Blocking Out the Sun

March 18, 2007

Rev. Paul Beckel

Boundaries. We need them. We resist them. We so long to open our doors and windows to the fresh air. But sensibly, on this still cold winter morning, we keep them closed.

This is national sunshine week, a time to remind ourselves about the importance of open records and open government. This week The U.S. House of Representatives passed four Sunshine Week bills to promote and preserve open government, including a bill to strengthen the Freedom of Information Act. Halleluiah!

This week we come together with our good neighbors the Presbyterians! I am grateful to this bell choir group, and I am grateful for the broader connections that we are making with these neighbors in providing community meals together. And yesterday at the Presbyterian church I spoke at a peace workshop – and I want to share just one bit of what happened there because it ties so closely to our theme today, which is boundaries. Do good fences make good neighbors?

Boundaries will always be with us. And that’s a good thing. Take yesterday’s paper for example. Just one page – the issue of boundaries and where the boundaries ought to be – is in almost every story: food safety, Valerie Plame, sexual predator housing restrictions. Yesterday at the peace workshops a speaker described what she had witnessed while spending time recently in the West Bank of Palestine. The Wall. The enormous wall being constructed to separate neighbor from neighbor. Actually lots of walls in addition to the big one there were barbed wire barriers forming an incredible maze winding through the region. So walls are bad, right? Well that’s a tough call. Because she also told about Israeli soldiers who on a typical day will just camp out on a Palestinian family’s roof. To the soldiers there are no walls, there is no meaning to privacy.

So that’s our question today. Even as we long for the passing of the winter and the opening of our hearts and homes to the sunshine, we have to ask ourselves whether we can take the heat. We cannot just glibly say that there should be no boundaries, but consider whether and when to redraw the lines in an effort to be good neighbors.

PART I

A “spite fence” is a structure built on one's own property specifically to harass or annoy or drive out one's neighbor.  Here are some interesting examples: The photo in the order of service [http://www.sfgenealogy.com/sf/history/hgoe75.htm ] is from San Francisco in the late 1800s, where the owner of a mansion was unable to persuade his neighbor to sell a sliver of land, so he entombed his house in a 3-sided, forty-foot wall.

Another example: In Massachusetts, the owner of two lots adjoining a black church put up a fence on each side as high as the eaves...within 18 inches of the building, painted black on the side toward the church, obliging the parishioners to use lamps at midday.  The fences stayed in place for almost twenty years. “Spite architecture reached its ultimate refinement in ‘The Spite House,’ which was in fact two 8-by-50-foot houses built ...in 1882 ... in Manhattan. [The owners] lived in one of the houses for years, taking their meals off an 18-inch-wide table.”[1]

A bit of folk legal wisdom suggests that whatever I choose to build on my property is my own business, regardless of how it affects my neighbors. But as far back as 1867, Connecticut banned spite structures. And though they were never epidemic, as recently as 1921 New York City numbered spite fences in the hundreds.  In the early 20th century many states banned them. A Michigan supreme court justice proclaimed in his ruling: "What right has the defendant to shut out God's free air and sunlight from the windows of his neighbor, not for any benefit...to himself, or profit to his land, but simply to gratify his own wicked malice?  The wonton infliction of damage can never be a right, and no man can pollute the atmosphere, or shut out the light of heaven...to gratify his spite...toward his neighbor."

==

In our lives we find ourselves both victims and perpetrators of isolation. When I hear the word, "isolation," my initial gut reaction is negative.  I feel cold, frightened.  But there is a great deal of ambiguity here.  What does isolation imply?  On the one hand I imagine physical barriers, or vast distances, or human laws, that keep neighbor from neighbor and lover from lover. 

On the other hand isolation is security. PROTECTION.  I feel fortunate to have a home, the PHYSICAL BARRIER between my family and the cold wind and rain.   I also feel blessed by the many REGULATORY BARRIERS which protect me, for example, from fraud or defective consumer products.  And where would we be without the BIOLOGICAL BARRIERS which isolate and destroy many of the viruses and bacteria which could do us all in?

