Do you believe in, or approve of, boundaries? Did Jesus draw a line in the sand just to draw it somewhere? Why do so many people ignore boundaries? Validation? Firm hand? Why do some people try to push a person beyond their known boundaries, then object to the reactions?
Do you believe boundaries are important? I am not talking about the wall, but feel free to go there. This was not meant to be political.
There are lots of different sorts of boundary. Physical ones are just there whether I approve of them or not - a beach, the edge of the atmosphere, the surface of the Earth. I certainly believe in these and in fact would come to considerable harm if I systematically ignored that sort of boundary.
There are other boundaries that are similar but have softer edges. My home has several boundaries, each having a greater degree of significance - the edge of my land, the walls of my house, my bathroom door for example. There is a physical nature to these but that isn't as objective as the beach, say. You won't get cold and wet if you come into my property - though of course you might if you came off the street and into my bathroom uninvited while I was occupying it, lol! In other words, there is a strong subjective element to these boundaries and their significance depends on convention and possession.
Then there are boundaries of morality and behaviour - there used to be a fairly consistent set in our societies but that's no longer the case now, and people seem to have a considerable degree of choice, though there is still the bedrock of the law with its civil penalties for enforcement. My feeling is that there is a lowest common denominator to these sorts of boundaries: they are vital for the functioning of society - even from a purely secular point of view - because they have a similar role to rules about which side of the road you drive on. If it were a free for all, our communities could not function and would disintegrate.
But now we get to where one person's boundary may cross another's even though that isn't the intention. We had some neighbours a couple of houses away that hit the skids financially - it looks like they started dealing drugs and there were unsavoury people coming and going at strange hours etc. Some people may say, well good luck to them, it pays their mortgage - but it drove their immediate neighbours to distraction with the disturbance and the midnight pot fumes and the reduction in neighbourhood safety, etc. My feeling - they crossed our boundaries of good neighbourliness as well as the law and made our street a little less safe at night than it should have been.
Then there are our personal boundaries - what I know and believe, what my aims are and how I go about achieving them, how I behave. This boundary cannot be hard-edged - far from it, it's fuzzy as heck as long as we have any sort of contact with others. We each have a core deep down which is not even fully accessible to ourselves let alone to others, but our outer layers overlap each other indiscriminately. My own deep feelings about this encounter between people are summed up in several ways. Some of them - the two great love commandments of Christ, His commandment not to judge others but to leave that to a higher Authority, and this poem by WB Yeats that I have quoted several times in the Forum:
Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
None of this means that we shouldn't try to influence each other - far from it - but we need to recognise that each of us is on our own road, starting from very different places and each currently at very different places. We have such a lot to learn by listening to each other and trying to understand, rather than only projecting ourselves at each other. None of us has a perfect vision of what is ideal, and the gift of humility says that there is always something we can each learn from one another.