Disappointing Fences

When Boundary Maintenance Fails

“Enter through the narrow gate, for the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it. For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it.” – Matthew 7:13

Of all the disappointments that have come to me with aging, the work I’ve had to put into digging up and re-planting fences has perhaps been the most deep-cutting.

---

Thinly ordered chaos seems to be at the foundation of reality. And the thing is, I loathe chaos. When I read Genesis 1, to this day, I feel a sense of dread at these words: “When God began to create heaven and earth, and the earth then was welter and waste and darkness over the deep…” (vs1-2, translation by Robert Alter).

I have no problem imagining this scene depicted over centuries of oral tradition as the beginning of all things. I’ve experienced enough chaos in my four decades of life to believe that, underneath our thin semblances of order, lurks a ‘darkness over the deep.’ Genocide, terrorism, hatred, poverty, mass incarceration, slavery – the evidence for a barely-restrained chaos is overwhelming.

I almost exhale in relief when I read the rest of the sentence in verse two of Genesis, “…and God’s breath hovering over the waters, God said, ‘Let there be light.’ And there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good, and God divided the light from the darkness.”

Yes, that’s much better.

Indeed, almost in agreement with the opening verses of Genesis, quantum physicists describe everything, including human beings, as incredible events rather than entities. One of the founders of the loop quantum gravity theory, Carlo Rovelli, summarizes what scientists think they know of matter as a:

“Handful of types of elementary particles, which vibrate and fluctuate constantly between existence and nonexistence, and swarm in space, even when it seems that there is nothing there, combine together to infinity like the letters of a cosmic alphabet to tell the immense history of galaxies; of the innumerable stars; of sunlight; of mountains, woods, and fields of grain; of the smiling faces of the young at parties; and of the night sky studded with stars.”

He goes on to say:

“The world is not so much made of stones as of fleeting sounds, or of waves moving through the sea. If the world were, however, made of things, what would these things be? The atoms, which we have discovered to be made up in turn of smaller particles? The elementary particles, which, as we have discovered, are nothing other than the ephemeral agitations of a field? The quantum fields, which we have found to be little more than codes of language with which to speak of interactions and events? We cannot think of the physical world as if it were made of things, of entities. It simply doesn’t work.”[1]

In a world which began as ‘welter and waste’ and is being held together by the voice of a God I cannot see, and in which things perceived as solid are actually events, and in which evil and suffering seem to prevail so often, is it any wonder I was so attracted to the idea of constructing tight boundaries to keep my world safe?

The Allure of Boundary Maintenance

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: when I heard about Jesus it was just like someone flipped on a glorious light in the middle of my darkened little corner of the world. It was the light that drew me to Him and continues to draw me every day. But it wasn’t long until religion got involved and I was drawn to the bright, shiny thing it offered me: boundary maintenance. After a while of swimming in religious waters, my simple understanding of the boundary between light and darkness expanded to include many more boundaries in all areas of my life.

You mean I get to order my life in such a way that I can keep out all the bad, all the dark, and all the scary? I get to live in a world where there are bad-guys and good-guys and distinguishing between the two is pretty simple because of these God-ordained rules? By building some emotional and spiritual fences – hedges of protection in religious-speak – I can ensure holiness and purity in my heart and home? You’re telling me there’s a right side and a wrong side on almost every issue and I get a permanent spot on the right side if I conform my life to these certain standards?

Well, honey, sign chaos-hating me up! Swarming particles and ‘darkness over the deep’ be gone! I’m here for the security of maintaining boundaries at all costs! Let there be light!

I believed with my whole heart that the wide gate and road Jesus warned us about in Matthew 7 had everything to do with sinful thinking and immoral behavior. The narrow way of Christ, as I understood it, involved withdrawing my participation more and more from the ‘ways of the world.’ I couldn’t have identified this at the time, but rigid morality, conformity of thought, and virtue signaling to appease my evangelical in-group became a significant part of my religious practice. And I thought this was the narrow way.

This may seem hard to believe, but the parallels between the Pharisees and me weren’t obvious to my well-intentioned eyes. And perhaps that’s where we get things wrong with the Pharisees. They were just like us, obsessed with boundary maintenance because that’s what they believed would please God and keep them and those they loved safe.

The thing is, I still do believe that the wide road of destruction is characterized by sinful thinking and immoral behavior and that the narrow road means withdrawing myself from those things. It’s just that now, after decades of following Christ and experiencing an ever-deepening disappointment with the efficacy of arbitrary man-made rules, I define these concepts much differently.

Instead of a lifetime of boundary maintenance in which I keep “bad” others out and keep myself from venturing into “bad” territory, I see that the fences Christ has called me to build are ones intended to keep love alive.

Do you realize how difficult it is to keep love alive in this world?

Read Matthew 7 in its totality and cross-reference it with Jesus’ teachings on right living. He is clearly invested in His people learning to love others, do good to them, forgive them, sacrifice for them, help them, pray for them, and bless them. And every time someone tried to narrow the definition of the ‘other,’ Jesus refused to play that game, widening the aperture instead.

Jesus said to concern ourselves with the plank in our own eye instead of the “bad” others’ specks. That’s a fence worth building because it will help love grow within us, enabling us to see with God’s eyes, reducing suffering for us all. He set the example for us in washing the feet of His betrayers and praying for those who crucified His body. These were back-breaking and soul-crushing fences to build but He was committed to leaving us this legacy:

Protect love at all costs, children.

That’s a narrow road, so grueling that not many are willing to take it.

And once again I marvel at the unexpected nature of Christ’s teachings. The broad road of destruction is one commonly taken by everyone. Ego? Hatred? Contempt? Judgment? Us-and-them thinking? Cognitive bias? Self-righteousness? In-groups and out-groups? Division? Stubbornness? Violence? Patriarchy? Selfishness? Envy? Greed? Strife? That’s wide-road stuff, dear reader. Everyone is doing it!

It’s disappointing to get to the middle of one’s life and realize that so much of our First Act was spent maintaining boundaries around things that simply don’t matter, isn’t it? Meanwhile, we never got around to maintaining the fences meant to protect our love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. It’s devastating to realize that we let the wolves have their way with those precious gifts, those fruits of the Holy Spirit, all too often.

And we did it all in the name of safety, not realizing safety is a myth. We live in a world where seemingly solid entities are really events, a world formed from chaos and held together by the word and goodwill of an invisible God. In this world we have almost demigod status in terms of how deeply we impact one another and all of creation and, at the same time, we are but fragile breaths, tiny dots in the intricate cosmic tapestry. All our boundary maintenance is but straining gnats while swallowing camels, a well-intentioned but silly game we play to keep ourselves from having to take a long, loving look at the real – the real in ourselves, the real in God, and the real in one another.

Perhaps you’re disappointed in some of your misguided fence-building too? Maybe you’re feeling, as I am, a little dizzied at all the boundary re-defining you still have left to do?

If so, take heart. In what might be one of the biggest plot twists of all time, the narrow road of Christ isn’t necessarily one of comfortable order and exacting control; but it is one of Presence. Christ carries our disappointment with us and teaches us how to walk this wild path of love. The Spirit of God wasn’t intimidated by the ‘welter and waste’ at the beginning of time, seeing the chaos as the stuff of creation. And God isn’t intimidated now. When our hands tremble and our knees grow weak as we remove a boundary marker which we thought would keep us safe but has actually failed to protect love, we can still our souls long enough to hear God’s breath over the ‘darkening deep’ and a wild, beautiful, creative voice commanding, “Let there be light.”

---

[1] Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time, p.99