Being An American: A Soulful Journey
Sermon by Steve Edington
March 2, 2003
Reading
From On the Road, Jack Kerouac
So, in America when the sun goes down, and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be drying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? The evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of the complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in.
Sermon
At the age of 18 I had a decision to make. It was not about what college I would attend; I'd already settled on that. And it wasn't about whom I was going to ask out for an upcoming Saturday night; my dating life was rather sparse at that age, as I remember. Instead, the decision was about what country I wished to be a citizen of. The only birth certificate I possessed at that time was a British one, showing I'd been born in August of 1945 in Plymouth, England - as indeed I had. My mother had been a British citizen at the time; my father was an American serviceman in the United States Navy. So as far as the Brits were concerned I was one of theirs unless I indicated otherwise. But given my father's military status at the time of my birth, I could also claim American citizenship for myself. It was my call.
In truth, it wasn't a decision I had to spend a great deal of time mulling over. This was the only country I'd ever known. I had no reason at all to want to move to England, and every good and practical reason to live in America. My contacts with the English side of the family had mostly been in the form of the birthday and Christmas presents I received in the mail plus an occasional visit from the other side of the pond. But for official citizenship-type purposes I did have to make an official type of declaration, so I filled out this official form I picked up at the local courthouse and mailed it off to the State Department in Washington, D.C. A couple of weeks later I got a standard issue State Department American Birth Certificate in the mail with, then, Secretary of State Dean Rusk's signature on it no less. You can't get much more official than that.
My citizenship now formally declared and secured, I was eligible then to register for the Draft, which I immediately went out and did. Again, I didn't see anything especially momentous about that at the time. I'd already been accepted and enrolled at the college of my choice, so my student deferment was assured. Vietnam, in 1963, was still just a vague entity out there on the edges of the American landscape somewhere. Registering for the Draft was just a routine act of good citizenship - if you were an 18 year old male - and I clearly wanted to be a good citizen. After all, I'd just informed the State Department, no less, that I was an American.
Forty years later now, I still want to be a good citizen. And my sense of, and feel for, being an American has actually deepened over the years since the day I took that Birth Certificate out of its envelope. I want to share some of that journey today as I offer another in my loosely structured series on how my mind has changed and evolved; changed and evolved, that is, in some of those life areas from which we each and all, in one way or another, derive and fashion our identities. One of the basic, spiritual questions, if you will, is: "Who Am I?" I don't pose, or suggest, this in a narcissistic or self-indulgent kind of way; but rather as the question of "What is it that makes me, me (or you, you)?" A few weeks ago I spoke of this matter with respect to race and gender. Today, as our country finds itself on the brink of a so-called "preventive war," and with our citizenry in an uncertain, anxious, and increasingly divided mood at such a looming prospect, I want to speak to how one's nationality - my nationality in this case - addresses that larger question of "Who Am I?" But I can't begin with the present, because that is not where this story begins.
Contained within my memories of my growing up days are my recollections of learning the stories of America. As I've shared on other occasions I spent much of my boyhood summers on a small Ohio farm where my grandfather, an aunt, and two uncles lived. One of those uncles was a high school history teacher, and I think he spent those summers keeping in shape for the other nine months of the year by working out his "teacher stuff" on me. We would go into the little town library about once a week and check out a couple of books that usually dealt with some phase of American history; or were biographies of famous Americans. I'd read them; we'd discuss them; and we'd then go back to the library for more. I spent my childhood summers being "home-schooled," as it were, in American history; and it never felt oppressive to me. Well, I think there was usually some kind of financial pay-off for each book I read and digested, so it wasn't all altruism. And, if memory serves, I did earn a few bucks at around age ten for memorizing the Gettysburg Address. I don't remember what the pay-off was for learning all the states and their capitals, but I knocked that one off too.
My being a "political junkie" goes back to those days as well. I remember listening on the radio to the 1952 political conventions. Being good Ohio Republicans my relatives were disappointed when General Eisenhower beat out Ohio Senator Robert Taft for the '52 Republican Presidential nomination. But they then impressed upon me how important it was for Eisenhower to defeat whomever the Democrats would nominate. They impressed me so much, in fact, that after listening to the Republican Convention I took my seven-year-old self out into the woods, where I climbed up on a huge rock and delivered an impassioned speech for Eisenhower. (Well, he won didn't he?!)
From a very early age, then, I learned to value and appreciate this country's heritage and its democratic institutions. Since those days I have had to face and learn about some less than glorious chapters in our nation's history. I've been exposed, time and again, to the flaws and failings in the workings of our country's institutions. And my political persuasions have gone through a variety of changes and adjustments, let us say, since 1952. But my basic, positive feel for the American story, painful warts and all; and my trust in the workings of democracy - as severely as that trust has been and continues to be tested - have remained in place.
