Late that night, after her husband returned home, we heard him out in the back yard with his tools, pulling down the six-foot extension he had built on top of the original fence. This story does not have the ending most of us might prefer. The two families did not become fast friends after that. The most we gave each other was an occasional nod when accidentally meeting on the street, but the hostility between us vanished. Everyone knows Robert Frost's famous line about good fences making good neighbors.
Fences can be positive.
They can help to demarcate the intimately personal from the impersonally public, the particular from the general, the church from the world. Not fences, but most walls need to be torn down. Of course, no one should confuse our White policeman neighbor with Jesus Christ who, without waiting to receive our service, breaks down dividing walls that separate us from each other, and without destroying our uniqueness as persons and cultural groups, makes us one in himself. But we give thanks to God that the policeman was at least human enough to be ashamed of what his wall signified and humble enough to tear it down as a gesture of gratitude. Walls suggest permanence, isolation, impenetrability, and alienation.