Building Walls

Monday, September 18, 2017

Building Walls

            The preeminent theme or motif that connects all the different texts is that of breaking down barriers. This theme is especially popular in Robert Frost's "Mending Wall" and is intrinsically essential to everyday life, particularly in a time when many are more supportive of building walls than breaking them. This week I attended Mass of the Holy Spirit. This is a very special tradition in Jesuit education in which Father Linnane along with many of our local clergymen and a large amount of the Loyola population gathered to invoke the Holy Spirit, so that it might bring favor and guidance towards a more successful and joyful school year. The idea of coming together in shared hope and purpose is enough to see the connection between this event and the texts. However, there were many more aspects that connected to this theme and thus is important to illustrate fully. For example, I am a singer so a major part of the mass for me was the music. I had a solo and the first line of music that I sang was "Washing the wounds of division we seek to ease pain..., Sharing the burden of others like God's gentle rain". As I would see in most of the music we sing, there is a direct connection between this message of inclusivity and acceptance in the music and the texts that we read.

This is clear when Fr. Peter-Hans Kolvenbach discusses Jesuit Higher Educational Aims. Kolvenbach discusses the importance of teaching students not only conceptually but "in solidarity". He writes, "Personal involvement with innocent suffering, with the injustice others suffer, is the catalyst for solidarity which then gives rise to intellectual inquiry and moral reflection" (34). While a mass itself is hard to see as "an action of justice" it is often the way it is conducted that is most important. The reason I say this is that in mass, while I greet everyone in peace, I am not literally doing justice for the marginalized or attempting to break down societal barriers. However, small things make a large difference. In mass, the congregation asks God to pray for people in certain situations. Yet, this week, when we knew there would be so many people they changed the style to be as inclusive as possible. Rather than saying everything in English, each prayer was said in a different language. One was Spanish, the next was Mandarin, then Tagalog (the language of the Philippines), and then Portuguese, and so on. In this manner, the mass was able to cater to more people, and people of diverse backgrounds.

This sort of connection between people is very evident in Jill McDonough’s “Accident, Mass. Ave”. This is the clearly a very odd connection made between the two characters. The small woman whose first language is not English and this mysterious citizen. Both seemingly live in Boston. Both are driving in Boston. Then they collide. It is the small woman, what one might consider “the alien” or “the stranger’s” fault. They scream at each other immediately, without hesitation. Then they realize there is no damage. And so, it ends, “I hugged her, and I said We were scared, weren’t we? and she nodded and we laughed” (McDonough 2). They are immediately confronted by this stressful situation as complete strangers. As the poem shows, it is societal expectation and natural reaction that causes them to simply explode. However, they are able to show compassion and mercy despite their differences. They realize that they were both afraid and that all that truly matters is that they are okay. This is where bridges are made and walls broken, in love and laughter.

So it goes with Frances E. W. Harpers’ “Learning to Read”. She was clearly a slave woman and thus greatly marginalized, yet she writes with such hope. She writes about the disapproval of the masters of slaves learning to read, or learning at all. But she also writes about their perseverance with the aid of those more fortunate, the “Yankee teachers”. She says, “But some of us would try to steal/ A little from the book, /And put the words together, / And learn by hook or crook” (Harper 1). In the end, it is all about working together with our diversity as Harper is forced to do to for the sake of learning. As Robert Frost puts it, “Before I built a wall I’d ask to know/ What I was walling in or walling out…” (Frost 32-33). According to my experience in life, at Mass of the Holy Spirit, and understanding these pieces; it is not our role to build walls between people or make distinction but only to break them and open paths for inclusion.