Like many of my generation, it was the tumultuous events of the late 1960s and early 1970s, that strongly contributed to the shaping of my American identity. For me those years became a time of frustration, anger, bewilderment, and anger. It was also a time when the trustworthiness of our leaders was first called into question for me. I remember an August evening in 1964 just as I'd turned nineteen, listening to President Johnson in very somber tones, tell of how American vessels in Vietnam's Gulf of Tonkin had been subjected to an unprovoked attack by North Vietnamese forces. The President, invoking very noble-sounding sentiments about defending freedom and democracy, said he was going to ask the Congress to give him the authority to take whatever measures necessary to repel such attacks. My mother was sitting next to me as we both listened to the broadcast; and I remember her putting her arm around me. She didn't say a word, but she was scared, having seen up close and personal the horrors of war as a British teenager living in a city on the English Channel in the early 1940s. Now she was wondering if she would lose a son to another war. Some years later it came to light that the so-called "Gulf of Tonkin Resolution" had actually been drafted several weeks prior to this alleged attack; and what was really a minor event was used as a pretext for moving the United States Congress into granting the President of the United States vast war-making powers. I think of that now.
As already noted, I didn't go to war - for me it was college and seminary instead. But I remember this good natured, easy-going junior-high and high-school classmate of mine. His family and my family were members of the same local Baptist Church, so he and I also went all through Sunday School together. His name was Gordon Taylor. He was a bright guy in his own way; but college wasn't his thing. Today, I'm standing, alive and well, in front of a church full of people talking about being an American; while the name of Gordon Taylor is carved into a black, granite wall. I think about this, too, as we prepare to send off another generation of young people to fight another war.
I find some of that bewilderment, and frustration, and anger of decades past, and to which I just referred, returning now. But those feelings are tempered at this point in my life, in a way that they were not, and could not have been when I was in my 20s. Well, maybe its not that they're tempered so much as they are in a different, and in an evolved, context today. For the ensuing years, and the many American roads it has been my pleasure to have traveled over those years, have given me a great love for this land. I use the word "land" quite literally. I mean the land - and not always, or not necessarily always, the people supposedly in charge of running the land. For ours is a good and beautiful land; and for all the ways in which we've abused and mistreated it, and tragically continue to do so; it is still a life-giving and life-sustaining land.
What brings this kind of goodness and beauty home for me - in addition to my travels - are the writers, and the poets, and the artists, who can also see the beauty and the blessedness that underlies so much of what can often be so troubling in this land. Thomas Wolfe's declaration of America as "a vast poem" resonates well with me. John Steinbeck, a wonderful American who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, never lost his basic love for the land even as he wrote, sometimes angrily, about the plight of some of its most dispossessed people during the 1930s. Near the beginning of his book Travels With Charley, which he wrote in 1960 as he set out to re-discover his land, he notes that "I listened and looked and felt, and in the process had a picture of my country." Here Steinbeck writes of an America that I, too, wish to listen to, and look at, and feel.
Then, of course, there's Kerouac. Those concluding words of On the Road, remain for me one of the great passages of American literature: "I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going (and) all the people dreaming in the immensity of it…" Sometimes when I've traveling "all that road" - and these days its usually from about 30,000 feet up - I'll find myself reciting some of the other words in that passage, especially if night is coming on: "The evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of the complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks, and folds the final shore in…" This is the land I have come to love.
This is also the land that I do not believe was ever meant to be the home base of a worldly empire, which is what I have come to believe that those who are ostensibly in charge of this land now wish to make of it. I say "ostensibly" because if there was ever a time to take seriously that simple, and so-often sung, refrain of Woody Guthrie's that "This land is your land; this land is my land" that time is clearly now. At a time when those who purport to lead us are attempting to make of this single nation of ours the headquarters of a global empire, it is clearly time to ask the question: Whose country is this?
I do not expect, nor even desire, unanimity of opinion amongst us here with respect to this impending war. I stand firmly in support of our fifth Unitarian Universalist principle which calls on us to affirm and promote the "right of conscience…in our congregations." All I can do, as both an American citizen, and - in this setting - as the minister you have called, is speak in accordance with the dictates of my own conscience, and urge you to search your own, in dealing with this very troubling matter that is now before our nation.
