On The Wall

May 9th, 2009  |   

The playwright, David Hare, got me thinking about walls this week. That happened after I read his marvelous article on Israel/Palestine, “Wall: A Monologue,” in the April 30 edition of The New York Review of Books.

The article is about the 486 mile wall that has cost Israel some $2 billion, gobbled up more than 3,700 acres of Palestinian land, and has resulted in cutting down102,000 trees.

Hare writes: “The Berlin Wall was built to keep people in. This one, they (Israelis) say, is built to keep people (Palestinians) out.”

As I think about it, there are all kinds of walls, physical, psychological and emotional. They are built by individuals, nations, neighborhoods, organizations, and religions.

I want to use this issue of Notes to bounce a few things off the wall hoping to make some sense out of the various walls that all of us run into, build, attempt to climb over, and occasionally find enough passion and courage to tear down.

Graffitied Walls

In shadowy confines, hidden from moon beams, the graffiti artist goes to work. With spray paint he etches his message on a wall that has no power to resist an indelible acrylic assault. His message awaits a morning passerby on the way to work. 

While in the Greek City of Ephesus (now Turkey), I saw what is thought to be an ancient example of graffiti. Carved into the mosaic pathway is a handprint shaped like a heart with a number pointing to a nearby brothel.

There’s no need to visit Turkey to see graffiti. It’s as close as the restroom you frequent while on a auto trip. You know, those Magic Marker scrawlings on bathroom walls.

And if you go up on the Internet, you can even see a collection of graffiti. Some are familiar, pretty earthy, humorous, and even philosophically profound.  
• A familiar men’s room urinal wall etching: We aim to please, you aim too please.
• A Kentucky high school bathroom: They paint the walls to cover my pen, but the bathroom poet strike again.
• A female New York political cynic, with humor: If voting could really change things, it would be illegal.
• One for all the deep thinkers on the road: Love and fear drive anger and expression. If you write it on the wall, you either love it, fear it, or crave it.

If you were a fly on the wall of my third floor office, you’d know that I’m a wall-writer too. For full disclosure’s sake, I’ll tell you about the wall I write on these days.

Facebook Wall

The wall I write on is a Facebook wall. For the uninitiated, here’s a brief explanation.

Facebook is an Internet web service that can be used to connect with other people, particularly friends. A person can create his or her own page and then post pictures, personal information, messages and announcements.  Since joining, I have connected with people I haven’t seen for years. It’s been fun and informative.

Here’s where the wall comes into the picture.

At the top of the web page, there is a box, upon which I can write messages that will be posted on my “wall.” Those succinct messages then are available to my list of friends out there in cyberspace. They can then respond by writing messages on my wall. Call it a band of Facebook graffitiites, without spray paint.

Last week, for example, I wrote the following: A new Pew Forum study reports that 54 percent of the people who go to church at least weekly say that torture is justifiable. Shocking but no surprise. In my experience most church-goers support the death penalty. We Christian pastors have much work to do. Jesus was tortured but never espoused torture. Should we replace coffee hour with a waterboard experience to convert folks? Just kidding!    

A friend, picking up on the dark humor expressed in my waterboard comment (Outrageously dark behavior requires a strong dose of dark humor.), suggested that perhaps an appropriate place for the torture would be in a baptismal pool with the message, “give up torture or else!” 

She got me thinking with that comment. When I baptize someone, I am, indeed, baptizing them into death—death to a way of life that embraces, even celebrates, violence, and accepts, even condones torture. I am also welcoming that person into a church community committed to live, and even die, if necessary, in active resistance to all forms of tortuous behavior and violent vindictiveness.

Baptism isn’t an ecclesiastical insurance policy that rewards holy-water-dunked Christians with a ticket for the journey across the River Styx. God knows I’m not Charon the ferryman steering the fortunate folks to some heavenly bed-and-breakfast place, and the unwashed to some slime covered, health-department-condemned greasy spoon. 

Baptism is the occasion when I introduce the newly water-splattered person to Christian sisters and brothers who refuse to get their jollies from any form of blood sacrifice. But I don’t kid myself about how deeply enculturated we Christians are when it comes to looking for a pound or two of revenge justified either for the good of God or country. 

The Pew survey indicates that the more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists.

And here’s the part of the survey that becomes the mirror on the wall to any churchgoer who asks the question: “Who’s the fairest of them all?”

The most likely folks not to support torture are those who don’t affiliate with any religious organization (only four out of ten).

At a Duke University coffeehouse, someone wrote this on a women’s room wall: There is nothing so pure as the kindness of an atheist.

On Monday, Judy and I leave for a trip to Concord, New Hampshire, where we will celebrate around daughter Debby’s graduation from nursing school. Interestingly enough, speaking of walls, on the Tuesday following her entrance into the nursing profession, she will leave for China and a trip to The Great Wall of China.

Perhaps, on our trip, I should pack a Magic Marker and, while stopping for gas, write my own graffiti message on the men’s room wall. What to say? What to say?                                      

Don’t torture me with a religion that thinks it’s okay to waterboard people.

Talking And Listening Walls

When Judy and I moved back to Charleston, we made a deal with a wall, or, you might say, closed a deal with a church which has a wall as a part of its outside garden.

I am talking about St. John’s, the church I served years ago—the parish which Judy now attends. The wall I am referring to is a columbarium built into the garden wall outside the parish hall. When death forces us up against the wall, as it does with all of us, we will go into that wall, hopefully, with peace and the blessings of friends and family.

