Welcome to the USA Zoo - Which Side of the Fence are We on? “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall”
As you know from this morning’s news, Homeland Security is racing to complete a 670 mile fence along the Mexican border. In my lifetime the Berlin Wall came tumbling down - one of the finest moments in modern world history! (It was erected in August 1961, three months before I was born - all 96 miles of it.) The iron curtain evaporated - a freedom few of us hoped to witness in our lifetime! There is something wholesome and heartening about walls coming down. Our Poet Laureate, Robert Frost, gave to us “Mending Wall,” preserving the American adage, “Good fences make good neighbors.” It sounds prudent but Frost rightly questions the need for walls, opening his poem, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” He repeats the line again later in the poem, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall/ That wants it down….” There is something within me that wants it down. I wonder what the source of that longing could be?
In April 2006 the Israeli Government approved the erection of a 436-mile wall between the State of Israel and the West Bank, with the purpose of keeping Palestinians out of Israel. I am well aware that terrorists cross the Green Line and that the wall is designed to deter terrorism on the pedestrian level. Have you seen a photograph of the wall? Did you know that even though its purpose is to keep Palestinians from crossing the Green Line, the wall is not built consistently along the Green Line, but instead traps Palestinian land between the Green Line and the wall, which trespasses Palestinian land? Palestinians are separated from their farm land, orchards, effectually robbed of their property.
Ironically, when Israel followed Joshua into the Promised land occupied by the Canaanites and other people groups, she encountered walled cities, Jericho, being the most widely known to this day. Who built the wall of Jericho? Who brought it down? When we teach our children to sing the spiritual, what about the song stirs our souls - the building of walls or the tumbling of them?
And now, the nation of our epoch, who has provided and enjoyed the greatest freedoms known in human history, has gone into the wall-building business. In the name of securing our homeland, we are rushing to complete a 670 mile fence along the Mexican border. I wasn’t aware that Mexico was threatening USA national security!
In my lifetime, zoos have undergone a transformation. As a young child I gazed through bars into concrete cells easily hosed down at the end of the day. An inmate of the animal kingdom would pace his cell and it was clear to the child and most likely, to the primate, who the inmate was and who the free one was. My children love to visit the Oregon Zoo four miles from our home. Animals love living in the Oregon Zoo habitats. I have to search intently through exotic landscaping to find the fences. One of our polar bears is a bit neurotic, pacing and plagued with some kind of lime green algae growing in his/her fur. But our elephants propogate instead of pacing and doing the crazy man stomp. It is a lovely place for animals and people - it is lovely and free on both sides of the bars. With the 670 mile fence going up on the Mexican border, I am a bit confused as to which side of the fence I am on.
Perhaps I need a little refresher course in American history. Why are we building a border fence at its precise and present location? Oh ya - it’s on the border between the USA and Mexico. When was that border set? In 1853 by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the 1853 Gadsden Purchase. The US Government attempted to purchase large tracts of northern Mexico in the 19th Century but the Civil War and Mexico’s unwillingness to sell her land postponed any transactions until the Pierce Administration. At that time, Mexico, in deep financial waters was too weak to prevent its Totalitarian President from selling the land. It was all done legally. It was all done without much thought to the common man, let alone the poor one. This much has not changed, has it? Is not our present border problem directly resulting from poverty?
250 million illegal crossings are recorded annually on the Mexican-USA border. It is the most crossed border in the world! Terrorism is not the reason for the fence. The reason is that poor Mexicans are willing to risk the crossing to take advantage of economic and social benefits in the USA. But we, the citizens of the USA, are not responsible for the economic viability of our neighbors, are we? Thankfully, the Church knows no boundaries! Christ is Savior and Lord on both sides of any border! Members and missions of the Church are working around the clock to build a better Mexico, including infrastructure for economic stability in poor communities throughout the enchanting land of our neighbors to the south.
Anyone who has visited to build relationships displaying the love of Christ in Mexico has fallen in love with a delightful and hard-working community.
