Call it self-defense. So it is. For I cannot allude to Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” without acknowledging that to do so, in almost any context, might be considered cliche. Speaking of well-explored terrain, one cannot google “Mending Wall” without soon discovering that it was first published in 1914. This coincidence is just begging for an analogy, which I want to develop by means of a question, in the hope that others will share my opinion that Frost’s poem is great enough to have not yet been over-used.

Is Catholic and Reformed interaction more like the Battle of the Marne or the situation depicted by Frost in his famous poem? Both scenarios involve, shall we say, different points of view, and the immediate result of both actions is a sort of stalemate. So I don’t want to suggest a complete dichotomy. But you will agree that there are some pretty significant differences between the two fields of action. The answer to the question, of course, depends upon where, when, and whom. On a literal plane, there have been wars of religion, baptized men of different factions coming together over blows and blood. There have also been discussions of religion, baptized men of different factions coming together over beers and sherry or whatever people drink when they are at leisure to disagree without impending threat of physical violence.

But isn’t there always at least an implicit threat of an even graver sort of violence, when what is disputed is a matter of spiritual life or death? Even if we agree that we are all better off without certain kinds of hostility, don’t we remain locked in battle, compelled by our deepest commitments to oppose one another? The answer to those kinds of questions depends on recognizing all sorts of distinctions. We must proceed carefully. If we think carefully about the nature of our “deepest commitments” and “one another,” then it should become apparent that our fundamental orientation cannot be mutual hostility, nor even a steady truce.

But someone will say, “What about the doctrine of justification?” And another might add, “What about the Eucharist?” Indeed. What are these things? Are they, primarily, not what x or y believes them to be? In this case, is the deepest significance of the most profound sources of joy the fact that affirming these in a particular way allows me to draw a line of demarcation between us and them? Or, is it the case that the fundamental significance of such precious things is that they are Gifts, freely offered to everyone, Gifts which have precisely the effects of forgiveness, peace and unity? Again, I am not interested in false dichotomies. But I am interested in the way we imagine what is going on in the discussion between Catholics and Protestants. The image of a battlefield is not entirely inappropriate, but it is too limited and limiting. If this is the model that forms our imaginations, then the only conceivable hope of unity lies in victory; that is, the conquest of one side by the other.

Is there a more accurate, a more nuanced, perhaps a more promising, way to represent how things are between us?

This brings me to the image of the Mending Wall. Like any great work of art, the poem suggests seemingly limitless applications, these residing in the “freedom of the reader,” rather than, as with allegory, any “purposed domination of the author.” Well, in the freedom of this reader, the poem evokes the way things are in Catholic and Reformed interaction. I don’t intend to exegete this bit of whimsy, this description by analogy by proxy, other than to say that, in my thinking, neither neighbor simply represents either side of the religious divide. Who is represented by which neighbor is relative to points along the wall, the particular stone under consideration, and, of course, the different sorts of individual Catholics and Reformed. Overall, in this particular application, the poem may be understood as representing the desires, fears, habits, judgments (prudential or otherwise), inconsistencies and, perhaps, paradoxes that crop up all around, on both sides, whenever Protestants and Catholics seriously consider one another.

Mending Wall

by Robert Frost

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors’.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.’ I could say ‘Elves’ to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

[Source]