Marchers hold a giant U.S. flag as they participate in the Independence Day parade in Port Jefferson, New York, in 2022. (Gregory A. Shemitz / CNS)
View from the pew
When we sang a string of “Alleluias” at the end of Mass on Pentecost Sunday, it was with mixed feelings. That was our cheerful “Happy birthday” refrain on the day we celebrate the birth of the Christian church.
It’s also a bit sad to reach the end of the weekslong Easter season full of alleluia refrains and biblical texts that underscore what Jesus’ resurrection means for us. We’ve been at this spiritual consciousness-raising for more than three months, since Lent began March 5. After we end June’s liturgical calendar of special feast days with Trinity Sunday, Corpus Christi, we’ll be back to what is known as “ordinary time.”
We’ll still celebrate Easter every Sunday, but it’s time to undo the gold drapes and leave the baptismal candle unlit and ease back on the floral arrays.
The sanctuary at my parish church is never “ordinary” thanks to the creative skill of sacristan Brother Richard Kupo, whose huge arrangements of tropical flowers and plants often draw visitors to take photographs. I think of the colorful array of blossoms as representing us rejoicing at the foot of the crucifix.
I love the Pentecost biblical accounts of the apostles receiving the Holy Spirit, appearing as tongues of fire descending on them before they went out and proclaimed Jesus’ teaching to a vast crowd of people in Jerusalem.
This year, hearing that list of all the nationalities of people who heard the Galilean apostles’ messages coming to them in each of their own languages had a profound meaning. My mind wandered off the pious path and into the darkness of worldwide politics and strife.
Here’s Jerusalem 2,000 years later: It’s still a religious center, not only for Jews but Christian and Muslim faiths, at a time when tongues of fire translate into deadly weapons of war. People who worship God in separate ways choose to become religious zealots devoted to obliterating those who pray differently.
That same plague rages in another sacred place, a country proudly created as the “United States.” The pandemic of hate we suffer attacks the mind and soul; its symptoms are to disparage, disagree, deny, destroy.
America, the liturgy
Looking at the calendar in search of something beyond ordinary, I flipped the page to July and found the next holy day ahead — America’s Independence Day.
Traditionally it is an upbeat celebration marked by waving flags, parades, speeches, civic ceremonies and private parties on a holiday off work. But nowadays, it may also be defiled by heated and perhaps violent demonstrations and derogatory rhetoric, people divided by political ideologies and prejudices.
Sinking in spirit, I pondered what it would take to make America whole again.
Perhaps we should use our church approach to a holy day. Let’s rewind Lent into a preparation for patriots. Let us work our way up to the peak celebration by doing some reading and reflecting on how great our country has been from its beginning.
My imagination immediately started shaping a liturgy.
In place of the poetic language of a psalm, let’s read and reflect on the poem etched on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, which closes with:
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp! … Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
It’s the 1883 work of Emma Lazarus, a young American poet who traced her ancestry to Sephardic Jews from Portugal, the first Jewish immigrants to North America. Her poem “The New Colossus” compared Lady Liberty to an enormous statue of a Greek god on the shore of the island of Rhodes, deemed one of the seven wonders of the world in ancient days.
The statue of the Roman goddess of liberty, Libertas, was a gift from the French people to America to celebrate the end of slavery after the Civil War, the inspiration of French abolitionist Edouard Laboulaye. So the statue, and the poem, which have come to symbolize our country’s open arms as a refuge to migrants, had ironic timing, created when people who came to this country as slaves were just at the first step of being recognized as citizens. By then, hordes of people from around the globe had moved to this New World.
In a National Public Radio interview, an official in Donald Trump’s first term as president suggested that the famous inscription should be rewritten to say, “Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet and who will not become a public charge.”
That statement by Ken Cuccinelli, then-director of the Citizenship and Immigration Services office, is pretty mild rhetoric compared to the hunt-and-deport words and actions underway in current days.
Proceeding with this new Lenten liturgy, I propose that we all read the creation story of the United States. Do schoolchildren these days have to memorize the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence as we did back in the day? It’s required of people who are becoming naturalized citizens:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among those are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
Beyond that famous introduction, the authors explained themselves in a basic lesson in democracy:
“That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it and to institute a new government…”
When the Founding Fathers wrote the Declaration of Independence 250 years ago, they had King George III of England in mind. Our high school history and civics may have flipped through the long list of grievances against that despot in the document drafted by James Madison, Thomas Jefferson and friends.
All these years later, it reads like something ripped from the headlines.
They wrote that the English dictator “has endeavored to prevent the population of these states, for that purpose obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands.
“He has made judges dependent on his will alone, for the tenure of their offices…
“He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people…
“He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies without the consent of our legislatures…”
While we do our homework and reflection to prepare for the glorious Fourth, find the U.S. Constitution online. Take it easy, just read it one amendment at a time. It will be good background if you are watching the news and the flood of court challenges about what may be unconstitutional actions by the 21st-century government.
The First Amendment is sacred text for people of every faith, for citizens in a democracy and for a journalist like me. It is worth memorizing. I think it would make a great holy card.
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people to assemble, and to petition the government for redress of grievances.”
Speaking of homework, there’s a much shorter document worth contemplating before Independence Day — it’s the weekly supermarket ad. Great reading in the produce section with melons, peaches, cherries, all kinds of fruit coming into season.
Who do you think picks all those fruits and veggies? In the hot fields of California — and Central America — or the cool orchards of the Pacific Northwest, field laborers are not likely to be the landowner or a third-generation American kid on a summer job. It’s new U.S. residents, mostly Hispanic migrants, who are doing the sweat labor that our ancestors did when they first came to America.
New migrants are the people who must take unsavory jobs in slaughter yards and sausage factories, whose labor provides you with meat in nice clean packages at the market.
On our annual return visit to Wisconsin, we found the populations of cities and small villages have changed from a Black and white ethnic landscape.
Hmong people from Southeast Asia, refugees from the Vietnam War, are prospering as farmers and business owners. You can actually find a real Chinese or Mexican restaurant in a small town. Masses in Spanish are offered in some parishes that were formerly the prayer places of the descendants of Scandinavian, German, Irish and Italian immigrants.
Living in Hawaii inspires you take ethnic, racial diversity as the normal, natural landscape. I delight in finding my mainland hometown is no longer haole-wood.
Perhaps when we celebrate the Fourth, we should be sure to say grace before the meal, with special thanks for the people out in the trenches whose labor brings food to our tables. We sure need them. They follow in the footsteps of Americans who have been immigrants since the first pilgrims came here to escape religious persecution in Europe. We should be welcoming them.
God bless them and God bless America.