Nations and Kingdoms: Some Inconclusive Thoughts on Patriotism, Freedom, and all That

This reflection has been composed gradually over the past week—before, during, and after July 4.

As an American citizen, I struggle with July 4^th.  I struggle with July 4^th because I struggle with patriotism.  I struggle with patriotism both as a manifest reality and as an idea.

I know that there are other notions of patriotism than “my country, right or wrong.”  I know that there is an actual, active, and vital tradition of defining patriotism as loyalty and obedience to the ideals that a nation supposedly embodies as opposed to the nation itself.  But, even when it’s framed that way, I still have a problem with patriotism.  I struggle with patriotism and its representative holiday always, even when I like the president and feel kind of okay about the shape of the country.  Neither of those things are the case right now, and so my nausea is a little more pronounced this year, but that’s a small matter.  I would feel at least a bit of this anyway.

Even if patriotism is framed as loyalty and obedience to principles instead of the nation, I still struggle with the notion precisely because of those two ideas—loyalty and obedience.  The core of my struggle is that I am a Christian, and as such I have placed my loyalty and obedience elsewhere.  I briefly did some teaching in a few public high schools recently, and I always found it a surreal and troubling experience when I was asked to lead my class in the pledge of allegiance to the American flag in the mornings.  I would pray the Lord’s Prayer aloud with my congregation each week for gathered worship and on my own in my private time of devotion, affirming my citizenship in the kingdom of Christ “on earth as it is in heaven” before any other group, organization, or system.  I was always irked by the persisting thought that it was either one or the other, that I needed either to affirm my loyalty to the reign of God in the kingdom of Christ or to the visible powers of the governing bodies of my geographical home.  And the fact that a sizable and visible portion of American Christians seem to feel no such tension only made this all the more irksome.  Think of all the common phrases—faith and family, God and country—that imply an inseparable link between one’s spiritual identity and one’s national or familial identity.  Think of all the patriotic services that go on in so many churches with so few eyes batted or brows furrowed. 

Given these dispositions of mine, it should be no surprise that I always wince a little at the word freedom.  If I’m in the right mood, all the things that I’ve been told about this abstract noun over the years begin replaying in my mind, only in a sardonic, mocking, and slightly slurred voice (you know the one):  Freedom isn’t free.  It’s more important than life itself.  It’s what we as Americans have that no one else in the world has in the right way or to the right degree.  It’s why the terrorists hate us.  More thoughtful and principled reflections on this word might state that freedom is a right that comes with responsibility; that freedom is given up when one breaks the law or fails to earn one’s keep.  On the other hand, I have often had such questions as “why did you throw all five of those cheeseburger wrappers out the window of your car” or “why did you drink three two-liter bottles of soda today” answered with “because this is America, dammit!”  Freedom, for some, means that I can do whatever I want whenever I want to, and anyone who tells me that maybe I shouldn’t do whatever I want whenever I want to needs to get their head out of their ass and mind their business.

My own church congregation does nothing in our services to commemorate this national holiday, and I am grateful for that.  This past Sunday, however, one of our hymns did offer a reflection on this word freedom and how it might be understood for a person of Christian faith.  The hymn is a setting of the canticle of Zechariah, found in the first chapter of Luke.  The music and text adaptation are both the work of a friend of prodigious musical ability and theological insight.  The text adaptation frames verses 74-75 of this chapter of Luke as a comment on “true liberty,” which is “to be holy, to be righteous, in His sight throughout our days.”  Freedom, in Zechariah’s song, is the freedom to be holy.

To a Christian, to be holy is to be like Christ.  To increase in holiness is to be transformed into the image of Christ.  And St. Paul gives a sweeping and lyrical explanation of what this might mean in the Christ-hymn in his letter to the Philippians (2:5-11):

                   Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,

who, though he was in the form of God,
    did not regard equality with God
    as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
    taking the form of a slave,
    being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
     he humbled himself
    and became obedient to the point of death—
    even death on a cross.

