Thesis For Mending Wall

Robert Frost, the celebrated American poet, penned these words a hundred years ago in his poem, “Mending Wall.”

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,

And spills the upper boulders in the sun;

And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

Imagine Frost’s rural New England scene: two neighboring 80-acre plots of land, forested with pine trees on one side and an apple orchard on the other, and dividing these, a rock fence that stretches on and on . . . and which falls apart on an annual basis. Every year, the gaps keep presenting themselves.

No one has seen them made or heard them made,

But at spring mending-time we find them there.

I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;

And on a day we meet to

Yet for me, in reflecting on the Trinity and the mystery of the community that exists in our one God – as well as the Great Commission that pushes believers out into the world, beyond fences, to make friends and disciples – I can’t help but hold onto what I think is Frost’s main thesis: there is something (or perhaps someone) that doesn’t love a wall and wants it down.

The Trinity is a mystery that is never mentioned by name in Scripture, but in which we in the church believe. In Genesis, it is seen as God creates the world, as the spirit hovers over the void, a sort of conversational, creative moment, in which the world is created good. And of course we read in the gospel of John that Christ, too, was there in the beginning: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being.”

We may say we’re more than just a Sunday service, but 90 percent of our resources and efforts are either committed to the Sunday morning experience or events designed to draw people to our buildings. We may think we serve, but if we took an honest look, we’d find only a small percentage of our people actually serving outside the church. (p.24)

Reminders like this can help us expand our imagination on what it means to be church -- what it means to be us. For Hatmaker, it’s breaking down walls . . . these “brick and mortar” walls . . . as the Church moves out into the world. What would it mean for you to join God’s work of breaking barriers and bringing down walls in your world, your neighborhood?

Frost was asked once about his intended meaning for “Mending Wall.” At the core, he said he simply wanted to do two things: portray two characters well and offer an image of the place. But he went on to say: “I should be sorry if a single one of my poems stopped with either of those things—stopped anywhere in fact. My poems—I should suppose everybody 's poems—are all set to trip the reader head foremost into the