Out of arguments with others, we make politics.
Out of arguments with ourselves, we make art.
– William Butler Yeats
Is there any church board out there unacquainted with all those “arguments with others” that have saturated our society for the past several years? Almost every decision in church life today feels like a proxy battle for larger and more trenchant issues.
Author Robert Caro has spent a lifetime writing about power—first in The Power Broker, an account of how Robert Moses wielded power while shaping New York City, and then in the multi-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson. When asked recently about what he has learned about politics and power across his decades of work, he responded, “Power doesn’t always corrupt. Power always reveals.”
What is being revealed in many congregations is that, absent a deep foundation of faith formation and hope-focused discipleship, we will let the fights “out there” define the fights on our own church boards about how to lead the church.
Those are the arguments with others. But Yeats’ insight about “arguments with ourselves” offers a different door, opening into the season of Lent. Your church board may not think of itself as ‘making art.’ But the extent to which your board members can talk about arguments with ourselves, shared questions of meaning, and the struggles of faith, will ultimately determine whether it can find a way to grow, rather than simply rehashing the conflicts du jour.
Gospel accounts of the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness take us into arguments Jesus was having within himself about his identity. The temptations that the devil put in front of Jesus were all temptations of power and purpose—temptations to divorce his God-given identity from his public identity and to use his power to drive conflict. In that 40-day argument within himself, Jesus addressed each temptation with a reaffirmation of God as the center of his life. Power did not corrupt. But wow, did it reveal.
In the poem “Mending Wall,” Robert Frost treats us to a conversation between the narrator and his neighbor about the value of a stone wall they repair together every spring. The narrator wants an argument; the neighbor will not take the bait. And what we get instead is a true work of art.
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 offense.
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.’
What arguments have you had with others recently? What did they reveal to you?
What arguments are you having with yourself right now? What do they reveal to you?
What does the narrator want, in “Mending Wall”? What does the neighbor want? What do they actually achieve?
What did the devil want, in the wilderness? What did Jesus want? What was revealed?
What is the conversation you want to have at your next church board meeting? Will it be an argument with others, or an argument with ourselves? What do you hope it will reveal?
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