 Therefore God also highly exalted him
    and gave him the name
    that is above every name,
 so that at the name of Jesus
    every knee should bend,
    in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
 and every tongue should confess
    that Jesus Christ is Lord,
    to the glory of God the Father.

There is so much going on here that my head is spinning and singing.  The second half of this hymn declares in no uncertain terms that Jesus Christ is the authority to which every person and every nation, every citizen and every governing body, will finally answer.  For a Christian, this should make pledging allegiance to anyone or anything else extremely uncomfortable at best.  But Paul has just held up the mind of Christ to his audience as the pattern of their transformation, what their freedom to be holy allows them to approach.  And the first half of this hymn tells us that this mind is a mind that knows its position of privilege and relinquishes it for others.  It is a mind that relinquishes privilege in order to exist in solidarity with the slave.  It is a mind that does not place its own safety and well-being above that of others, but instead voluntarily gives up its own life—not even as a fighter or as a warrior, but in complete humility.

All the talk of freedom that happens around this time every year here in the U.S. makes me so uncomfortable because it usually takes a tone that is drastically different from the tone of this hymn.  Freedom, according to many of the voices that I hear, means the ability to protect and safeguard my own rights and my own way of life.  It means the ability to deny others what they want or what they need when those things cause me discomfort.  It means the ability to wield one’s beliefs and convictions as a sword against those whose beliefs and convictions I find abhorrent or inconvenient.

So what am I saying here?  Am I saying that I hate my country?  No.  I find the land on which the United States has grown up and the cultures made up by the people who inhabit it to be endlessly fascinating, endearing, and inspiring.  The history of my nation is a sweeping story that engages my mind and my heart, and it is a story in which I cannot help but situate myself.  The ideals that undergird our political system—that power only works when shared and kept accountable, that every individual should have the right and the ability to realize their place in the whole—are inspiring and noble even if they have often been articulated and embodied by deeply flawed leaders and thinkers.  Even if they have not yet been realized.

Am I saying that I have attained the mind of Christ, or have disciplined myself to learn the freedom to be holy in all my ways?  No.  I see the very ills that I decry in our contemporary American notions of freedom so clearly because I know them to be a part of my own history and my own patterns of living.  Not only am I knowingly and unknowingly complicit in the ills of our social machine by which the oppressed are marginalized, ignored, or trampled upon; I am also guilty of pushing away friends and family, the very people that I am not habitually blinded to, for the sake of my own convenience.  I, too, often live as if freedom means I can do whatever I want whenever I want to, regardless of who may be hurt in the process.

I am simply saying that I want to understand freedom as entering into the holy free-flow through which I am emptied of myself—my privilege, security, and well-being—so that others may be filled with a measure of these very things.  So that, thus emptied, I might be filled again not by pulling myself up by my bootstraps but through receiving the same free-flow of grace.  When I think of this freedom, it includes freedom from the things that I think I want and need so that I might be transformed through experiencing a will other than my own. 

I don’t know a way forward in this.  I don’t have a concluding statement about how to redeem the notion of patriotism or come to a better understanding of how my objective identity as a citizen of the United States does and should relate to the other identity that I claim as more foundational and to which I do pledge allegiance.  But maybe the closest thing I can muster to patriotism is the faint hope that even nations can repent, can free themselves of their own self-conceptions and realize that power and privilege can be given up.  But, again, I also hope that I can learn to embody these things in my own smaller way.   

Planted More Deeply

*A note:  This piece was originally written in late January of this year. 

We affirm God’s goodness at the heart of humanity, planted more deeply than all that is wrong.

I had never uttered such words in prayer.  I had never spoken them aloud on my own; much less had I ever spoken them together with others in the context of gathered worship.  At first I wasn’t sure that I was allowed to.  In my life as a Christian I had heard a great deal about human sinfulness, a great deal about “total depravity,” and a great deal about how to work against one’s own grain in order to take on a fuller likeness of Christ.  But rarely, rarely had I heard an affirmation that perhaps the divine image in which our own scripture tells us we were created may still, despite all the mess we have made of things, be the truer, fuller picture of who we are as individuals and as a species.  And even when I had heard such affirmations, I had often received them as “our little secret”—a bit of accepted heterodoxy that would not fly outside of the small circles in which we dared to speak such words.

