Dear Friends,
I have been thinking a lot about how rightly to observe our Semiquincentennial as a nation. I remember our Bicentennial clearly, though I was only six in 1976. We celebrated in our own neighborhood, beginning with a bike parade, and I rode my bike with red, white, and blue crepe streamers woven through the spokes of my wheels and streamers flying from my handlebars to the local park where we had a neighborhood family softball game, picnics, and more games, ending the evening with square dancing on the tennis courts with a live fiddler and caller. Come to think of it, each year we celebrated the fourth of July that way. It was a time of community and a gentle pride in our country’s founding and democratic ideals and hopes.
As an adult I have a more complicated relationship with the day, as many of you do. I’ve been reading Professor Eddie Glaude’s new book America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, which Courtney talked about in her sermon on the weekend of Juneteenth. Glaude examines our national celebrations and how, at each anniversary (1876, 1926, 1976, and today), we are a nation struggling anew with our identity. Are we a nation of ideas that embraces anyone who longs for “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,” believes in the equality of all people, and works for a government self-determined by its citizens, free of tyranny or are we a nation of “blood and soil,” that sees itself as white, and is hostile to immigrants?
It’s a funny thing that we wish each other “Happy Fourth of July,” though “happy” has gotten attached to so many days (“Happy Pride,” we say and, often, people will say, without thinking, “Happy Lent”), but some of our observations deserve contemplation as much as celebration. On Sunday we will sing what I think should be our national anthem, “America, the beautiful,”written by Katharine Lee Bates, professor of American literature at Wellesley College, activist for the rights of women, people of color, immigrants, and the poor. She wrote the hymn after standing on Pike’s Peak in Colorado and seeing the beauty of the country spread out before her. She knew the difficulties of this country as it faced an economic depression in 1893, she had seen the how the industrial revolution was crushing workers, and she longed for equality in this beautiful land. And, so, she wrote a hymn capturing the complexity of our reality and our dreams and in each verse prays for God to mend our flaws, drawing us ever into a nation of “brotherhood,” “nobleness,” and “self control.” My heart soars when I sing it, and courage and hope are renewed.
See you in church!
Faithfully, Suzanne