Peters Progress – 4 July 2014

I spent six years of my childhood in England and fell in love with castles! Every holiday seemed to feature a visit to a castle or the remains of a castle. When I drive around many suburbs in South Africa, I see castles emerging. The castle logic is logical: let’s protect ourselves from those who want to injure us or pillage our resources.

When I arrived at my new placement in Polokwane someone tried to scrape out the putty from our lounge window with a knife to gain access but the blade broke. I also caught someone trying to steal my hosepipe and he said he was from garden services.

So we attached razor wire to the top of our garden wall. I now live locally. We’ve had several break-ins at our church. So I’m always looking to our security and rely on Alpha Security for their expertise. But I can’t help being troubled and saddened. Troubled: Oliver Cromwell forced a revolution of castle design by his widespread use of cannons in warfare, instead of older forms of siege equipment. He simply flattened castles. There was an escalation of violence. Ok, so I feel safer behind my high wall and alarm system. Now someone has to hold me up at gun point. So then I have to have security guards on patrol. But even then there can be an escalation. Depressing? Absolutely. Deep down I know that we need the transformation of our society rather than of our fences.

Saddened: Robert Frost wrote a poem called “Mending Wall” about a neighbour who repairs a wall each spring, saying “Good fences make good neighbours.” There is sadness here as his counterpoint asks “Why do they make good neighbours?” Good fences don’t make good neighbours. They only lead to the further fragmentation of our communities.

This tension we live with is not new. Augustine wrote at a time when there was great instability in the Roman Empire. He put forward that there would always be two kinds of human motivation creating two kinds of society: 1) The Commonwealth of God, in which everything is done for the sake of God and neighbour, and 2) the commonwealth of this world, whose best hope is to limit the excesses of competitive, acquisitive violence by external means. My love of “castles” forces me to ask which commonwealth I am investing in…