A LOVER’S QUARREL WITH THE CHURCH OF CHRIST

It was the poet Robert Frost who requested that his epitaph read: He had a lover’s quarrel with the world. Mr. Frost’s life and labors give witness to his love for the world, even if they fall short of depicting him as a quarreling man. The request for such an epitaph was his way of saying “I love you” to the world, an acknowledgment evident enough in his writings, he would no doubt suppose, and yet all too vague to a poetically-illiterate world. Poets, like philosophers and all other reformers, can hardly expect the luxury of being understood.

If Robert Frost had a quarrel with the world, the converse of that is hardly the case, for the world, especially the United States, has honored him as it has few men of letters in all its history. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Literature four times, and he had numerous honorary degrees bestowed on him by top universities at home and abroad. He was a professor at Amherst, Dartmouth and Harvard. During our “Cold War” with the Iron Curtain, Frost went to Moscow to visit Khrushchev, where he read his immortal Mending Wall. In that poem he tells of two men mending the wall that separated them. They worked so closely together that their hands touched, and finally they entered into conversation. The wall was really fragile, as are all the walls that keep men from being brothers, and it had to be repaired every spring or it would fall down on its own. “Good fences make good neighbors,” said one man over and over, alluding more to the traditions and prejudices that separate men than to the actual wall. The other responds, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, that wants it down.”

And it” was Frost who prepared a special poem for the nation’s new president’, which he was to have read at Kennedy’s Inauguration in 1961, only to have been hindered by the elements and fading eyesight. Instead he recited from memory an earlier poem, The Gift Outright, which he thought should set the tone for a nation at the threshold of creative greatness. It is only in giving ourselves outright that we can become a noble people, he told the Inauguration assembly.

That Robert Frost loved us is clear enough, but it is not so obvious as to just what his quarrel was about. The only piece that I have used in the classroom from his pen is his After Apple-Picking, which points to the old fashioned virtues of New England rural life. The farmer is through with apple-picking as winter sets in. He is drowsy and about to fall asleep, with his two-pointed ladder still sticking through a tree and an unfilled barrel nearby. Before falling off to sleep he keeps thinking of the experience he had that day in looking at the world through a pane of glass that he had skimmed from the drinking trough. As he held it against “the world of hoary grass,” it melted and he let it fall and break. Then he falls asleep only to dream of apples.

Maybe this is his quarrel with the world, or part of it. The world is painful to look upon with naked and realistic eye, with all its unnecessary evil and suffering. It helps to have something artificial to look through. or some anesthetic that blunts the reality of it all It is sinful and unredeemed, too complex for a simple farmer to cope with.

President Kennedy was referring to this matter of Frost being honored by the very world with which he had a quarrel when he observed, “If Robert Frost was much honored during his lifetime, it was because a good many preferred to ignore his darker truths.” Men have a way of enthroning error and crucifying truth, to paraphrase another poet, so it may be in the case of Robert Frost that the world honored his verse but ignored his point.

And his point was that life is to be lived honestly and with sensitivity, without sham and pretense. The simple virtues of the individual with integrity are to be preferred over the hollowness of ostentation. Frost wrote about the simple life with its dark woods and snow, its fall and autumns, its brooks and vales. His was a restoration mind that sought to recoup for man his lost individuality, restoring genuineness for superficiality.

In Stopping by the Woods on II Snowy Evening he describes himself as enthralled by the scene before him. The simple beauty of the silent woods beckon him to tarry longer and bask in nature’s glory. But he must hurry along.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

Frost wants us to see ourselves as individuals with our own unique potentials and obligations. This looms strong in his poem about the unstamped letter in the rural mailbox, in which a tramp thanks the farmer for the use of his woods for the night. Under “a low-swung juniper” the tramp beholds wonders in the sky. Conceding that the farmer may perchance have seen the same, he says: “‘Tis possible you may have seen, albeit through a rusty screen, the same sign Heaven showed your guest.”

