A Meditation by Dave Skidmore delivered Sunday July 4, 2004
The Fourth of July, in childhood memory, is for me one of the best of all holidays, second only to Christmas. The Independence Days that I recall, growing up in Philadelphia, seem as if they were all hot days, with brilliant sunshine. Morning was time for the neighborhood parade, observed from a perch on my father’s shoulders. Afternoon might be given over to a picnic – hotdogs and hamburgers, potato salad, watermelon; and the steamy evening, to fireworks and popsicles at the neighborhood recreation center. And, as a young history buff in the city where the events giving rise to the holiday occurred, I like to think I even had an appreciation for the ideals that we were celebrating. (As an adult, I’ve also come to appreciate the Fourth of July as a rare holiday that requires no greeting cards or gifts.)
But, on this particular Fourth of July, although I am looking forward to spending this evening with friends from work on the balcony of a federal building on Constitution Avenue, ooh-ing and aah-ing at a fireworks display far better than anything I imagined in Northeast Philadelphia, I find I don’t feel much like celebrating. Perhaps you don’t either. If not, I suspect it is because we know that Americans and Iraquis and Afghanis will be fighting and dying and suffering even as we enjoy the potato salad and fireworks. We know that bombs bursting in air in Baghdad do not elicit the same delighted oohs and aahs from Iraqi children that the fireworks bursting over Washington will elicit from American children tonight.
The war that the Fourth of July commemorates occurred more than two centuries ago and the horror of it (for all wars are horrible) has faded from our consciousness, replaced by Williamsburg images of costumed militia marching to a jaunty fife-and-drum rendition of Yankee Doodle Dandy. But the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan are real and present, not sugarcoated and distant. The images we see in our newspapers and television screens, whether of American bodies hanging from a bridge over the Euphrates River or of cowering and naked Iraqis in Abu Ghraib prison, do not stir an idealized, misty-eyed patriotism. Rather they serve as a grim and ironic contrast to today’s red-white-and-blue gaiety.
Nevertheless, for me, these images sometimes seem as unreal as that Revolutionary fife-and-drum corps – not because they actually are unreal (unfortunately they are not) but because they are so far removed from my day-to-day reality. I know only a few people who have been personally touched by the war. One member of our congregation, is serving in Baghdad. On most Sundays, as we did this Sunday, we pray for her safety. My daughter tells me of schoolmates enduring a long separation from their fathers. The son of my next-door neighbor, who I watched grow up, has just completed his basic training in the Marines. I hope, along with his parents, that he will not have to fight.
But, as my mind wanders these dark paths, it is important, for me at least, to recall that the halcyon, sun-drenched July Fourths that I remember in Philadelphia – when I was eight and nine and ten and eleven and twelve and thirteen – occurred from 1965 to 1970, during the height of the Vietnam War. I have to think that the adults around me were experiencing much the same sort of disquietude many of us feel today and yet also found a way to celebrate alongside their children.
So, what are we to do with our disquietude?
First, I think, is to remember that life is a gift of God to be enjoyed—despite the suffering that is part of life—and that eschewing pleasure does not negate someone else’s pain. Perhaps that is what Jesus was trying to get at when he rebuked his disciples for rebuking the woman who poured a costly ointment on his head and said, “For you will always have the poor with you.”
Second, though perhaps as adults, with a sometimes all-too-acute awareness of the world, we can’t enjoy the Fourth of July with the starry-eyed abandon of an eight-year-old, we should not swing to the opposite extreme and think valueless the American ideals this holiday celebrates: democracy, self-determination, pursuit of happiness and, above-all, freedom. Because we look on the horrors of Iraq and Afghanistan, does not mean that we cannot also contemplate the beauty, in the words of our opening hymn, of the “patriot dream that sees beyond the years.”
Last, as Universalists, we must trust, try to trust, that the God, in whom (in the words of Paul) “we live and move and have our being” is always present to the suffering in the world and, ultimately, will find a way to bring about peace and reconciliation and “the final harmony of all souls.”
So, I hope you have a chance today to eat potato salad and watermelon and revel in the company of family and friends. But I also hope we can pause to remember those who are separated from loved ones, and to fervently pray for peace and to hope, in God, that, ultimately, the people of Iraq and Afghanistan find a way to enjoy the same peace and prosperity and freedom we celebrate for ourselves today.
I’d like to close by repeating the prayer offered in the second verse of our second hymn this morning. The words are those of G.K. Chesterton, the British writer best known today for his Father Brown mysteries. I believe he had World War I in mind.
From all that terror teaches,
From lies of tongue and pen,
From all the easy speeches
That comfort cruel men,
From sale and profanation
Of honor and the sword,
From sleep and from damnation,
Deliver us, good Lord.
Amen.