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July 2007

There aren’t too many fences in Middlebury, at least few that can be seen. But most of seem to know exactly where the boundaries lie; when we mow our lawns and rake leaves and shovel snow, we know where to stop. And we know not to wander across our neighbor’s property, and to stop our animals from doing the same; we know not to pry and peer and peep; we know to check inquisitiveness. Most of us have a feel for boundaries, the need for space and distance and privacy. Most of us, but not all.

David Wise, writing on the FBI’s internal spy, Robert Hanssen, comments on how, in conversation, Hanssen routinely invaded other people’s space: it would seem boundaries of any kind were not his strong suit! When we violate another person’s privacy, or another nation’s sovereignty, or another church’s integrity, we fail in respect, we destroy trust, and we rend the fabric of relationship. Sound relationships rely on clear borders to contain and limit and define and protect, and that is as true between neighbors as between nations, between spouses and friends, parents and children; as true in the life of a parish and a church as in international politics.

There is a centripetal energy in the Scriptures which some imagine is alien to maintaining perimeters: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free person, there is not male and female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal.3:27), but the Gospels remind us that Jesus well knew the lonely place, that he sought solitude to rest and pray, and recognized his disciples’ need for the same. They reveal a man who respected others’ freedom and dignity, who trusted men and women to keep their word and find their way, who rendered to others their due and counseled his followers to do the same. The life of the Christian community relies for its health and fidelity on that same subtle blend of respect and critique, closeness and separation, trust and challenge.

Robert Frost memorably asserted, “Something there is that doesn't love a wall,” and as he discovered, that ‘something’ is always mysteriously at work: intruding, disturbing, scattering and disrupting. In our difficult and ongoing discernment of what it means to be a global, national and local church, perhaps we need to be reminded that our Anglican tradition emerged from a refusal to allow the internal life of the local church to be determined by outside powers, or to have the authority of local bishops usurped by any other bishop. We do no service to the church by abandoning what we believe to be constitutive of our church. And at the heart of every incarnation of the church is a profound reverence for the integrity of the other, and a loathing to interfere in matters we cannot fully grasp from the distance that manners and decency demand.                                    TPG+

 

 
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