This is the world with which Robert Frost had a lover’s quarrel: a world that keeps mending fences that keep men divided; a world that beholds Heaven’s glories through rusty screens; a world that waits and dreams even when duty beckons; a world that stops too long to rest when it has miles and miles to go before it sleeps.

I am not saying that I want my epitaph to read: He had a lovers quarrel with the Church of Christ, for it would be best that I have no epitaph at all. But I am saying that this is the point of this journal. To be sure, I have a quarrel with the brotherhood, for there is much that I am unhappy about. But I like the way Frost puts it, and the sentiment is also mine. It may be a quarrel but it is a lover’s quarrel. My problem is different from Frost’s. The World could see his love but not his quarrel, while the church sees my quarrel (sort of) but not my love.

His advantage was that he quarreled in the best of poetry, while my quarrel is in less than the best of prose. But mine too is a lover’s quarrel. I insist upon that, whether prose or poetry. I do love my brethren and I do love the Church of Christ --- and there is some difference between the two references.

It is folly for a man to try to prove that he loves, for if his love is not otherwise evident no one will be convinced, and that is not the point of this article. It is rather a testimonial of my love, which all my readers may not accept. Love does not always show through, even when it is there. Even Paul had to affirm his love to the Corinthians. And which of the prophets did not love? And yet they were treated as if they did not. Jesus loved most of all, but he had to suffer as if he did not love.

If I should seek to prove my love, I would point to the fact that I haven’t left to join somebody else. I stick around even when the atmosphere is not always conducive to sticking around. Too, I keep trying, year after year. Men who stay with their wives like that are suspected of having a little love. And what would my purpose be, going through all this for half a lifetime and at my own expense, if it were not that I cared. If you accuse me of having a quarrel with the Church of Christ, the church of my youth and the only church I’ve ever known, I would grant that such is the case. But it is a lover’s quarrel, believe me.

So, I love you, pure and simple, just as you are and without fanfare; and even if you don’t believe it, it is still so. Reject me you may. Doubt me you may. Ignore me you may. But you can’t keep me from loving you. There is nothing you can do about that. And there isn’t much you can do about my quarreling. So I will keep on loving and keep on quarreling. A lover’s quarrel! The love will never end; the quarrel will continue until we become a freer and more responsible brotherhood. I’m like a lovin’, fussin’ schoolteacher!

What caught my interest in Frost’s quarrel with the world is that his complaints are similar to those I have of the Church of Christ, if indeed I have correctly interpreted his criticisms.

Frost wants man to be free and responsible, an individual in his own right, bigger than creed or race or institution. That is what I expect of the Church of Christ. I don’t want it to be white, middle-class, or southern. I want it to be catholic as well as apostolic. And I want it to be God’s congregation on earth, the community of the redeemed, a confessing community as well as a professing community.

Frost quarreled with the world because of its insensitivity. In one poem a child’s arm is amputated in an accident on the farm. Now he lives but bleeds. Now he’s dead. But the world goes on, not caring enough. I too am angry that our people do not care enough. Virtually ignoring the social implications of the gospel, we are content to build our towers of Babel (a church plant finished in Ft. Worth this month cost two million!) while the world is aflame with poverty, injustice, and crime, with all the attending frustrations. People bleed and die, and we care too little. We are not a people who reaches forth to touch the world’s wounds.

Frost wrote a lot about walls and fences that separate people needlessly, with most of the differences artificial rather than real. I too have this quarrel with the church, for we too are wall-menders. I am angry because we allow our clergy to keep alive the old divisions, mostly because of pride, prejudice or vested interests, when if it were left up to the rank and file the walls would have long since disappeared, fragile as they are. Frost did not accept the tradition that “Good fences make good neighbors,” for there is something in man that wants the fence to go. Neither do walls make for better churches. I will keep on quarreling until we quit mending fences and allow love to have its way.

