Walls and Othering: Finding Hope Amidst Fear
Around me, walls. A wall is not a border; a wall is static. Borders change. Borders fluctuate, redefine, undulate in summer sunlight and disappear in snowstorms. Unburied, we can’t find the dividing line. Above below and through, border-bright shifting.
No one redefines a wall. It is either here, or not here. It’s either standing, or torn down.
When they tore down that heartspace, the Berlin Wall, I was 9 years old. I didn’t understand why this undoing was important. My friend’s brother had a very small scrap of the wall, flecked with yellow graffiti, that he looked at in awe; he showed it off with the pride of a pirate. I touched the cold hardness of the fragment, trying to understand how a piece of concrete could symbolize freedom.
We are building new walls and new borders constantly, real and unreal. We raise steel grates of wall in the desert. They are discernable regardless of language, that first unseen border between here and there.
Even among multitudes of essays about the border between me and you, between us and them, I still hear Frost’s “Mending Wall” quoted. “Good fences make good neighbors,” he wrote, when all the while each on our own we learn this is deceit, misquoted, that in his Franconia woods among Eastern white pines, Robert knew only “something that doesn’t love a wall.”
Walls are easier, though. Helpful. Visiting another friend in Manassas, Virginia at 13, I gawked lack of walls. Where were the fences? I asked. What do you mean? my friend Laura Lee said. All around the houses were grass and forest: green, green, and more green. At home in urban California there was every kind of fencing, every kind of wall—iron, wood, cinderblock, sometimes even hedges taller than me—everything except this lack, the absence of definition between homes. Grass and forest where a wall might be.
Throughout the Old Testament, walls serve as a metaphor for God’s protection—the one defense of desert cities built in hostile lands. Then in the prophets, the Lords says to Isaiah:
“No longer will violence be heard in your land,
Nor ruin or destruction within your borders,
But you will call your walls Salvation
And your gates Praise.”[1]
The walls between peoples, the walls that were so critical for protection from outsiders and the unknown, are falling away. Instead, Christ appears as the new Joshua, commanding the shattering of walls that fooled us into thinking we were safe.
In the New Testament, there’s one mention of a wall[2] – how by faith, the walls of Jericho fell. Otherwise, walls—and the metaphor of walls—change. Instead, the partitions that separate are ones of the heart. Everywhere he goes, the people find their way to Jesus. Physical barriers are easily surmounted: they follow him to the edges of lakes, where he’s forced to speak to them from a boat. They break cultural barriers and cry out from their affliction on the side of the road. They even lower their friends through ceilings. Continually, Christ seeks to break down barriers that his disciples work to build between him and everyone else: tax collectors, children, unclean women, demon-possessed men, Gentiles. Again and again, he sets aside their prejudices, breaks through the partitions they construct—or else try to enforce, in the name of the law, in the name of what is right and good. But when Jesus Christ dies on the cross, the most symbolic partition –that mystical divide that stands between the people and the holy of holies in the temple – is rent in two. The divide between God and His people, the wall, is forever razed.
We are watching with terror the devastation of pandemic sweep across a fragile, broken world fraught with borders and walls. We are watching the consequence of those definitions, and the reaction of those who harken to walls to keep out pestilence as though we were not all interconnected in a way so visceral, we could sooner lose heart than a hand. I am looking for the bits of assurance that can be found between the lines, beyond the anger and the confusion, in the ever-expanding pandemonium of now.
“We are apt to create every partition, every barrier, and every wall that we can.”
We are apt to create every partition, every barrier, and every wall that we can. Sometimes we build walls in an effort to protect or to enforce the law. More often we build walls to help us feel as though we’re safe, no matter the reality—physically—mentally—emotionally. Christ will tolerate no such fallacy, no superstition. He is our only refuge, our only help in times of trouble.
To understand, and to “articulate all we can about divine reality” is the whole purpose of theology. Yet somehow in the midst of trying to know and to recite what we see as the will of God, we go astray. We fabricate walls where we should build bridges and roads that lead us back to Christ, to his acceptance, his forgiveness and his love.
If we envision Christ solely as a bridge, we risk missing some of the deeper truth: the great “I am.”[3] A bridge implies a construction, but before time began, Christ Jesus—the Way—was and is: plain, open, wide as mercy. He was and is laid fast as our path from before the oceans trembled or the cosmos broke the dark with galaxy and sky. In His words to us, “I am the way, the truth and the life, no one comes to the Father but by me[,]”[4] Christ reminds us that he is our revelation, the unveiling of what always was but had been lost. The barriers, walls, and so much of what’s formed of this life masquerade as safety, when against the reality of eternity we see they are only mist and shadowplay.
God provides not only all the protection and sanctuary that we search for, but He breaks the chains that bind us. Our freedom in Him allows us to thrive in the joy and peace that surpasses understanding. Perfect refuge is not a wall or a barrier, or even a bridge, but the absence of necessity for the bridge: the restoration of all that created a chasm between God and ourselves. Where Moses and the Israelites saw the Red Sea, God saw a path that cut through the abyss. So God invites us into his kingdom, where we find not only redemption but the transformation of ourselves to life in Christ.
—Bonnie Rubrecht
[1] Isaiah 60:18
[2] Hebrews 11:30
[3] John 8:58
[4] John 14:6