Good Neighbors ©
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
October 3, 2021
There is a hillside in Salem, that I discovered recently. It’s a small area, tucked between two ordinary houses on an ordinary street. It is a hillside known as Proctor’s Ledge, and there, on that hill, in 1692, 19 people accused of the supposed crime of witchcraft were hanged.
There is a wall there. Not a wall between pines and apples, not a wall to control cows, but a low retaining wall to hold back the hillside. Placed in that wall are blocks of granite inscribed with the names of those hanged.
It’s a sobering spot, simply designed, surrounded by the ordinary, and yet a site so infamous for what took place there that it was remembered by word of mouth, by stories passed down, for over 300 years.
An ordinary spot, where ordinary people were put to death. And it stands as a stark reminder of what happens when walls go up between people, between neighbors, when a community turns on itself, rather than turning together toward love and justice.
Today, of course, almost 330 years later, remembering the Salem witch hysteria is always intriguing and mysterious, and yet safe. We look back at the quaint clothing, and the images of a landscape of farmland, small towns, and charming wooden houses. It feels distant, otherworldly, an intellectual exercise to try to figure out how people could become so hysterical that they could tear their community to shreds.
And yet, there are echoes of those actions today. Echoes of the ignorance that created such fear. We see daily fear of a virus, and in some cases, even greater fear of the vaccine that can prevent it. We see fear of people who are different; those who speak a different language, or who wear different clothing; those whose skin color causes some people to think they do not belong. And of course throughout history we have seen a common human response to that fear – to build a wall. From medieval times when whole cities were enclosed with stone walls, to early times in this country when tiny villages were enclosed with wooden palisades, to our recent attempts to wall off a border with an adjoining nation, humans have tried to use walls to create safety.
Robert Frost asks this question in his famous poem:
“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 offense.” (Robert Frost, “Mending Wall”)
This month, our theme is Cultivating Relationship. It’s wonderful timing for us to be reflecting on relationships; we are finally rebuilding our church community after a year and a half of barely being together. But at the same time, we have been watching as relationships strain and fracture, as we in the United States find ourselves so unable to agree on what we used to take for granted. Or, perhaps I should say, what we thought we could take for granted – things like believing in democracy, in supporting public health.
But as so often happens, during difficult times in our history, we find out that we are not who we thought we were. We find that there are many among us who do not believe in liberty and justice for all. There are many among us who believe that their own freedom matters more than the common good. We witness the anger, the flouting of laws. We feel less safe, less confident in our futures. We ask ourselves: how do we respond to this? Do we build walls around ourselves and our own small groups, to try to keep ourselves safe? But if we do that, if we wall others out, do we risking rejecting the larger world and the opportunities for new relationships that might arise? As Frost pointed out, any inquiry into the meaning of community becomes complicated right away. As we will see, there are no easy answers to that question Frost posed: what are we walling in, or walling out?
We humans are not meant to live in isolation. “There is no life apart from life together,” wrote the Reverend Rebecca Parker. We are community-formers; from the earliest cave-dwellers to the 21st century’s rich network of social, political, religious, and interest groups that form continually. We gather in religious communities, knowing that our seeking for understanding of the Ultimate is strengthened when we feel safe to question, explore, and learn together. We gather in book groups, not satisfied to simply read books on our own. Our understanding of religious belief, or a book, improves when we listen to other voices and opinions, rounding out our own experience.
According to the late poet John O’Donohue, one of our strongest human longings is to belong. It is in belonging that we create our own identities – we understand ourselves through our relationships: as partners, parents, siblings, and friends. We are church members, choir members, lay leaders. We discover what interests us, and who else is present, and in doing so, we discover more about ourselves. Where do we belong? Whose are we? This is work that we cannot do alone.
There is no life apart from life together. Our need for connection, for belonging, is so vital to our human existence. In our liberal religious tradition, we believe that it is our connections that save us; that provide salvation. And some progressive theologians might tell us that to betray others, to reject the life-sustaining human connections and separate ourselves from others, is a definition of sin. Now, we don’t talk much about sin and evil in our progressive church; over time we have become much more concerned with how we grow, and transform, and realize our potential. But to think about such transformation only for ourselves as individuals, and to not remember that we do this work as part of communities, is wrong. When we separate ourselves, turn our backs on others, reject the human connections that foster growth for us all, we sin.