Yet after arriving on the Isle of Iona in August of 2016 I found myself praying these words in gathered worship every morning, as they pulse at the heart of the Iona Community’s liturgy of morning prayer.  At first I wasn’t sure if I believed them even as they escaped my lips.  Whether they were true of the world at large was questionable; that they could be true of me as an individual was unthinkable.  But as I lived out my eleven weeks on this small island in the Scottish Hebrides, among the most sacred of places to British and Celtic expressions of Christianity, these simple and beautiful words wore away at my defenses.  As I prayed, worshipped, and worked with a breathtaking group of people gathered from places it had never occurred to me to imagine going, I began to suspect that this affirmation might be true.  As I ate and laughed, sang and danced, talked and cried with these same people, I could no longer deny either this affirmation’s truthfulness or its vital importance. 

There are many ways one’s heart may be broken open.  One’s heart may be broken open with goodness. 

After my time with this community was over, I spent my first night alone in a cramped and crowded hostel in Fort William, at the foot of the Scottish Highlands.  I awoke in the morning with a start, for all the world as if I had come out of the darkest of dreams.  The grief of parting from the faces, places, touches, and voices of the island was still so palpable that I felt momentarily unmoored.  Before the light of morning I climbed out of bed and left the room that I had shared with roughly seven other people to whom I had spoken not one word.  In the silence and stillness of the hostel’s common room I pulled my Iona Abbey worship book from my backpack and opened to the liturgy of morning prayer.  Though on my own, I breathed deeply of the building’s musty air and let myself settle into the familiar words, offering them up as a supplication that I might find community around me even in the coming days as a wandering American vagabond in Scotland. 

We affirm God’s goodness at the heart of humanity, planted more deeply than all that is wrong.

At the close of prayer my spirit surged with a new sense of the vitality from which I had felt utterly cut off only a few moments before.  Through the bay window across the room I could see the sunrise revealing the trees on the sides of For William’s hills—blazing autumnal torches swaddled in the eerily beautiful mist of late October.

I knew that in the coming days no one I met would be a stranger.

***

Only two days later I found myself back in Fort William.  I had just spent two evenings in Portree, taking in the rugged, remote, and often abrasive beauty of the Isle of Skye.  En route to Glencoe, my bus stopped in Fort William for a half-hour break in the early afternoon.  Though I had had a late night the evening before, even the best bus seats make sleep difficult, and so I took the opportunity to walk around the corner to a small coffee shop to refuel.  After buying a cup of coffee I walked back around to the bus station to find a spot to wait until my journey resumed. 

This is where I met Alan.     

Alan is the name by which I’ll be calling the middle-aged man who approached me as I leaned against the outside wall of the bus station drinking my coffee.  His appearance was professional from crown to toe, from his haircut to his clothing to the briefcase that he carried with him.  Other than this, though, the first thing that I noticed about Alan was the immense exhaustion that peered out from behind his eyes.  He had the look of a man who had had a long day in a long week in a long month in a long year.  He greeted me very politely, and then asked for some information on bus timetables that I couldn’t give him (I wasn’t yet the seasoned bus-riding veteran that I would be by the end of that week).  I apologized for being unable to help him, but he would hear none of it.

“Not a problem,” he said.  “At least you can speak English.  It’s so hard to find someone who speaks bloody English these days.”

It was evident from my accent that I was American, so next came the question that I was only just becoming accustomed to answering:  “What are you doing in Scotland?”  I explained that I had just finished an eleven-week stint as a volunteer for the Iona Community, an international and ecumenical Christian organization that operates centers on the Isle of Iona.  Having finished my time there, I was taking ten days to play the role of a vagrant tourist in Scotland before heading back to East Tennessee. 

