For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us
There are so many walls, aren't there? We divide ourselves by class, race, age, income, education, neighborhood, country, politcal party, rreligion, gender. There are just so many walls. The walls are erected for safety and comfort and they always make sense at the time. Right now as the President is presenting his new budget, safety is primary for him as he has increased spending in defense and decreased it in so many other important ways. But I digress.
Yesterday morning I woke with a wall between me and Chuck and it took time and prayer and honest reflection and conversation to take it down and find our normal peace with each other. Walls spring up (or are slowly built) all the time but that is not what God wants for any of us. Walls lead to misunderstandings and alienation and isolation at the very least.
As I pondered this morning I remembered the Lord's prayer and these line "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." And realizing that the kingdom life is without walls between us - and if wall are built often for safety - it means that the kingdom life is one of a willingness to be vulnerable. And who wants to be vulnerable?
I just bought a new book by Richard Rohr. Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of St. Francis of Assisi and was stopped by this quote in the introduction:
"Francis must have known, at least intuitively, there is only one enduring spiritual insight and everything else follows from it:
The visible world is an active doorway to the invisible world, and the invisible world is much larger than the visible"
There is this continual pull from the invisible world - the world of God's spirit of love - to let go and disarm and love. And trust God. My prayer for today is that I might recognize the ways I am erecting and hiding behind walls. And do what I can to dismantle them and live in peace with everyone.
Here is the way that Eugene Peterson translates the end of this passage:
That’s plain enough, isn’t it? You’re no longer wandering exiles.
This kingdom of faith is now your home country. You’re no longer strangers or outsiders.
You belong here, with as much right to the name Christian as anyone. God is building a home.
He’s using us all—irrespective of how we got here—in what he is building.
He used the apostles and prophets for the foundation.
Now he’s using you, fitting you in brick by brick, stone by stone, with Christ Jesus as the cornerstone that holds all the parts together.
We see it taking shape day after day—a holy temple built by God, all of us built into it, a temple in which God is quite at home.
My mantra for today: MAY WE BE BUILT TOGETHER SPIRITUALLY INTO A HOLY TEMPLE
This poem by Robert Frost seems fitting for today:
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:
I have come after them and made
repair
Where they have left not one stone
on a 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,
But at spring mending-time we find
them there.
I let my neighbour 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.
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.
Oh, just another kind of out-door
game,
One on a side. It comes to little
more:
There where it is we do not need the
wall:
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 neighbours."
Spring is the mischief in me, and I
wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
"Why do they make good neighbours? 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." I could
say "Elves" to him,
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,
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 neighbours."
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