . . No one has seen them made or heard them made, 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. . . 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. 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. 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!. . . Mending Wall by Robert Frost

Robert Frost would tear down the walls . . . but Jesus . . . oh wonderful, beautiful, playful Jesus . . . Jesus would walk on them . . . he would straddle that middle space that stands in between us all . . . like Mary Lou Retton in her best balance beam form . . . like a child running along the wall . . .

Jesus doesn’t ignore the walls
He doesn’t tear down the walls
He doesn’t honor the walls
And He doesn’t go around the walls

He simply jumps up on them. . . runs along them . . . laughs and calls over them  and in the jumping and running and laughing and calling, the walls are changed . . . still brick on brick, rock on rock, walls are now . . .

The sailing ship of a small boy imagining adventures at sea . . .
The empty canvas of the urban artist . . .
The tightrope of a girl with gymnast desires in her veins . . .
A place for neighbors and friends to rest their elbows while they pass the time enjoying each other’s company . . .
A place for the ivy to grow stronger in the sun’s heat baked into the bricks . .

It is the blessing not of the doctor’s cure, but of the divine’s sharing . . .

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