In a meeting with a group of congregants last week, I decided to share a poem about America for our centering. The past week I had blogged about the separation of church and state, and the dangers of our church becoming a political club. Yet our ministry together needs to make room for the hopes and the deeply felt fears for our national life.
As I read the poem, it felt like the bottom dropped out of the emotional and spiritual space. I saw tears, pain and anger in the faces around the circle. But most I saw fear in those faces. Fear for what may be coming. Fear that our worst fears seem increasingly likely to become real.
I realized how close those fears were to the surface in me.
But most I realized what it has been costing me, and perhaps costing you, to keep those fears at bay.
Around that circle, the agenda for the meeting changed and we spent time telling the truth of how hard it has become to listen or to avoid listening to the news, to search for solutions or accept that our fears are much too close for comfort. The honesty helped. The honesty was needed because not naming our fears was leaving us to deal with them alone.
If there is one truth in our emerging theology of interdependence and accountability, it is that isolation strips away our power and our hope.
I offer that poem here recognizing that it does not point to easy answers. It may though remind us that this is the only America we have and that it is up to us to live out its promise. I hope it reminds all of us, myself included, that the fears we know in our bodies need not be faced alone.
America the Beautiful Again by Richard Blanco
“How I sang O, beautiful like a psalm at church with my mother, her Cuban accent scaling-up every vowel: O, bee-yoo-tee-ful, yet in perfect pitch, delicate and tuned to the radiant beams of stained glass. How she taught me to fix my eyes on the crucifix as we sang our thanks to our savior for this country that saved us—our voices hymns as passionate as the organ piping towards the heavens.
How I sang for spacious skies closer to those skies while perched on my father’s sun-beat shoulders, towering above our first Fourth of July parade. How the timbre through our bodies mingled, breathing, singing as one with the brass notes of the marching band playing the only song he ever learned in English.
How I dared sing it at assembly with my teenage voice cracking for amber waves of grain that I’d never seen, nor the purple mountains majesties—but could imagine them in each verse rising from my gut, every exclamation of praise I belted out until my throat hurt: America! and again America!
How I began to read Nietzsche and doubt god, yet still wished for god to shed His grace on thee, and crown thy good with brotherhood.
How I still want to sing despite all the truth of our wars and our gunshots ringing louder than our school bells, our politicians smiling lies at the mic, the deadlock of our divided voices shouting over each other instead of singing together.
How I want to sing again—beautiful or not, just to be in harmony—from sea to shining sea—with the only country I know enough to know how to sing for.”
It will be the love we find together that is stronger than fear. That is our faith and that is our hope.
We come together in faith, in hope and in love.
Blessings,
Bill