I’ve been brooding over boundaries: fences, barricades, walls, dikes, moats, hedges and the like. I’m contemplating commodities that separate space from space and vista from vista. “Post-modernist” folk
see such things as antediluvian artifacts that want shoveling out like so much muck into the maelstrom; they call for commons, bridges, networks, cacophony and community, not sanctuaries and silence.
And we all seem to want “openness” with every aspect of our lives: we keep our music always on; we’re available 24/7 via cell phones and email; we “personalize” our computers and appliances. We have news
collated and streamed to us in tailored torrents. We carry our lives around in integrated black boxes: our tablet computers, our Smartphones, our MP3 players. Like everyone else in our office or on campus, we customize our cool common contraptions so as to express how unique we are and how hip….
“We are all individuals!” we proclaim boldly to the cosmos.
But, not all boundaries are bad. Not all differences divide. The joy, even today, of travelling to some far flung shore is to encounter there something other than a McDonald’s or a KFC with a slightly different décor. The point of going on vacation is to model a different mode of living, however briefly, so that we can taste our lives anew on our return; the intent of insulating one’s work life from one’s home life is to be more bountifully engaged in both.
The eastern orthodox churches have a long history of creating boundaries. But theirs are not encumbrances that exclude, but curbs that consecrate. The eastern view of worship is one in which we are taken, wholly, with all of our senses, out of this world. We are placed in hallowed halls: all that we see reminds us of God; all that we hear is harmony, all that we breathe is balm. In the Divine Liturgy, we utter words that are reserved for that place alone; we sing hymns whose rhythms and melodies have been saved for sanctifying time, while gazing at icons that sanctify space.
Why have we lost this in the west? In too many Roman Catholic and Protestant churches, music whose rhythms and words have more in common with daft modern ditties than with timeless traditions are forced upon us. Chatty folk speak to each other in church just as they would in the mall or in a parking lot. Choir members and musicians jest loudly, ignoring the few that might be (horrors!) trying to pray quietly in the pews. If God is present, he apparently has to be “helped along” with snappy tunes and sappy displays of back-slapping congeniality; the Prince of Peace once again has no place to rest His head.
There’s plenty here to plumb.
I recollect a book I read years ago entitled “In the Absence of the Sacred” by Jerry Mander. Although its predictions of impending environmental disaster did not persuade, the central concern expressed
by the title remains relevant. What are we, as living beings, if we safeguard no space in our lives for that which is holy? What do we become if we populate our plazas and pump up our parishes with the
profane? What remains to us when we wallpaper over the Host of hosts with melodies and sentiments more suited to Sesame Street than to the sanctuary?
G.K.Chesterton once said “Don’t ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up.” In our churches, in our homes, in our workplaces, we are whittling down walls willy nilly. We aren’t aware
that, instead of impeding us, these constraints may be keeping bad things out and good things in…good things that need nurturing, that want warding: precious treasures to tuck away, ready to refresh us
when our souls are spent; words and images, songs and stories that are set apart for us, and for our children, and for all generations to come.
Can we, then, afford to keep tearing these dikes down? Can we afford a drear and Godless world that resembles the plains of Gorgoroth, where everything is the same, where all is standardized to a low standard? Can we afford to live in C.S. Lewis’ “Grey City”, where nothing is off limits, where nobody’s views are any more important or any more “valid” than anyone else’s, where we all believe the same things and where there is no truth other than what is discovered from the next opinion poll?
In short, can we afford a world in which we are all enslaved?
A world without walls is one where monsters maraud and dragons devour. Whether our barricades are being blasted in the name of “diversity”, or “tolerance”, or “ecumenism”, or “progress”, their thwarting, like the spanning of the river Narog, often serves the schemes of the vile more than those of the virtuous. And, in the absence of the sacred, we dismantle our defenses against devilry to the risk not only of what, but of whom we most love.
Didn’t Robert Frost say something about this?
I’m reminded of a book I read 30 years ago: Wie Deutsch ist Es? (How German Is It?). In it, a man and his daughter live in a new apartment (or house). They decide they don’t need any interior doors; what good are they? They just divide, segregate, isolate. Failing to recognize the value of boundaries, separateness, privacy, etc., their lives are a wasteland, although they don’t realize it.
30 years ago ago the novel was discomfiting; now it seems prophetic.
René Girard’s work, too, reminds us that God’s Law given to the Israelites in the form of the Decalogue was a hedge or fence. Prohibitions that the postmodern world wants to kick over so neatly as so much leftover flotsam and jetsam of the past are fences that the wisdom of 30 centuries of human tradition know are essential for living civilly, sanely, and – one hopes – salvifically.
Division is a necessary function of sanity. When we define anything, we first put it into a genus, then differentiate it from all other items in that genus. It’s a two-step psychic process that allows us to make sense of ourselves, each other, the entire cosmos. Definition is the foundation of human intelligence because it’s the beginning of *language*. It’s what Adam did when he named the beasts and thereby understood himself as *not* one of them (different, other). That’s why language marks the genesis of civilization, the beginning of history. (All that occurs before language is “pre-history”). But language actually is this process of *naming*, identifying, classifying and dividing. Without division we do not distinguish one thing from another, and “insanity” (chaos) reigns.
Now, when a thing is defined, it is also confined. It loses the possibility of being another thing instead of, or in addition to, itself. Hence, man is forbidden to define God (to know his “name”). When anything is named (defined), the knower gains power over it. He “knows” it. It is language that has made man the most powerful creature. (In the beginning, there was the Word). Defining something puts barriers around it, isolates it from other things in its meaning, its unchangeable definition. Words objectify things, protect us from being the thing defined/confined.
After life itself, language was God’s first gift to us. And language IS this process of “naming”. Later, we used this gift to EXclude actions, thoughts, that were not acceptable to God in his plan for us. (Thou shalt NOT….) These actions or thoughts had first to be identified by *naming* them.
There is no order in the universe without “fences”–literally. No intelligence, no civilization, no sanity.
Jerry Mander, whose book “In the Absence of the Sacred” Jef refers to above, also wrote “Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television”, a book that I now recognize as poorly argued, but a book that inspired me to live for eight years without a TV.
It was a fence that saved my sanity.