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Longing for Beauty, July 8, 2007 |
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Written by Jeanne Knepper
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Sunday, 08 July 2007 |
LONGING FOR BEAUTY
Hosea 10:13-15; Psalm 30; Galatians 6:1-10
July 8, 2007
I figured something out this week, as we were driving home from seeing the fireworks on Wednesday evening: for as long as I can remember, going back into my childhood, this week in July, the week of the fourth of July and my birthday, was the most special week of the year, except maybe Christmas. As we drove home, I thought of family picnics and swimming in lakes, of a favorite red and white striped shirt, of cap guns and feathered flyers that soared high into the air when you put a cap in the holder and smacked it down on the sidewalk. I thought of flags and fireworks and the full feeling in my chest when the flags snapped in the wind and the fireworks boomed so deep. I remembered the morning in October, 1962, the day when our nation was in a showdown with the USSR over missiles in Cuba and the threat was that, if the USSR did not agree to remove the missiles by 1pm, East Coast time, we would launch bombs and the world would be at war. As I walked to school that morning, my eyes riveted on the American flag in front of the grade school I had attended years earlier, and I thought to myself, over and over, “It’s still flying. As long as it is flying, it’s okay.” That day, I knew how important the sight of our national flag was to me, maybe to all of us. As long as it is still flying, we’re okay.
As I was thinking along this string of memories, another darker set came to mind. In all the family memories of the Fourth and my birthday, of summer picnics and times of celebration, there was a shadow of discomfort and fear, a shadow brought on by the fact that both my Uncle Bob and my father often drank too much. When Bob was drunk, he broke the law, got mean, blustered, bullied, and touched his nieces in ways that made us very uncomfortable. When Dad drank too much, he asked me to do things way beyond my capabilities. But none of us in the family talked about it, about the drinking or the behavior or the fear or the sense of something being terrible wrong. We didn’t have the words for it, and we all seemed to believe it would be disloyal to try to talk about it. And so we ignored that shadow, even to our peril.
I remember the terrifying Fourth when a company picnic took place in Welches, on Mt. Hood. Mom had a headache that day and was not with us. We children had enjoyed the hamburgers and ice cream, the swimming and sack races. Dad had drunk beer with his buddies and co-workers. On the way down the mountain, Dad pulled the car over and said, “Jeanne, watch what I am doing. You have to drive us home.” He scooted over on the seat and fell asleep. It was a stick shift car and I was about 14 years old and terrified. I sat there, not knowing what to do, afraid to drive, afraid to disobey, paralyzed with fear, trying hard to figure out how to do what I had been told to do, aware of my brother and sister in the car, holding back the tears as I tried to do what I was told, when some people going home from the picnic pulled up, told me to get in the back seat, and supplied the necessary driver. Back then, I didn’t know how to talk, or even think, about what had happened, but I knew that it felt very bad. And it is also a part of my memories of this week of summer.
It took many years before people in my family could find the words to talk about the terrible force that was tearing us apart. Before that happened, my Aunt Janet decided to divorce my Uncle Bob. Bob lived with us for a while, and then he went into treatment for alcoholism. By then, he had lost his business, his marriage, his home, his well-being. But he sobered up. And later, when Dad’s drinking was taking him down a similar pathway, it was Bob who could say, “You have to go into treatment,” and be heard. It was Bob who could help my Dad find the path that led away from destruction. It was Bob who knew the language and could speak the truth of what was happening.
This week I read an interview with Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister, a 70 year old woman who has been a nun for 55 years. She spoke of her travels and work for world understanding and peace over the years. As she has traveled the world, she has seen a shift in how people respond to the United States. In her own words:
Chittister: In a sense, the U.S. is the largest island in the world. We’re bounded by huge oceans on the east and the west and by a lightly populated country to our north and a poor country to our south. We have never felt our borders pressured. We sit in a kind of arrogant security and see ourselves as a messianic people, as liberators. We consider it obscene that anyone would resist us. But we are no longer perceived as liberators in the rest of the world. Years ago, I was part of a number of delegations that went tot the Soviet Union. At the time, the Soviet Union was this big black bear. Now we’re the big black bear.
Interviewer: You must see a lot of anti-Americanism in your travels.
