Born on the Fourth of July
A Sermon Given
by Sally Benson
July 5, 1998
at Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church
Bethesda, Maryland
No question, in my grammar school in the Pioneer Valley of
Massachusetts, the fourth grade was my favorite. For one thing, after
three repressive primary classes, we discussed things like what we
would be when we grew up right there in class. For another, a roly-poly kid with suspenders showed
up and was allowed to regale us
with tales of the Queen Elizabeth and the mysteries of the Atlantic --
the other side of which he had apparently been real skinny. He
pointed past our big windows to a world we knew nothing about --
one that hinted of complexities our unit on Vasco da Gama couldn't
explain. As the jig-saw pieces of memory have fallen more or less
into place over time, it occurs to me that he had been part of the
evacuation of infants and children to Britain -- when orphaned by
gas chambers, he had landed on our shores and in our classroom for
a new life and freedom.
Another reason I liked fourth grade -- we were trusted to go door to
door selling seeds to raise money for books to be lined along that
window sill and to which we could go when we finished "our work"
-- a string of Nancy Drew and biographies of great Americans as kids
on the prairie and the Colonial girl or boy of this or that cradle of
liberty of the East. I loved them all, but the single episode that has
stayed with me from that delicious year was the final chapter of
Colonial Girl of Old Philadelphia in which the little heroine is
squashed among reverent grown-up stippy-toed on hot cobblestones.
She doesn't understand a bit of it but endures by clasping a brand new
doll. When the final words are spoken and the great Liberty bell is
struck and all the church steeples ring across the City of Brotherly
Love in wild celebration, she solemnly christens her doll "Sacred
Honor." While the words were officially adopted two days later, the
Continental Congress actually declared the United States Free and
Independent on July 2nd and the public reading and rejoicing took
place in the Pennsylvania State House yard on July 8th. Steeds and
stages and boats carried the words into the countryside and along the
coast south and north so the bell-ringing and bonfires took place
throughout the colonies all month. Our dependable Abigail Adams
described the Boston events to her husband on July 21 referring to the
previous Thursday, and then she said "After dinner, the King's Arms
were taken down from the State House, and every vestige of him from
every place in which it appeared, and burnt in King Street. Thus ends
royal authority in this State. And all the people shall say AMEN."
(102,3 Angle) Thinking about my appointment with you today, I re-visited those words -- basically a
bunch of grievances accumulated
because the crown needed to pay for the Seven Years War -- the war
that made it the supreme world power at the cost of American life and
plundered villages. It was the cry of life at the birth a new nation --
the first modern one to be born from a revolutionary stance and
parented not by kings and popes and military giants like Charlemagne
the Great but by a polyglot of the sons of American yeomen and
mechanics and new immigrants -- they may not have used the word
polyglot but they did honor the principle with e pluribus.
The grievances are bracketed with spiritual and civic expressions that
give voice to the Biblical values that identified the Israelites as a
"special people," that informed the radical reformation and the "Age
of Enlightenment" and inspired a new generation of liberal thinkers
and doers -- and have been repeated by colonized and oppressed
peoples ever since.
So these United States welcomed my little round friend in suspenders
and many others before and after the war, but it had turned away the
ship with Jewish passengers in 1938 and hunted down other folks
with visions of liberty during the McCarthy years that followed --
including my favorite teacher.
Our classrooms, yours and mine, taught us to salute the symbol of a
principle and a proud republic not a human being -- not a King
George or a Hitler, but it also turned our school basement into a bomb
shelter and spent billions to escalate the arms race robbing us of the
promised of a newly desegregated society and a world of funds for
negotiation and peace.
Our schools graduated patriots, but sent a number of them off as
grunts and technicians and pilots to a hot subplot of the Cold War.
A president asked us to consider what we might do for our country
but succeeding ones never took the rap when our ideals were
trammeled about the pavements and back hollows of our land and the
battlefields of another one faraway -- our national pride shot all to
hell.
I saw only bits and pieces of the war up close, but I came home from
Vietnam with a compassion for veterans; and I remember the first
time I saw Born-on-the-Fourth-of-July-Ron-Kovic-paralyzed-from-the-chest-down. He
commanded the attention of a circle of
congressmen and staffers towering around his wheelchair -- his
energy and affection drawing everyone in. His story and Oliver
Stone's film version tells of his easy, familiar patriotism and how it
died/how he died and then of his epiphany not reborn as with cushy
clouds and harmony but with constant struggle with what he called
rocklike rubber piss bags" and recurring depression.
Generations of us understand that patriotism could be easy and
familiar. There was so much to celebrate that some could gloss over
the Indian wars and the reconstruction-gone-awry and the
colonization of the Philippines and the other island countries one
hundred years ago. But with daily live televising of our young dying
along with lots of other patriotic people fighting for independence, it
got real dicey.
When it all ended -- all the efforts since President Truman
committed the first dollars to support the French effort to recolonize
Indochina around the time I was in the fourth grade; when it all ended
in military defeat and humiliation -- like with Ron Kovic --
something really died. Of course, it was more than a military defeat
and a deeper humiliation than we yet understand; but it was -- like
Ron -- like we as a nation were only three-quarters here.
