In the 1960s, some of Channa’s and my generation disdained the setting up of fences. All things should be free and easy, that group opined, and they practiced what they preached.
It was their idea that their example of openness was sufficient, in itself, to make calm the heart of evil…not that they believed very stringently in the existence of evil in the first place. Evil was, to them, misguided love, and it longed for an apotheosis by which it should come, shining, out of its ugly humor.
Our co-generationists were to bring that happy moment into being, by dint of their goodwill. All of us were, at the time—this is a theme—still young and unhurt.
Theirs was an intellectual and idealist snobbery, and they set fences around themselves without recognizing their existence. They believed no one over thirty. They dressed in flowered uniform to make a fence between themselves and the straights.
But they disliked other fences.
At the time, of course, there was a war on. Some of us laughed mightily at the silliness of the idea that Communism ought to be contained. Why, Communism was nothing more than the idealist yearning of downtrodden men for a fairer sharing-out of the productivity of society and for a more social-justice orientation of the governing system. What could be wrong with that? That its principal exemplar, the Soviet Union, was a hideous affront to human dignity—to say nothing of its being an acute danger to human life—was a fact which didn’t penetrate the cotton batting some of us pulled around ourselves. Beyond that, though many of us read The Baghavad Gita and Siddhartha and Black Elk Speaks, and considered ourselves quite spiritual indeed, the fact that Communism was antithetical to God troubled us little. Indeed, in Vietnam, it was plain to many that our Christian nation was the aggressor and that the Viet Cong, whatever their Chinese Communist backing, were innocent and pacifist Buddhist victims of our megalomania.
It would have astonished some of them at that time—even horrified them—had they been able to see a mere thirty years into the future. It was to be the great monolith of Communism itself that died, buried in a rubble of concrete between the Germanys, and the evangelical Christian churches of America would be ascendant.
Picture if you will the young Dikkon, as yet unhurt. Surrounded by a few friends, cavorting freely on the beach at the southern tip of California’s Point Reyes, some fifty miles north of San Francisco, it was—as always—a stunning day in paradise. That beach is backed by a tall cliff, perhaps sixty feet high. It is pleasant to loll in the shade of that cliff and to drink wine and to talk earnestly of love and of God and of other beneficences.
On that day, our idyll was interrupted by a sudden…fence. In the middle of a sentence, we were stunned by a sound from above of such hugeness as to blank all other sensation. Our eyes jerked upwards. No more than fifty feet above the top of the cliff, there appeared for an instant a flight of three Navy fighter jets streaking out to sea. We had heard nothing until they appeared. The noise when they passed was colossal. They were so close above us that my eye photographed—and I still have in my mind—an image of their underbellies, one with a streak of oil near its wheel well. In seconds, they had dwindled to specks above the far horizon.
Outrage!
I was for an instant a Vietnamese peasant and they the arrogant invaders. What possible power could I muster against such might? My friends stayed with that outrage through the next hour, and they whipped it into a froth of victimization. But I grew quiet.
Suppose I were ever hurt. Suppose I needed assistance. Suppose someone dear to me were hurt. Suppose…even suppose my country were hurt. Suppose I needed to throw up a fence.
Those Navy jets were a strong, and a very high fence.
*****
I’m older now. I’ve been hurt.
Too, I’ve steeped myself in history and theology through many volumes and many years. I’ve learned that others can be hurt as well as I. I’ve recognized that bad neighbors do exist on earth. I’ve understood that darkness does encroach across the green fields of our so green and pleasant land. I’ve dreamed of a tower of my own. I’ve grown angry and wanted to bang up a fence between myself and the Other, the Bad One. I’ve watched the Blue Angels scream past me at air shows and marveled at their precision. Mostly, though, I’ve breathed a prayer of gratitude that these magnificent men in their flying machines are on our side.
I’ve challenged God on theodicy. How can you allow evil, you who are all-powerful? How dare you? And then I’ve cowered at my blasphemy.
Like the flooded man disdainfully waiting on his roof for the Lord to provide—while first the Lord makes a floating door passes by, and then an empty canoe, and finally a Coast Guard helicopter with a dangling rope—none of which he uses because, as he explains later to St. Peter, he was waiting for God to provide—I didn’t notice at the time that the Lord was providing just as fully as He needed to, and that it was by my own arrogance that I failed to see it..
A stone wall along a property line in southern New Hampshire is a barrier to assure the goodness of neighbors of good will, but it is a figurative one withal. Three feet high at the most, that fence will stop a cow from crossing but not a man with evil in his heart. That’s when we are glad for the more powerful fences, the bigger and the higher ones, from the Spite Fence in Penobscot village to the instant platoon of taxi drivers who had my back in Roxbury, from the towers and stone cottages which saved our Irish ancestors—and with them Christian faith—to the fliers of supersonic fighter jets who have our national back today.
To be hurt is inherent in being the animals we are, albeit animals with a divine spark. But, in the end, there is one even greater Fence that we can use.
When it all comes down to the end, and we truly need a fence, and we have tried everything we can think of, and absolutely nothing else will do, we have Jesus to watch our backs.
Jesus did stand up for us once upon a time, and He stands up right now, too. Greater than the greatest soldier, who dies to save his foxhole buddy, Jesus (who is God) allowed Himself to die so that He might save all of us, through all time, until the end.
Here’s what Channa and I learned: against bad neighbors God has given us a Very Big Fence.
Copyright -- Dikkon Eberhart, 2013
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