Something There is That Doesn't Love a Wall

“Before I built a wall, I’d ask to know What I was walling in or walling out.”
Mending Wall by Robert Frost

 
For some unidentifiable reason, the cooler winds of this mid-September day brought to mind Robert Frost’s poem, Mending Wall. I found a copy and read slowly through the lines. Halfway through that iambic exercise, I began to wonder if it was not a kind of metaphor for the relationships and partitions within Maryknoll.

In the poem, two neighbors meet each year to repair the wall that divides their properties – apple trees on one side, pines on the other. No cows in the picture. One of the neighbors is very much for the wall, “Good fences make good neighbors”. The other has doubts, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall”. This line suggests that walls – real and allegorical – are arbitrary constructs people make (often based on past traditions) that can be barriers to deeper levels of collaboration and community.

The possibility of a deeper collaboration (the Maryknoll Family) among the entities has arisen regularly for as long as I can remember. I’m not aware that it has ever been given a full hearing or the projections for and against been thoughtfully examined. Frost challenges the axiom that “Good fences make good neighbors.” hinting that barriers can prevent us from working and relating in a closer way - sharing our mutual charism, life commitments, ideas and even resources - that can create closer bonds and a better, collective use of resources that would make for a more effective mission outreach.
There already exist respectful and predominately good relationships among the four entities within Maryknoll. Deeper, more substantive collaboration among us would continue to honor the vocational identities of each and allow the space(s) for those to be nurtured.  Still, Mending Wall suggests that there remain unnecessary divisions, often based on dated historical traditions that keep us from creating a more diverse culture of solidarity, creativity and a collective vision that would increase the possibility for a more vital, engaged and capable community. Would not a more collectively diverse Maryknoll family have a better possibility of fostering shared growth and attract new populations?

Rather than periodically coming together to maintain and mend the wall(s), would it not be more meaningful to ask ourselves, in Maryknoll and the wider Church, “Why do they make good neighbors”?