In the play, “Tuesdays with Morrie,” Morrie, on his deathbed asks one last favor of his dear friend Mitch.               
    
“I’ve picked a place to be buried…After I’m gone, I want you to come and visit…when you have some time. Bring a blanket. Pack a lunch.”

Mitch always brought lunch—egg salad, Morrie’s favorite—on his visits as he accompanied Morrie through his battle with Lou Gehrig’s Disease.

“Bring your lunch” says Morrie, “sit…and talk with me. Tell me your problems. Tell me what’s going on in the world.”

But, says, Mitch, “it’s not gonna be like we’re talking now because…you won’t be able to talk back.”

“I’ll make you a deal,” says Morrie. “After I’m dead, you talk…I’ll listen.”

Walls talk and walls listen.

One need only visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington to get a full-blown experience of a talking-listening wall. The names on that wall talk to us about the sacrifice that war requires—the blood-sucking, vampire-like war that drained the precious blood from so many people.

Back at the start of the Iraq War, I was a part of a West Virginia delegation that took a canvas-like wall to Washington. It was filled with the names of those who had died, up to that point in time, in Iraq. We unrolled it in a field adjacent to the Vietnam Memorial Wall. I felt the connection as people passed by—one wall speaking to another.

I would do well to go again to Washington to listen to those names carved into that granite Wall. They still speak to anyone ready to listen. I would, of course, like Mitch, talk to that Wall about what’s going on in the world. The Wall would have to hear my complaints about the additional US troops that are on their way to Afghanistan.

I have prayed at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. Think of it, praying to a wall—weeping in front of a wall as if that wall could ingest one’s tears, and comfort and instruct those who cry.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall is America’s Wailing Wall. It is there to listen and to speak, even though its stone is silent—except for those with ears to hear.                                           

Something There Is That Doesn’t Love A Wall

Mentioning the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem drives me back to David Hare’s article on the wall dividing Israeli and Palestinian villages and cities. Observations about that wall have deep overtones for all the walls we build or confront.

Robert Frost’s oft quoted poem, “Mending Fences,” points to the tension between the word wall and the word fence. The narrator in the poem says, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall—That wants it down.” Not so, says his neighbor, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

In what has been traditionally called “The Holy Land,” language matters—naming is a critical endeavor. As Hare points out, “Words become flags, they announce which side you are on.” Israelis refer to the wall as the “separation fence,” while Palestinians use the term “racial segregation wall.”

On the one hand, Frost’s narrator could well be a Palestinian who sees a wall—a barrier which isolates, stigmatizes, and chokes off social and economic contact. On the other hand, the neighbor could well be an Israeli who sees a fence—a boundary that offers definition, distance, and protection.

Whether you see the wall or fence as a necessity, a violation of international law, a land grab, a practical attempt to stop the violence, or, as Sari Nusseibeh puts it “the perfect crime because it creates the violence it was ostensibly built to prevent,” will ultimately depend on which side of the edifice you live.     

There is much to learn from all this wall-talk, because each and every one of us find ways to wall ourselves off from other people—particularly those who don’t look like us or think like us. In like manner, we often stonewall new information and new contacts that might confront our old viewpoints and prejudices.

When this occurs, David Grossman, the Israeli novelist, whose writing I prize, warns us about the dangers of walling ourselves off as individuals, and as a nation. Behind our fortified walls, he says, “we have terrible trouble imagining any other reality than the one we live in. You become habituated, you cannot believe there is another way of life. And so effectively you become a victim of the situation.”

When we allow ourselves to become victims, says Grossman about Israel, but it could well be the United States, “we hand our fate over to the security people, we allow the army to run the country, because we lack a political class with a vision beyond the military. Survival becomes our only aim. We are living in order to survive, not in order to live.”

The Dividing Wall Of Hostility

The words from the African-American spiritual point to a profound truth: “There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole.” But it is also true that religion can be toxic—hazardous to our health, as individuals and as a nation.

Raja Shehadeh, a Palestinian lawyer, says that the greatest good fortune for Ramallah, the West Bank town where he lives, is that it is not mentioned in the Bible. Hare writes: “Nothing divine happened in Ramallah. What a stroke of luck for any town that wants to survive! Not to be named in any Holy Book.”

Hare’s observation is right-on. For years I have quietly objected to the term “Holy Land” to describe that portion of the world I knew as a child as Palestine, and now called Israel. And why, you say? Simply this: All life and all places are holy, and that’s precisely the message that the great religions espouse when they are faithful to their own message.

Warning: When you wall off and designate one place or one nation as holy, that place become more important than any other place and, therefore, it becomes the ground over which people fight in order to possess it.  

I mentioned Ephesus above. Let me mention it again, as the destination for the Apostle Paul’s letter found in Christian Scripture.

Paul was greatly concerned about the animosities and divisions in Ephesus that had separated the followers of Jesus from other Jews. He let them know, in no uncertain terms, that Jesus had come to break down “the dividing walls of hostility,” and they’d better do likewise.

His message had cosmic implications pointing to the fact that this Christian way of life was intended to break all barriers, not with retaliation or revenge, but with love and justice. Good medicine for a case of toxic religion.

For Your Wall

Consider your bulletin board or your refrigerator as your wall. With the banking situation as it is, clip this little ditty, compliments of Jonathan Swift.

A baited banker thus desponds,
From his own hand foresees his fall,
They have his soul, who have his bonds;
‘Tis like the writing on the wall.

Entry Filed under: A Fig Just Dropped Archives

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