Preparing for Lent - Meditation on Breaking Down Walls

Christine Sine (Photo Credit Hilary Horn)

Christine Sine and her husband Tom are two folks who have, for decades, been in the forefront of social justice (especially in regard to climate issues) and hospitality. 

I had the privilege of interviewing Christine almost a year ago. For the Sines, living in community is essential to growing in relationship to God.

Christine maintains a Godspace Light Community website and Facebook presence, which I've found to be an excellent meditative resource. 

Recently, Christine wrote about getting ready for Lent. (She points out that the traditional Western Culture Christian timeline for the season begins on February 22nd. Yet she's encouraging us to prepare ahead of time.)

In her Meditation Monday of February 6th she writes that her theme for this Lent is Breaking Down Walls.

Sine makes the point that breaking walls can be a violent act. But it's necessary.

She writes:

"...it is my experience that bridges can only be built when walls have started to fall. I think of some of the walls I have seen fall in my lifetime. The Berlin Wall, which I visited in the 1980s and kept a piece of until recently when I gifted it to a friend, taken from the wall by a German friend, who together with others prayed for years for the breaking down of the wall. The statues of Stalin in Poland, some of which I saw torn down after the country’s release from the Soviet Union. The wall of silence about black deaths at the hands of the police in the U.S., the barrier to people crossing from Mexico to the U.S., our confrontation with the consequences of climate change are examples of wall that are still in the process of being broken down.  Unfortunately none of these walls came down without violence, even though the crumbling of the walls themselves were not violent acts. In fact they were acts of freedom and liberation."

Christine & Tom Sine

She continues: "Sometimes we need to break down walls so that we can build bridges. If we build bridges when the wall still exists, we still have barriers to peaceful, freedom giving action. What we need to work towards is a society of justice and understanding and compassion in which walls are not thought to be necessary."

I believe that Sine is making a powerful point.

Especially in regard to the necessity of breaking down the walls of resistance to "peaceful, freedom giving action." 

Sine also points out that the breaking down of walls involves listening carefully and respectfully. 

Last week we commemorated the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. He was a leader in non-violent action, but the protests he led were not always peaceful. His own death was tragic and violent. 

Centuries before Gandhi, Jesus of Nazareth, also a practitioner of non-violence, actively resisted the social injustice of his day. He was crucified.

Frederick Douglass (Credit: Courtesy of W.W. Norton

A few years before the Civil War noted African-American abolitionist Frederick Douglass said that "Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."

In all these cases, violence was encountered that resulted in bridge-building. 

The implication is that positive change occurs at the price of challenge. Most often, that challenge is resisted by those in power. But as walls are being torn down, bridges are being built. 

As for an action plan, Sine encourages us to consider:

1. Preaching a theology of inclusion

2. Encouraging actions that help us get to know our neighbors

3. Being open to change

4. Sharing in the pain of  those excluded

This Lent, I'm going to be meditating and, hopefully acting on Sine's suggestions!