The gospel breaks down the barriers the apostle Paul wrote about in his letter to the Church at Ephesus and to the Church at Galatia. As the gospel invades every aspect, sphere, and field of our world and life experience, it consistently tears down walls. The only walls being built and recorded in a positive presentation in the New Testament would be the walls of the new temple, the walls built out of living stones. The apostle Peter writes, “You yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ….” (I Peter 2:5). God is building walls all set plumb to the cornerstone, Jesus Christ. Built upon the foundation of the prophets and the apostles, the walls God is building are not boundaries between people groups or nations, but rather houses of prayer in every language, culture, strewn throughout the world as an angel would cast gems from heaven to fall upon the poor inhabitants of the lower regions. The walls God is building do not protect people on one side and punish those on the other side. Rather, the walls are built to capture the glory and praise of his infinite and pervading presence. These walls are built to focus our attention upon the divine Person. Look at the brick next to you? Red, brown, yellow, black and white, you will find the bricks in your row, if you are a member of the universal temple of Yawheh established throughout the world. If you are a son and daughter of Abraham, then with him you are searching for a city whose builder and architect is God. That heavenly city has no temple building, for The Lamb and God are present in the midst of the people of God, the Overcomers, the followers of the Lamb. The heavenly city, Jerusalem, as it appears in the vision of the Jesus Christ to the apostle John, includes “a great, high wall, with twelve gates, and at the gates twelve angels, and on the gates the names of the twelve tribes of the sons of Israel were inscribed…. And the wall of the city had twelve foundations and on them were the twelve names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb….” (Revelation 21: 12-27). What a beautiful picture of the inhabitants of the city! This great wall is not built of stone and mortar reenforced by rebar. Perhaps it is my longing for heaven that has planted the idea within me, “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.”
December 7th, 2008 at 8:35 am
Perhaps the border wall should be moved one mile back from the border. Then we can banish all our criminals to the area between the wall and the border. We save on prison bulding because we only need to build one side of the four walls and we get a border wall at the same time.
December 7th, 2008 at 4:16 pm
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December 22nd, 2008 at 1:59 am
What is the ’something’ that doesn’t love a wall? Entropy and decay. Do these not both stem from the fall — just as much as the hunters’ vandalism Frost mentions?
December 22nd, 2008 at 10:03 am
-creative, Charlie, to think of entropy and decay as the breakers of a wall. I am fairly certain that Frost was not thinking about these causes at the root of his desire to remove walls. Too many others share his desire to experience a neighborly peace and trust. I would label it “common grace desire.” Of course, the special grace cousin of Frost’s desire, has been described by the Apostle Paul to the Church at Ephesus - the breaking down of the dividing wall between Jew and Gentile, the very work of Christ. To my knowledge, Frost did not know much of this special grace. Frost is honest as well as poetic in his line “something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” Common grace stumbles upon critical points and can be thus, quite enlightening. Special grace adds personhood to the “something,” and pinpoints the precise moment of fulfillment in redemptive history making sense of what is merely a common grace gut feeling.
December 22nd, 2008 at 10:09 pm
No creativity at all. What Frost called a ‘frozen-ground-swell’ I merely labeled ‘entropy and decay’. Perhaps not completely accurate on my part, but my main point still holds. It is an effect of the fall that pulls the wall down.
What Frost rails against is a wall where one is not needed — i.e., where there is no livestock.
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.
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.
As near as I can read the poem, Frost completely misses the other reason for walls — as ancient boundary markers, which are clearly supported by Scripture. Or perhaps this is his point. Maybe he is railing against private ownership of land? I don’t know enough to make a determination about this.
Frost’s poem describes two neighbors cooperatively mending a wall in a time-honored annual ritual. But the modern example is a case of a neighbor who zealously builds up the wall on one side of his property while all but actively tearing down the wall on the opposite side of his field. Which would you rather be, a Guatemalan apprehended without papers in Chiapas or Oaxaca — or a Mexican similarly apprehended in California or Oregon?
At the borders between modern nation-states, the neighborly cooperation Frost describes is rendered in the form of passports and visas. This is universally recognized as passports are inspected at borders or airports — whether those airports be named for Benito Juarez, Miguel Hidalgo or Kingsford Smith.
I happen to believe that the levels of legal migration into the US are rediculously low (and I believe it can be objectively demonstrated that they are at historically low levels). This is not a good thing. But illegal immigration is the direct cause for these rediculously low levels of legal migration. First, a poorly controlled border means that illegal migration, despite all of its dangers, appears more straightforward than the legal alternative. Second, a large population of illegal immigrants eliminates the desire for higher and more reasonable limits on legal migration.
Years ago, the very night of my arrival in Mexico, I sat at a pastor’s kitchen table when a group of young men from the flock came by to ask for prayer before the left to cross the Rio Bravo. I took it all in stride. They were apprehended and one of these young men became my close companion. At the time of my departure a month later, he publicly thanked God that he had not made it across the border.
Then a few months later, I was telling the story to friend who challenged my thinking. She had also challenged me to rethink the appropriateness of using a scheme I had for riding the BART under the bay but only paying the fare for riding between adjacent East Bay stations.
The lesson I learned was this: the economic benefit and the possiblity of success do not by themselves determine the rightness of a course of action.
So I say, build the fence. Build it soon. It is the first step toward getting higher limits on legal migration.
December 23rd, 2008 at 9:24 am
beautiful. you’ve given me a lot of good points to think about. I can always count on you. thanks.