Indochina put all that we'd glossed over in high relief. Our denials
were no longer credible to us. That we had squandered the glory of
our revolution and our defeat of the slave system and our hero role
against Hitler and fascism hit the younger generation and its ideals
hard.
OK, so what now? To explore that question would take a year of
sermons and study, not these few remaining minutes. But on this our
birthday celebration, I want to put the question out there -- and to
suggest that the answer might lie in the very history we have
squandered and in some of the very traditions from which our
Universalist and Unitarian forms of faith have grown. Both are
rooted in the Biblical understandings of the radical reformation: that
we humans are imperfect -- all of us even popes and kings, that it's
just us folks wandering in the desert who must make sense of things
and make progress by having a covenental agreement among
ourselves and with some transcendent spirit which then takes on life
through our actions -- through our efforts at fulfilling our promise.
We are in constant need of renewal and checks and balances and
being called back to our covenants and better selves by prophetic
voices and our ethical stirrings within.
So for now I'll end with these comments and a story I just found.
Like some of you, I've just returned from General Assembly in
Rochester -- home of Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony, site
of the second women's convention and close to the first one that
called for our suffrage at Seneca Falls 150 years ago this month.
Abolitionist and women's history was all around us at GA -- the
4000 plus attendees, and "Fulfilling the Promise" was the theme
about which you will hear more from your. ministers and delegates.
At the end of the day-long drive back to D.C., I lay down with the
week's mail and in the latest issue of Yankee magazine was a small
story about another soldier who -- quoting from it, volunteered
immediately, though he was his parents' only son and though he was
not a warrior by inclination, but rather a kind, somewhat scholarly,
temperate, and thoughtful boy. He was, in fact, a Universalist, which
would indicate a tolerant, broad-minded approach to life." (p 76) He
fought at Lee's Mill and Antietam, was wounded at Cold Harbor and
First Fredericksburg where Shelby Foote says more men died than D-Day. He left the Fairfax Seminary
Hospital to join the march north,
but somewhere between Westminister and Manchester, Maryland his
commander had him stop along the way to recuperate further. On July
5 someone reported to his company of the Third Vermont Regional
that during their battles at Gettysburg, where about as many died in
a few days as all the Americans in ten years in Vietnam, the young
man had been found with his head bashed in -- presumably by some
Confederate sympathizers. The commander's tribute to this young
Universalist is in the National Archives: "He was a natural and good
scholar, truly moral in his habits, one who possessed a large fund of
good feeling, a true Patriot . . ." -- The author of this little story says
that her eulogy to her distant uncle would be different. ". . . my dear
uncle, I live with a man who was a boy, as you were, in Vermont.
Who grew up to volunteer to be a soldier. Who fought in a hot
country not his own. Whose best friend then was a black man, who
died in that war, in his arms, as surely you must have held dying men.
You fought to make that black man's great-great grandparents free,
and he fought because he loved the country that both enslaved and
freed him. The man I live with lived to have sons and when his sons
talk of war and killing, he shakes his head sadly and says, "Do not be
quick to fight." (p 120) Now I, myself, live with a man whose long
ago Universalist uncle left the New England hills to fight for abolition
and the union. Who also volunteered -- not to fight, but to be a
teacher and friend among people divided by civil war, to be brought
home to be drafted and then to resist. And when there is talk of war
and killing, he too tries to explain to our daughter a better way. The
veteran and the resister, both are patriots.
There are veterans and resisters and the families of their peers who
never came home who are seeking a new way to be patriotic, to be a
nation inspired by our revolutionary promise, to build a global society
with democratic practices, to become a planetary Eden in which we
are called to co-creators through fulfilling the promise. Do not be
quick to fight, to kill, to exterminate.
Ron Kovic has retreated from public engagement. I don't know how
his body and spirit are today, but it is his birthday and we can tell his
story of how one can return from the near-dead and defeat -- to be re-born with creative power and a
voice to calling us back to our dreams.
Many Americans have retreated from purposeful civic life, their
spirits weighted down by god-awful crimes and out-of-control
capitalism, but it is our birthday, the anniversary of our radical
experiment in democratic rule and we can renew our promises yet to
be fulfilled.
Oh, another thing about my 4th grade, we could march in the
Memorial Day parade -- a very serious affair compared to the
rollicking fun with which we celebrate the Fourth Spanish-American
War veterans in the lead, those from the trenches following and
finally the ranks of younger men with fresh wounds of world war.
There was the gun salute at the village green and all the kids from our
school would repeat Lincoln's eloquent words at the foot of the statue
of another American boy/man who fought and died for abolition and
the union.
Many of the men of my memory are now in realm of that statue,
people who believed in a promise and are gone -- who given today's
realities might seek other ways to fulfill it than the choices they had.
The image of them moving along the town common to the beat of a
muffled drum comes to me from time to time, their eyes straight
ahead, so solemn with thoughts never spoken. I like to think they are
asking us to renew the commitments which we celebrate and calling
us to new ways to serve the common good.
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