The Day the Wall Came Down

Do you remember where you were when the Berlin Wall came down twenty years ago today?  I remember the day vividly.

I had been attending a five-day retreat supporting psychological and spiritual growth.  For me and for all the participants, it had been a week full of exploring the inner barriers that had obstructed our freedom to experience joy and wholeness in our lives.  It had been a time of hard work, laughter, tears, and dramatic breakthroughs.  The last day of the retreat under any circumstances would have been an emotional day, as we were full of gratitude for what we had learned, and for the sense of freedom that had come from stretching past inner obstacles to living fully into the people we were intended to be.

We had been out of touch with the news throughout the week, but on November 9th, a staff member announced to us that the Berlin Wall had come down.  Many of us cried, resonating deeply to the East German people’s experience of joy, freedom, and possibility.  We were awed by the remarkable parallel between the collapse of the great physical wall dividing Europe and the disintegration of walls within our beings, separating us from ourselves and from the fullness of our lives.

I was mesmerized by today’s reports of events in Berlin celebrating the 20th anniversary of the collapse of the wall.  Journalists interviewed people who had been there, who remembered the exhilaration they had felt - the sense of the end of imprisonment, division and fear.  One could hardly hear these people’s memories without feeling their joy, and also feeling sadness for the walls that remain in many places in our world. In some places the walls are made of concrete and barbed wire.  In others, the walls are in the heart: walls of hate and fear, ignorance and prejudice, and traumatic memory.

Today’s anniversary calls us to visualize other moments when walls of brick and fear might fall.  Is this naïve utopian thinking?  Some of the Berliners celebrating today remember how improbable the collapse of the wall seemed, and how radically surprising the moment of reunification was.  If all of us spent a moment today imagining the possibilities of today’s walls falling, we might be closer to peace, justice, and freedom for all people.