Thought about the church brings out some of Holmes' deepest ambivalences – as we have just seen in the Autocrat passage about the interwoven flights of crow and kingbird. And as we turn to other passages throughout his writings, we find that the same polarities which emerge in external relations to make a sermon seem to develop as a symbiotic household dialogue between speaker and listener can also operate internally, so that the process of all thought can be described as a dynamically unstable “marriage” between light and grave voices, and any possibility for personal change or growth – in the intellect, the emotions, or even in the bodily system – can only be imagined as emerging out of dialogical interrelations between light, airy, kingbird-like wingbeats and the solid, fixed, framing walls of the church or family home.