Open Doors or Higher Walls?

Maybe the real divide is the most obvious

May is birthday month at The Cottage! To celebrate, you can get an annual subscription at the deepest discount of the year — 20% off for all new subscriptions, gift subscriptions, or upgrades from free to paid.

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The news has me thinking about boundaries and borders. Nearly every major story in global and U.S. news involves somebody’s incursion on somebody else’s territory. The two major wars raging are primarily about borders — Israel and Gaza, Russia and Ukraine. Both arguments are over who has a right to be where and who can control what. Wars aren’t always about boundaries (they can be fought over honor, uncertainty, ideology, money, or revenge). But these two are.

In the United States, the boundaries of free speech have re-emerged in two current issues — the campus protests about Gaza and in the Trump hush money trial. In the first case, the universities are trying to balance the right to free speech with campus order. In the second, the judge is attempting to gauge freedom of the former president to speak and the protection of the case, court personnel, and the jury. Where are the lines? Are there limits to the right of free speech?

Abortion is also about boundaries — in this case the borders are both biological and ethical. Is there a boundary between embryonic life and viable human life? And who has the moral right to police the borders of a woman’s most private life?

Immigration is about borders. Book bans are about boundaries. Ethnic nationalist movements are about lines between people.

On nearly every front, there’s a border war. After decades of taking down walls, too many seem committed to putting them back up. And, even if we’re not combatants on the front, we’re all experiencing the skirmishes.

Despite all the borderline assaults, two very different stories about boundaries also made the news this week. Both are about Christians crossing over boundaries — and opening the doors of faith to those who have long been excluded.

First, the United Methodist Church lifted their bans on the ordination of LGBTQ people and same-sex marriage and removed prohibitions against homosexuality from their Social Principles, the cornerstone Methodist theological and moral guide. These changes were the culmination of decades of theological struggle within the church, complex polity issues, and a significant denominational schism. Many expressed relief, some continuing anger. But, even if their path forward is still difficult, the United Methodist Church has decided to fully embrace its public motto: Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Doors.

A sign outside the Allendale United Methodist Church in St. Petersburg, Florida. From this CNN article, and identified as courtesy Rev. Andy Oliver

The second story was, in many ways, more surprising. On Monday, May 6, The Washington Post published a front page feature story on Pope Francis’s cautious shifts on LGBTQ issues and his acceptance of transgender people. As stated in the article:

In recent months, Francis has given explicit approval for transgender godparents and blessings of same-sex couples. He penned a defense of secular civil unions — once described by his predecessor as “contrary to the common good.” His pronouncements have sometimes seemed contradictory or in tension — authorizing baptisms for transgender people one day, while warning of the moral risks of “sex-change intervention” on another. He has said “being homosexual is not a crime” but hasn’t altered church teaching that homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered.”

Nevertheless, as the 87-year-old pontiff moves to cement his legacy, he has been emphatic about his overarching vision: the open door.

The Post article tells the story of Laura, a trans woman and sex worker, whose life has been transformed by a Catholic priest, a nun, and an unlikely audience with Pope Francis.

“I’m a transexual from Paraguay,” she blurted out in Italian.
He smiled and replied, “You are also a child of God.”
She asked for a blessing, and he touched both her shoulders.
“God bless you,” the pope said.
“You, too,” Laura responded.

“Pope Francis never criticized me or told me to change my life,” Laura said.

The entire story is beautiful — of welcome, acceptance, and a slow renewal of faith. I urge you to read every word of it (the link above is a gift link from my Post account). The secular media rarely features a piece of such profound insight and tenderness.

That’s the power of the open door.

And maybe that’s the real struggle of our times. Not left versus right, liberal or conservative. Rather, we’re engaged in a global tension between those who want to open doors and those who seeking to rebuild the walls.

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Nearly all the recent news coverage about religion has been bad: Christian nationalism, MAGA evangelicals, and religious abuse. Most stories involve the hardening of religious boundaries, institutional protection, and the pain and division caused by religion. And rightly so — these are important stories.

It’s a pretty rare day when there’s a good story in the news about religion. It is hard to recall mainstream coverage of religious groups taking risky moves toward lowering boundaries that have long kept others at bay. This week, however, that’s exactly what appeared in the news. Two Christian communities showed a different side of faith and even the most secular of editors couldn’t help but notice.

Maybe it’s not the best thing when journalists treat stories of love, acceptance, and openness as news:

BREAKING: Christians act like Jesus! Story at 6!

Perhaps people of faith should be completely and utterly boring when it comes to treating the poor, the rejected, the despised, and outcasts with dignity and grace. The doors of every church, synagogue, and temple should always be open to all. It shouldn’t be front page news when it happens.

But, while I dream of a world where faithful people aren’t hypocrites, I’m happy to take this week’s news as a win for goodness. And, as a surprising change, to let religion provide some hope for politics.

The world could do with more open doors and less barbed wire.

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INSPIRATION

The actions of the United Methodist Church and Pope Francis reminded me of a chapter in Strength for the Journey, my first book. It opens with this story about Trinity Church in Santa Barbara, California:

One Sunday in March 1996, Bishop Fred Borsch of Los Angeles rededicated Trinity Church. As the service began, he banged his pastoral staff on the church doors and commended, “LET THE DOOR BE OPENED!” The massive oak doors swung wide. A few weeks previously, and after a year of exile, the congregation had moved back into the sanctuary. We gladly opened those doors…

In eighteen short months, the congregation raised the money to retrofit the sanctuary for earthquake safety. But it was not about the money. People were coming. New people. Lots of them. Including me. The church’s membership doubled in those few months. And it would double again in the next couple years. No program or evangelistic strategy prompted this growth. Rather, Trinity did something few churches think of doing — it just opened its doors. It opened spiritual and theological doors, doors of gender and class, actual doors and symbolic ones. And people walked in. Sometimes right in the middle of a service. And they stayed. Straight and gay, rich and poor, able-bodied and ill, healthy and wounded, the respectable and the outcast….Doubters, skeptics, and questioners. People bruised and battered by more narrow forms of religion.

On that day, the once empty sanctuary was packed with hundreds of people celebrating the dedication of a church recently threatened with the wrecking ball… “LET THE DOOR BE OPENED!” shouted Bishop Borsch. The command struck me as ironic. No one needed to tell us to open the door. We wanted it open. Opening doors was our mission. We practically threw them off the hinges.

We had found something all too rare even in church: the freedom to be exactly who God made us to be. A community to which we could bring everything. A church with an open door.

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POEM

People often quote a single line from Robert Frost’s poem, “Mending Wall,” approvingly: Good fences make good neighbors. But, if you read the entire poem, it is clear that Frost didn’t mean what many readers think he meant.

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.’

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I recently wrote about Easter and openness — how openness is central to the story of the Resurrection.

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I personally believe that while Jesus came to open the door to God's house, all human beings can walk through that door, whether they know about Jesus or not. Today I see it as my call to help every person claim his or her own way to God.

―Henri J.M. Nouwen, Sabbatical Journey