It’s two miles down Nashville road, along Leery Flats to the third bridge, where Mill Brook breaks over a log and disappears into the beaver flow. The Queen Anne’s Lace is past its moment, and the loosestrife is taking over the roadside, competing with the Day Lilies. One cluster of Black-eyed Susans appeared, just outside the line of maples watching the Corey house. Behind the dams, bullfrogs talked up the morning. I was able to make out three beaver hutches.
Yesterday’s NYT Magazine had a Noah Feldman piece, A Church-State Solution, billed as “a provocative proposal for redrawing the line between church and state.” If provocative means you think about it during a walk, then I suppose it was. I have to laugh at the notion of a solution. I prefer having the problem, making peace with it perhaps, than using up my wind chasing after its solution. There needs to be a wall between the cathedral and the city hall. Not so high, though, that you can’t hear the hymns or see the steeple on the other side. But for the religious (and I am being unfair using that title so broadly), the wall is too high. It’s not enough that both buildings are on the same street. So the hymns get louder and the steeple rises higher, and the secularists respond the only way we know how – by adding a few levels to the wall.
Turning back home, I walked into the arms of Bolton Mountain, over the next two bridges where the brook is busy with a sound almost like wind. I don’t need God to love this life, and I can have the same values as the next man without the reinforcement of faith. Church and state are separated by not much more than a stonewall on a working farm. It is built by men, created from the materials at hand; it gets the job done, and from a distance, it doesn’t look at all bad.
Posted by Bobby Farouk at July 4, 2005 08:11 AMThanks much for that. But speaking also as a New Englander, perhaps "good fences make good neighbors" after all.
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at July 4, 2005 02:58 PMI like your physical analogy. I see things a bit differently from where I sit, however, and would tell the story like this:
Once a church and a city hall sat next to each other, with a short fence between them. The pastor writing his sermons on Saturday could hear stump speeches from the city hall, and the court clerks catching up on work on Sunday could hear the hymns, bells, and catch part of the sermon from the church. In pleasant weather, the smell of incense drifted from one set of open windows into another.
Some of the city employees enjoyed the hymns, most ignored them, but nobody cared for the preaching. At least one janitor was Jewish, and a couple of the noisier clerks decided he was offended by the hymns, without ever asking him. After all, offensiveness is determined by whether someone could be offended, rather than by whether someone actually is. So the city passed noise ordinances that required the church to keep its windows closed and lower the volume on the organ. It raised the wall around the municipal building on the church-facing side to keep the carcinogenic smoke from escaping after services.
The old pastor didn't feel much like fighting, but some of his parishioners convinced him to take an early retirement and found a new pastor. This young preacher's first act was to replace the beautiful old bells with a loudspeaker system — bells hadn't been covered by the noise ordinance, he explained, and the new system would let the church play recorded chimes loud enough for the whole town to hear.
Ordinances, citations, and lawsuits ensued, and the publicity brought a lot of new people to the church. Many of the old parishioners left for quieter meetinghouses, but their departures were without fanfare, and the new congregants who replaced them aren't too sorry to see them go. After all, those were the fuddy-duddies who opposed replacing the organ with a rock band and kept making sour faces when the preacher started holding a children's sermon instead of the creed.
These old parishoners open their papers and wonder what happened to their town. The noisier clerk got elected to city council last year, and the letters section regularly hosts a shouting match between her and the new preacher. They'd like to tell their grandchildren about the community they built when they were younger, but are depressed to see that the hand-carved altar they raised so much money to buy has been dropped from the city's walking tour. It probably doesn't matter, though, since it now sits hidden behind a multimedia projection screen.
Posted by: Ben Brumfield at July 5, 2005 01:01 PM