Chittister: Not only do I see a lot of it, I also see a shift in it. I started traveling the world in the early 1970s. At that time, if you walked into a room in a foreign country and people knew you were an American, everyone wanted to talk to you about how wonderful the U.S. was and how grateful they were for what the U.S. had done. Now if they know you’re an American, they are wary and somewhat distant. And if you get into any kind of real conversation with them, they’re sure to let you know that something’s wrong with the way our country is behaving.
Interviewer: When did this shift occur?
Chittister: When the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003—no doubt about it. People in the Middle East now see us as a rogue state. They see us as the problem. It’s going to take a great change in attitude on the part of the U/S. government to rectify the situation.
Can you imagine the agony it must have been to be Hosea, all those years ago? He loved his nation Israel. He loved his land so much, and he could see it moving away from God’s ways, from the pathways of justice and righteousness and peace. Here was the nation, investing in its military might—the original words are, “Because you have trusted in your chariots, and in the multitude of your warriors”—and he could see great troubles coming.
Oh, the country was divided about that. The king thought he was on a fine path. The company of official prophets, on the payroll of the king, agreed that this was a godly nation, God’s chosen people. Nothing bad could befall them. Hosea, with his predictions of doom, he was a madman, a fool, certainly no lover of his land or people. Why would he speak like that?
And Paul answers, in the letter to the Galatians, “”Don’t be misled: No one makes a fool of God. What a person plants, he will harvest. The person who plants selfishness, ignoring the needs of others—ignoring God!—harvests a crop of weeds. All he’ll have to show for his life is weeds.”
The person, or country, who plants lies harvests untruth and mistrust. You can’t plant lies and harvest truth; you can’t plant selfishness and harvest community; you can’t plant bombs and war and harvest peace between nations. Being a “chosen people,” a “nation on a hill,” a “Christian nation”—none of this changes the basic law of the harvest: what we sow, we reap. God will not be mocked: we are a “Christian” nation, a godly nation, only for so long as we act like one. Or, as the Psalmist wrote, in Psalm 72, of the king whom God guides and supports:
For he delivers the needy when they call, the poor and those who have no helper. He has pity on the weak and the needy, and saves the lives of the needy. From oppression and violence he redeems their life; and precious is their blood in his sight.
This is the behavior that distinguishes a godly nation: justice and righteousness, protection of the poor, the widow, the orphan and the alien, walking in the pathways of peace. This is the sobriety, the crop of real life, using the language of Paul in Galatians.
Oh, it is a hard thing to be Hosea, the one who can see and must name what he sees. Maybe it was a hard thing to be Uncle Bob, to be the one to tell this brother who had always been the caretaker, the leader, “No, you are going the wrong way. You must turn around.” Maybe he only had the clarity to be able to name what was wrong, and what could be right, because he had lived on that pathway of pain and had seen where it led. And he had the will to do that hard thing because he did truly love his brother, even as Hosea loved his land.
Perhaps that is the balance point that allows us to love our country and also to speak when it is straying from its own best vision. Without an aching love for Israel, Hosea couldn’t have written his poignant love song to a country that was betraying its own deepest loyalties. Without an aching love for the beauty and vision of this nation, our pain at what is happening now in the world wouldn’t be as true, or as sharp.
Wednesday evening, as we awaited the fireworks at Oaks Park, I watched one cross-section of our nation, native born and foreign born, speakers of English and Spanish and Korean and Ukrainian and languages I didn’t even recognize, all watching the bursts of color in the sky, all murmuring their oohs and aahs, all watching out for the small children among us, all treating each other with courtesy and kindness, and I thought, “This is it. This is the strength and beauty of our experience in nation-building, to have created a place where people of such different histories and experiences can become one people, united by notions of equality and freedom and civility and respect for one another.” This is our gift of beauty, this is our strength, these simple virtues can be our legacy and our offering to a world struggling with how to live at peace. Perhaps, perhaps like Hosea or like Uncle Bob, we can find the words to say, in love, that will point us back to our truest strengths, that will show us the pathway out of the weeds and into the creation of a lush and beautiful garden, where all can thrive. Perhaps, perhaps we can begin again, where we are, and bit by bit, bring forth the realm of God.
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