There are any number of directions I could go from here, but let me just read the concluding paragraph of a recently published article titled "The Madness of Empire" by Scott McConnell:
"Consider America's international situation: A country rich and technologically advanced, blessed with an unusually stable political system, separated from hostile countries by huge oceans, and still retaining durable long-term friendships with the world's most powerful and successful democratic states, and requiring serious international police and intelligence cooperation to deal with its most pressing enemy, al-Qaeda. For such a nation to suddenly decide that its best and only option to 'save itself' is to embark on a course of imperial expansion, one that will be opposed by vigorously by the rest of the world, seems almost a form of madness."
This article appeared in the latest issue of a journal called The American Conservative. Its author, Mr. McConnell, is the magazine's Executive Editor; and its Editor-in-Chief is Patrick Buchanan. I just thought you might be interested in hearing a critique of this war coming from the right wing, rather than some of my more predictable sentiments. I doubt that Mr. McConnell, Mr. Buchanan, and I will be locking arms and marching through the streets together any time soon, but the words I just read speak to a very troubling suspicion I find I'm coming to hold.
Beyond the various rationales that this Administration has put forth for an Iraqi invasion since the war drums first started to beat - and they've changed so often now they're downright hard to keep up with - are we really about to launch a war because we can? Flip as that may sound, I am serious. We as a nation now possess the military might to have our way with almost any nation on the planet; and there is no counter-weight anywhere to our might. I'm as glad as anyone that the Cold War is over; do not mistake me on that point. But one of the consequences - intended or not - of our being the world's remaining super-power is that anytime the powers that be in this country can convince themselves that launching a "preventive war" is to our advantage - or appears to be to our advantage - then why not just go ahead and do it?
Early in his Presidency, Dwight Eisenhower was presented with a plan to wage a preventive war to disarm the Soviet Union's Josef Stalin. His response was: "All of us have heard this term 'preventive war,'... in this day and time I don't believe there is such a thing; and frankly, I wouldn't even listen to anyone seriously that came in and talked about such a thing." Maybe I knew what I was doing after all when I made that speech for Ike, even if it was only heard by a bunch of trees.
This past week our current President spoke about how a liberated Iraq will "transform that region (i.e. Middle East) by bringing hope and progress to the lives of millions." Does he really believe we can first militarily devastate and overwhelm a country, and then turn it into that region's beacon of freedom and democracy as its citizenry - once we've stopped dropping bombs on them, of course - cheers us on? Or is this the kind of delusion that flows from the idea that if we can enforce our will upon a nation - using the acknowledged despotism of its ruler as our rationale - then we should just go ahead and do it? Such does appear to be the mind-set of those who now rule this land. But to think that we, more or less on our own, can re-shape the world in our image - even granting that there are any number of places in this world that could stand some reshaping - is indeed a form of madness.
As halting, frustrating, and, yes, maddening that such things as containment and plodding inspections may be when it comes to dealing with Saddam Hussein, I still regard them as preferable to the even greater madness of an all out war; a war that will be followed by an occupation whose full consequences we cannot foresee other than the fact that it will be our young men and women whose lives will potentially be in harm's way. For all of the noble sounding sentiments being put forth by our leaders for this impending war, I have to wonder if we are really laying the foundation for this generation's black granite wall?
"This land is your land; this land in my land…" The meaning of my soulful journey as an American can be best captured in those words as well as any. I'll be bearing them in mind in the days ahead. I'll bear them in mind knowing that if I cannot stop the madness, neither do I, or we, have to be overtaken by it (which is why I refused to buy roll of duct tape about ten days ago, and would not have done so even if I'd actually needed it for something). I still believe in the goodness and the promise of "all that raw land (and)…all the people dreaming in the immensity of it." Naïve or not, I still choose to believe that such dreams are ultimately stronger and more enduring than madness; and that the words of the artists and the poets will in time be voice of sanity and blessing again.
This past February 14, two weeks ago, the 83 year old poet laureate of San Francisco, Lawrence Ferlinghetti (one of the last of the old beats), brought his own poetic voice to the fray with a poem that ran in the San Francisco Chronicle. I'll read just a few lines as we close for today:
So now is the time for you to speak
All you lovers of liberty
All you lovers of the pursuit of happiness
All you lovers and sleepers
Deep in your private dreams
Now is the time for you to speak.
It is Mr. Ferlinghetti's repeated use of the word "lovers" that strikes me the most about his poem. It is time to speak, he says, as lovers.
May our speaking, from whatever sentiments may be in our minds and hearts, be as lovers; lovers of a land that still holds great promise. And may we promise one another, that while we may not always speak with complete uniformity as the war drums grow more intense; we can and must still speak with one another as lovers of a land for which we care deeply.
Stephen D. Edington
March 2, 2003
Copyright © 2003 by the Unitarian-Universalist Church of Nashua NH. All rights reserved