So is our ability to isolate a gift or a curse? This could be a PERSONAL question, answered differently by an introvert and an extrovert. It may be a COMMERCIAL question.  In Philadelphia, baseball fans used to watch games at Shibe park by standing on the buildings which faced the right field fence.  But in 1935, management, hard-hit by the depression, put up a 22-foot-high sheet iron structure to block the view.

Is our ability to isolate a gift or a curse?  This is forever a SOCIAL question, as seen in our ongoing debates over prisons, nursing homes, private schools, immigration quotas, free trade agreements, and "don't ask - don't tell."

Is our ability to isolate a gift or a curse?  Robert Frost's poem, Mending Wall, addresses this moral ambiguity, but leaves us to grapple with it in the end. Twice in the poem the narrator reflects on how "Something there is that doesn't love a wall." The forces of nature conspire to heave its stones apart: erosion, animals, gravity, entropy....  It seems quite natural that walls were not meant to be left standing. Something there is that doesn't love a wall.

And twice in the poem the narrator's neighbor, who has joined him in an annual effort to replace fallen stones in the fence that separates their property, remarks, "Good fences make good neighbors."

There are communal isolations from the Amish to suburbia. There are forms of isolation that we may laugh about, such as the bundling boards that our great great great grandparents may have placed between courting lovers in bed. In the age of the internet, of course, there are electronic forms of isolation. There is the spamming that occurs when someone maliciously generates millions of emails to someone effectively cutting off their ability to communicate with the rest of the world. And there are the fences we rely on to prevent commercial spamming. There is also “Flaming,” which is a form of psychological isolation, in which one floods another user with degrading or insulting e-mail with the intention of driving them out of a group.

But how can I discredit the benefits of isolation... when isolation is the very key to the deductive process that we call the scientific method?  Is it not through the process of isolating one factor at a time, and scrutinizing it under various conditions while all other factors remain constant...that we discover all of empirical knowledge?

It’s hard to judge. There are ENVIRONMENTAL barriers that we'd like to keep, such as the ozone layer that protects us from UV radiation...and others that we'd like to see eliminated, such as the atmospheric Carbon Dioxide which by preventing solar heat from escaping causes global warming.

Medical practitioners appreciate isolation when it protect patients from providers, or protects providers from patients. Babies born prematurely, as much as we want to hold them, need to be isolated from our germs – and yet they suffer if they are isolated for too long.

In social situations, or I should say anti-social situations like prisons, people who are isolated can experience hallucinations. In a political context, the isolation of being left out of the process can create a desperate sense of alienation.

In one theory of adolescent development [Erik Erikson] young adulthood is characterized by the dilemma of intimacy versus isolation. In this stage we have to be willing and able to unite our own identity with that of another person – a form of love. Andy yet if we do let down our barriers, if we do make connections, then we become vulnerable. Ahhhh blessed... cursed... isolation.          

MUSICAL MEDITATION 

MESSAGE, Part II

Themes of isolation pervade our western religious history.  The ancient Israelites developed an annual ritual of casting all of the sins of the community upon a goat, which would then be cast away into the desert, thereby relieving them of the pressures that sin can sometimes bring. Many centuries later, those same Israelites’ descendants found that their ENTIRE community had become a symbolic scapegoat.  When, in 1516, the Jewish quarter of Venice was walled off from the rest of the city, that neighborhood, located next to the giotto, or iron foundry, became just the first of hundreds of Jewish ghettos to be isolated from European cities.

Our Unitarian history has its own story of isolation. In 1841, Boston Unitarian minister Theodore Parker was already seen as a bit too much of a radical -- for his abolitionist activities.  But when he gave the sermon at a well-attended ordination questioning the supernatural aspect of biblical miracle stories, his peers felt that he had gone too far.  The orthodox Christians of the day had always declared that Unitarianism was but a halfway house for infidels.  Now Parker had given them an opportunity to discredit the whole Unitarian body.