Alan seemed fascinated by all of this, but especially by my current status as an anchorless wanderer.  “So you’re just living out of that backpack, then?” he asked with a mixture of admiration, amusement, and incredulity.  I explained that I wasn’t, really, as I also had a large suitcase stowed away underneath the bus, but that didn’t seem to diminish his bafflement.

I asked Alan a bit about himself.  I learned that he had recently moved back to Edinburgh after spending several years in London.  A recent divorce and an antipathy to the larger city had instigated a return to his home place, though it didn’t sound as if homecoming had been treating him all that well of late.  He had stopped in Fort William on his way to a temporary home, as his flat in Edinburgh had recently suffered severe fire damage.  He had lost many of his possessions, and didn’t know if he would be able to move back in or not.  As he told me this story, the exhaustion I had earlier noted on his face became more apparent and more explicable.  This guy was having a rough go.

Alan didn’t seem to want to dwell on this particular misfortune, though.  He was far more interested in the future.

“But what about you all in the States?  Who the hell is going to be president?”

I had been asked one or another variation of this question many, many times since arriving in Scotland.  While this had often led to fruitful conversation, it had also taught me how to be tactful but brief.  I explained that there were many things that troubled me about my country’s state, but that at the end of the day my primary wish was that Donald Trump not be our president.

And somewhere a switch flicked.

Alan cut in immediately and almost sharply.  “I disagree,” he said, his tired eyes turning inward to search out the fire that he would need for what he had to say next.  He admired Trump’s tough stance on immigration.  He went on to deliver a passionate denunciation of the troubles he felt that immigration posed to a national culture, about the unnecessary friction created when people with vastly different ways of life tried to share the same space.  “Just go to London and see what it’s like,” he said.  It was just a bunch of people who didn’t know how to communicate with one another, who couldn’t agree on any shared values, bumping into one another and pissing each other off.  Suddenly his comments about having so much trouble finding someone who “speaks bloody English” in an English-speaking country were cast in a clearer light.  Alan’s intensity flared up through his evident tiredness, and it came to a head with one summative declaration:  “Multiculturalism just doesn’t work.”

I bristled at his words.  My heart and mind were still singing with my recent multicultural experience, and these declarations seemed to be coming from an alien world.  To be sure, the people I had lived and worked with on Iona had been bound together by English as a common language.  To be sure, the culture of our life together rested on many of the traditions of Britain and Scotland (I became fonder of tea than I ever thought possible for a committed coffee-addict, and fonder of ceilidh dancing than I ever thought possible for such an awkward guy).  But the culture that we formed and in which we lived together was really not about any of these things.  Such delight poured through the cracks.  Our varying degrees of English-proficiency opened us to the joy of learning one another’s languages.  Our common sharing of certain British cultural norms gave us the opportunity to offer up the things that we loved about our own home cultures, to share them and to invite others into the comfort that they could bring.  And our twice-daily (at least) gatherings of prayer and worship fixed our minds on the fact that we had come to the island to lose ourselves—language, culture, and all—in the light of something larger and more important.  Warmer, more radiant, and more loving.  This was the air I had breathed for eleven weeks.  As I listened to Alan’s words, defensiveness rose in me.  Unexpectedly, I found myself becoming angry.

But somewhere a switch flicked.

I can only call it grace, because it pierced through my immediately defensive disposition without my willing it, stealing away my anger.  Through the fiery frustration in Alan’s eyes I could see the same inescapable exhaustion that I had first noticed when we met.  What did I really know about this man?  He seemed bitter about multiculturalism, perhaps even violently so, to be sure.  But he was also wounded.  I thought of his apartment, his possessions, his marriage, and it became difficult for me to disentangle the resentment I heard in his political statements from the misfortunes that had so clearly left him raw.  I opened my mouth to answer him, hardly able to guess at what was going to come out of it.

