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The Theology of Hospitality ˜ 329
good friend Bill Shane from New Hope House, but the heavy rains rush down
the hill against it, and already I can see the need for spring mending time. Something
wants that wall to fall into a pile of rocks.
It’s not that walls are necessarily a bad thing. I rather like having the walls
of my room. Living with thirty other people would be impossible for me if I
couldn’t escape to the solitude of my own space, defined by its four walls.
Something, though, doesn’t love that kind of wall either. At 910, we are always
in the process of plastering holes and cracks where a long, hard life has
begun to wear those walls away. On a recent trip to South Florida to help my
sister rebuild from Hurricane Andrew, I was astounded to see many of the walls
from my childhood blown down. I didn’t recognize the house I grew up in;
many of my friends were left homeless; and the old neighborhood is a pile of
rubble, with houses and walls collapsed. We love those walls that defined our
homes, our churches, our schools, our stores, our workplaces, but something
there is that doesn’t love a wall.
In the poem, the speaker tells of going out in the springtime to meet her
neighbor and to rebuild the wall that separates their property. The heaving of
the ground from heavy freezes has caused even boulders to spill. So with the wall
between them, they walk down the line and put the stones back together. The
neighbor has a favorite saying which he learned from his father (and probably
his father learned it from his father, and so on), “Good fences make good neighbors.”
He likes it so much that he says it a couple of times.
For the seven years that I’ve lived at the Open Door, we’ve had an ongoing
struggle to be good neighbors. During my first summer at 910, the neighbors in
back of us began to complain of the noise and smell and sight of so many homeless
people in the backyard. We agreed to put up a high wood fence to separate
us. It is a beautiful fence and well constructed. And it works. The people who
live in back don’t see us, smell us, or hear us anymore. Good fences make good
neighbors, I suppose, although I’m not sure you can call a person with whom
you have no contact your neighbor.
In the poem, the speaker says of her neighbor that he won’t go behind his
father’s saying. He doesn’t seem interested in the history: did a cow several generations
ago get into the neighbor’s garden was there a feud over property lines
When the history and meaning is forgotten, the fence really becomes nothing
but a dividing wall between the two neighbors. You almost get the sense that the
only time they have anything to do with each other is at spring mending time,
when they rebuild the wall that divides them.
While the fence at 910 is a good one, it does keep us from being neighbors
because of the barrier between us. They don’t know what happens in our lives,
and we don’t know what happens in theirs. I doubt they know that on the morn-