The world’s fear of the unfamiliar and its unwillingness to take the less traveled road was another of Frost’s complaints. In A Hundred Collars Frost tells the story of a professor who misses his train in a one-hotel town only to learn that if he sleeps in a bed he will have to share a room with a stranger. His desire for rest is complicated by the sight of a man sleeping in the office chair rather than take the room with the stranger, for fear of being robbed and murdered. The frail professor takes his chance with the stranger, only to find that he is huge, wearing a collar size 18 while his size is but 14. And the man drinks. It turns out that the stranger is friendly, even offering to send him 100 collars, size 14, that he wore when he was smaller, and he tries to ease the professor’s fear and mistrust of him. He points out that he has 90 dollars on him while the professor has but 5 dollars, that he has greater cause for fear. He finally goes out for a night on the town, leaving the prof quaking in bed, and telling him: “There’s nothing I’m scared of like scared people.”

It all sounds mightily like church folk who are too scared to reach out into the unfamiliar. We’d rather sleep in the office chair than take a chance with strangers, and when we do venture forth we find them with more trust, love, and kindness than ourselves --- even if not as righteous! Generally we socialize only with our own kind. We want other folk to come our way and hear our preachers, but we’re not much on fraternizing with them. Of course we have the truth, and that does make a difference. It may be all right as long as we don’t miss any trains and have need of others.

The Road Not Taken is the same theme, for it depicts man’s reluctance to take the lonely, rugged way. He wants the often-traveled, well-worn road of ease and certainty. But Frost’s hero, standing at a fork in the road, takes the less-traveled way, “because it was grassy and wanted wear.” The poet observes that it makes a big difference which road one takes, the one the crowd takes or the other.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

Many of us in the Church of Christ, especially among the younger set, can appreciate the truth of that verse. We stood at the fork of the road, the way the party takes and the other way, and in taking “the one less traveled by” it has made all the difference in the world.

I am convinced that that way is the way of freedom and the way of glory. He who takes that road will walk with Christ. The oft-traveled road is patrolled by the party, and it too has its rewards, but only those that men can bestow.

I must quarrel, lovingly quarrel, so long as we put party above principle, and even above personality. We will destroy those ministers among us, even taking bread from their mouths, who break party ranks. A man’s reputation means nothing if in destroying it we preserve the party image. The way we read it, man is made for the sabbath, not the sabbath for man.

Finally, there is in Frost a feel for the mystery of life and a reverence for truth that is hard to come by. The world makes truth too easy and the mysterious too common. He writes of the “enormous Outer Black” symbolized in dark, thick woods and overhanging clouds. He even speaks of the appalling “design of darkness,” and sees some of nature’s work as “like the ingredients of a witches’ broth.” Well aware of the heavy hand of evil in the world, he realized that man must struggle to bear along what light he can find.

She always had to burn a light

Beside her attic bed at night.

It gave bad dreams and broken sleep,

But helped the Lord her soul to keep.

Good gloom on her was thrown away.

It is on me by night or day,

Who have, as I suppose, ahead

The darkest of it still to dread.

No one is in such darkness as those of us who suppose that we have all light. There are those who rejoice in what little light they have, even if but a candle at one’s bedside at night. Truth does not come so easily as for any of us to suppose that we have all there is to have, while in truth we may have but very little.

There is hope in the poetry of Robert Frost. Not only is there a lamp to carry into the deep, dark forest, but there is also beyond the woods a clearing. It is noteworthy that his long career as a poet ended with the publication of In the Clearing. Here he tells us that we can “push the woods back from around the house, and part them in the middle with a path.” So ended his lover’s quarrel with the world.

This is what I want for our Church of Christ people. I want us to see the deep, dark woods, the mystery of evil, and the complexity of truth. I will continue my quarrel until we can see the woods that surround us, that all is neither light nor right with us. And beyond the woods the clearing!

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

                                        --- the Editor