As I thought about this, the words of the very first hymn in our gray hymnal came into my mind: Hymn #1 – May Nothing Evil Cross This Door. Feel free to take a look if you wish. The lyrics are actually a poem by Louis Untermeyer: A Prayer for This House. I wish we could sing it together, but I’ll recite the first verse:
“May nothing evil cross this door, and may ill fortune never pry
About these windows; may the roar and rain go by.”
We create sanctuary here, and the way we first created it, back in 1806, was to build walls to enclose a gathering space for this religious community. Since that time we have faced hardships and celebrated successes together. Think for a moment how we have widened our view of our community since that time. We have worked hard to sustain this community even as our founding belief system of Universalism was joined with Unitarianism, and our beliefs evolved beyond our founding Christianity. Our theology, based on our first principle that all have inherent worth and dignity, has guided us to expand our vision of who belonged within these sanctuary walls; to people of color, to LGBTQ people, to the economically marginalized guests of the Grace Center. While none of this growth took place overnight, we have been able to open our community – our vision of community – in ways that our founders could never have imagined when our physical walls were being built. Our walls have expanded now into cyberspace. We have a much broader understanding of who is welcome and how they participate.
The growth can come at a cost. We lose people along the way; those whose beliefs or tastes move them in different directions. And of course, those who would express hatred of others or deny their humanity would not find shelter here.
Growth can come at a cost. But what this community has learned, over the course of 240 odd years, is that using these walls to keep people out comes at a much higher cost than does growth. It can be tempting to exclude. It so often feels safer to deny access to people who we might be afraid of. Lock the doors, and we don’t have to think about what’s outside. When we’re here in this room, we can’t even see outside, can we? But we have the memory from 1692 of what can happen when a community becomes so limited, so rigid in belief, so focused on total conformity, that they can turn on anyone who is perceived as different. A community that creates walls that cannot expand can ultimately be consumed by fear of what they cannot understand. A community that has walled themselves off from easy access to the information they need about the lives of others, will have no way of learning, and thus is unable to dispel their ignorance and fear. Such a community cannot connect, or be in relationship with those they perceive as belonging outside of themselves. As we saw in Salem, in their efforts to keep themselves safe, the community risked destroying themselves from within, until people – neighbors – were imprisoned, tried, and in the end, carried in oxcarts five or six at a time to Proctor’s Ledge to be hanged.
We must always guard against creating too much safety for ourselves, guard against walling ourselves off. Do good fences make good neighbors? That last line of Frost’s poem is so well known, but it becomes a cliché – and its point is often missed. What is the purpose of a wall? To both protect and to separate. To offer safety to those on the inside from those perceived to be on the outside.
Our tradition, Unitarian Universalism, calls us to create communities that can hold in balance a feeling of shelter, and of welcome. To create a community that is safe, and warm, and loving. And to then encourage its members to step outside of its comfort zone, to connect more broadly, and to welcome more people in. To return for nurture and support, and then to step outside again. Back and forth, in and out, over and over.
Last evening, I did something unusual for myself on a Saturday night: I attended the first anniversary celebration of the North Shore branch of the NAACP. We gathered, and we saw the pull toward human connection, toward relationships, that is stronger than emails and Zoom meetings. We humans are meant to meet in person. And in meeting, we stepped out of our individual lives, our own comfort zones, to learn from one another. It’s easy to become isolated here on our island. I have to leave here to be able to encounter new people and hear their stories. I have to leave here to meet people like the Reverend Andre Bennett, to hear his story, as a Black man, of the constant terror that on any given day, he could be arrested, injured, or killed. I stepped outside our community last night, and helped, with my presence, to strengthen another one. I was inspired in a way that could only have happened by leaving. And today, I am back here, in our sanctuary, stronger and better informed, committed to holding the balance of finding shelter and widening our welcome.
The final verse of the hymn reads like this:
“With laughter drown the raucous shout, and, though these sheltering walls are thin,
May they be strong to keep hate out, and hold love in.”
My friends, my wish for us all is that we see our congregation, and our sanctuary, as a loving home base. If we only use it for our own growth, or our own nurture and support, then we are only doing part of our work. May we take what we find here out into the wider world, may we foster relationships with others we encounter, and may we then invite those we create kinship with to join us, expanding our walls and our hearts. May we be blessed by one another here, and in turn, be a blessing to those we meet.
Blessed Be, Amen.
