Tearing Down the Fences
"And the second is like it: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.'" (Matt 22:39 NKJV)
"Good fences make good neighbors", the television commentator said, misquoting Robert Frost for the millionth time in my memory. It made me wonder if the esteemed poet was not looking down from Heaven and sadly shaking his head.
No line of poetry has ever been more
misused in history than that one. It comes from Frost’s great poem MENDING WALL.
In it he writes of him and his neighbor repairing the broken stone wall that
divides their property. Frost questions why they are doing so, because there are
no animals that need fencing in. He sees as well that the wall is a symbol of
the barriers that people create to distance themselves from each other. He
wisely writes that, "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."
His neighbor, however, who Frost describes as a "stone savage" who "moves in
darkness" refuses to part from the ways of his forefathers and goes along
foolishly with their belief that "Good fences make good neighbors."
I wonder if Mr. Frost would have ever written this poem if he knew that the line
he wrote in irony would be used again and again to encourage what he was so
against. Perhaps he would have written a different one about tearing down the
fences that separate us and breaking apart the walls that hide our hearts from
each other. Either way, we should embrace the wisdom he shared with us. Fences
and walls separate us from each other and from God. We need to take them down
stone by stone, walk through them, and embrace each other in joy. We need to
love our neighbors just as our Father in Heaven meant for us to. We need to see
that good fences DO NOT make good neighbors. They just make lonely hearts.
By: Joseph J. Mazzella