Parker's colleagues were eager to distance themselves from his outlandish naturalistic theology.  But as staunch defenders of freedom of the pulpit and free inquiry into all religious matters, they were in something of a bind.  In the end, the Boston Association of Unitarian Ministers voted to ask Parker to withdraw from their Association.  But when he refused, they came to realize that they had no formal means of excommunication, and could not legitimately create one.  They did, however, shun Parker for the remainder of his days, and refuse him the common courtesy of pulpit exchanges. Today Parker’s sermon is considered one of the  classics of Unitarian literature.  And Parker is thought of as one of the great prophets of our movement.

==

So isolation has some intriguing “benefits.” But on a personal level it does not feel good.  So what are we to do about it?

In Robert Fulghum's book, From Beginning to End, he tells the story of a child dedication that he attended at a friend's home.  Though the family barely knew their closest neighbors, they decided to invite the whole neighborhood to this child dedication, which was preceded by a lengthy barbecue, to give people an opportunity to meet one another.  The ceremony itself became much less important than the relationships which began between neighbors that day. 

The ceremony ended with these words: “As most of you know, Max has been born with a tiny hole between the chambers of his heart.  His existence is somewhat fragile.  The good news is that surgeons can repair that hole, and Max may live a long life -- if all goes well.  In the weeks to come, Max and his family will need your support, your help, and your prayers that Max will endure and take his place with the children growing up in this neighborhood.” And the room was silent.  With a silence that separates a moment of community from everyday isolation.

Fulghum also writes: “Once upon a time, somewhere far back in ancient human history -- so far back that personal survival was the only concern -- a defining event must have taken place. // Someone didn't eat what he found when he found it, but decided to take it back to the cave to share with others.  There must have been a first time.  A first act of community -- call it communion -- in the most elemental form.”

Fulghum considers this spirit of sharing, or cooperating, to be the very basis of civilization.  Is it any wonder that the rituals we perform contain such power?  Perhaps every kind of religious ritual hearkens back to that original act of sharing.

When I meet with couples to prepare for a wedding, I ask questions about their relationship and their common goals.  I ask them if they have similar social and political goals -- whether they intend to reshape the world together according to a common dream.  Most couples aren't quite sure what I'm talking about. It's too bad I didn't get to perform the wedding of John and Sally McKittrick, a couple who I met during my ministerial internship in Illinois, a couple whose love story I heard when I asked Sally about her ring, which was formed in the unusual shape of the diagram on the cover of your order of service [above].

In 1968 Sally saw this quote and diagram on the cover of the order of service of a UU Church she was visiting outside of Chicago.

            He drew a circle to shut me out;

            Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout;

            But LOVE and I had the wit to win;

            We drew a circle that took him in.

Sally held those words close to her heart, and found them to shape her personal way of dealing with people. They may have even helped her choose her career in special education.  When she and John, both teachers, married several years later, they decided to have their ring design based on that diagram and that quote. To this day I sense that Sally and John see their marriage as a partnership to overcome their own isolation, but perhaps even more: as a SOCIAL contract, wherein they refuse to shut out any who need their care.

I believe that we as a church community create such a social contract.  Even as we celebrate our right to build whatever we want on the property of our own minds, we have the opportunity to end the isolation which we and many others experience.

Whether we put it in the terms of our Universalist forebears who saw all people as children of a loving god, or go back to the Jesus who received all people, no matter how marginalized, no matter how isolated from society, or further back to the inspiration of that first sharing of a morsel of food.

I’ve been walking around in the construction site and I feel a profound rightness about the balance that seems to be emerging there between openness and intimacy. Very soon they should be putting up the front window wall which will open us up to the world. In doing this we are taking a significant risk. For opening ourselves up to the world could be seen as an invitation both to intimacy and vulnerability. It may turn out to be a stage in our congregational development very akin to that of the young adult who struggles with that balance: with the meaning self, and the meaning of love.

BENEDICTION                    #683, by Theodore Parker

Be ours a religion which, like sunshine, goes everywhere;

its temple, all space;

its shrine, the good heart;

its creed, all truth;

its ritual, works of love;

its profession of faith, divine living.