From somewhere, words came.  I said that I couldn’t agree with him because I believed I had seen multiculturalism work.  I spoke of the beautiful expression of international faith and community in which I had been privileged to participate on Iona.  I spoke of the small but significant ways in which I had seen the same fruit growing from a similar soil of faith and compassion back home in Tennessee—in my church, on college and university campuses, from communities and organizations that were committed to making friends out of strangers despite the most seemingly insurmountable cultural barriers.  I did not use these words, but I believe that I was describing the Kingdom of God—or at least some small and precious reflections of it. 

“This is my experience,” I said at the last.  “But we all speak from our own experience, don’t we?”

“Yes,” Alan said with the smallest tinge of skepticism in his voice.  “I suppose we do.”

A few moments later the driver opened the door of my bus, signaling that it was time to resume my journey to Glencoe.  I thanked Alan for the company and the conversation, offering my condolences for his recent losses and my best wishes for the coming days. 

His eyes lit up as he offered his parting words.  “Do be safe in your travels!  I hope you enjoy your time here!”  On his face was an unmistakable and unaffected smile that told me we would both remember this as a good encounter.  It could so easily have been otherwise. 

***

We affirm God’s goodness at the heart of humanity, planted more deeply than all that is wrong.

To make such an affirmation is not to be naïve.  It is not to turn a blind eye to the brutal ugliness that human beings produce as they live together in the world.  What honest person could do so?

To make such an affirmation is to recognize that we don’t get to subject any person to any test—political, doctrinal, or ethical—before we affirm that God’s goodness resides in that person.  It does.  End of story.  Or, rather, not the end of the story, but the only true and necessary beginning to any story.  To pre-emptively build walls between ourselves and others because their beliefs, their cultures, or their ways of life make us afraid is to close the book before the story has even begun, to deny the story a chance even to get started.  We can’t do that.  But those of us who feel that we have digested this message and are working to live it out must realize that neither do we get to write off any of our neighbors simply because we see in them our own categories of anathema—racism, sexism, nationalism, or any other form of xenophobia.  We name these things, we denounce these things, we stand up to these things, yes.  But we do not in doing so deny the essential humanity that we share with those who espouse them.  And in the global scene that begins to take shape in the era of Trump, that work may be harder still.

I am a Christian.  So what does this mean for those of us who name ourselves as such?

For many who share my faith this affirmation may seem questionable, uncomfortable, or even heretical.  I am no theologian, but I don’t think that it is any of these things.  In the Iona Community’s morning liturgy this affirmation follows directly on the heels of another, equally foundational one:  We affirm that we are made in God’s image, befriended by Christ, empowered by the Spirit.  To affirm “God’s goodness at the heart of humanity, planted more deeply than all that is wrong” is simply to accept the implications of our belief that we are made in God’s own image.  Down to the very last one of us.  And if we affirm this, could it not be that to be transformed into the image of Christ is to allow Christ to draw that image out in friendship, no matter how many layers of “all that is wrong” have to be traversed before we get a clear picture of it?  And could it not be that the necessary response to that is for us, empowered by the Spirit, to do the same?  As Christ has done for us, to pierce through all of the worn and the weary and the ugly and the broken bits of those we find around us until we are gifted with a glimpse of that deeper and more foundational goodness?  To refuse to close the book until we have found it?  And then, like Jesus, to draw that goodness out in friendship through all that is wrong?

I don’t know what has happened to Alan in the days since our paths crossed.  I don’t know if he has found a place to live, if he has found some reasons to smile, if he has found any peace.  But I do know that, through nothing that either of us did, we uncovered some goodness in one another in our brief encounter.  Such a thing seems so much harder, so much more daunting, here at home where the stakes now seem so high.  But I hope to continually train my eyes to see through all that is wrong to the smaller but more luminous seed of goodness that is planted beneath.  To give it space and make it grow.  My hope is that what I do here on this blog will be one way for me to train my eye to see this seed in our world and its people, and also in that place where it seems hardest to find—in myself.