Patriotism as a spiritual practice?
Sermon on Patriotism for Unitarian service, 11/1 In Castine and 11/15 in Belfast.
America is a big adolescent boy. Glory, like war, is a boy’s thing and America has had one hundred years of glory with all the wonder and achievement and self-deception that goes with a boy feeling his oats.
When the tall, well-fed America boys entered the mud of World War One the men of the other nations at war reportedly were astonished at the optimism and the ability of these New World warriors and their abundant materiel, food, and weapons. We lost 150,000 men and they lost millions. We came away smelling like a victor, and have, pretty much, since then until the Vietnam War.
I want you, if you are willing to think of American history with one year equal to ten years. So America, having been born in the 1760’s and 70’s was about 15 years old in 1900, a hundred and fifty years later. At the rate of one year to ten America grew ten years in the 1900’s. We are about 25 or 26 now.
I think it is a useful paradigm for seeing the spiritual life trajectory of America. From 1800 to 1900 America went from being, five to being fifteen. America before1900 was like a child full of wonders and blunders, and then emerged around 1900 as an adolescent ready for its ten years of glory.
What is useful about this model is that we can see the love of America and the hatred of America as fitting different stages of American life. Most of what we criticise about America now is the young boy who became an adolescent in the 1900’s, although surely there were bad boy things earlier. Most of what has become our definition of patriotism is what America has become since it became a world power after World War One—and became what I call an adolescent boy, giving patriotism a bad definition.
At the 1916 Democratic National Convention re-nominating Woodrow Wilson the place erupted into an unplanned over-the-top demonstration for pacifism as the patriotic thing. Patriotic Pacifism has fallen a long way down since then.
To see American in terms of decades of development holds out the possibility that, as for all young people, a spiritual transformation and maturation is possible, and indeed, necessary. Spiritual transformation—which is prescribed in all spiritual traditions—may also lead to some significant reorientation towards gender. But for now I stick with the masculine for starters. Herman Melville said that war is a boy’s game. The primary narrative of America has been written and told as a masculine story, for good and ill.
Boys, like empires, over reach. We boys never know our limits until we hit the wall of tragedy. It is then that the spiritual path converts tragedy into wisdom. In doing so glorious boys become merciful men, and power becomes compassion, and young boys join the human family.
The rich young Buddha anticipated limits and saw tragedy when he saw illness, death, and poverty. Jesus found limits and suffered tragedy on the cross. Muhammed found limits in a moral law and obedience, and Moses in the burning bush found freedom from the tragedy of slavery and met limits in the Mt Sinai commandment law.
Now is our time to face limits, tragedy, and to transform. Love of country, love of the idea of the country, is a step on the spiritual path. It may be the first step. But without a grounding in our homeland and its ideas the universal reach of love, peace, and harmony evaporates into another empire, an empire of air. Liberty, equality, and fraternity did not survive long in France after the French Revolution. The high tide of pacifism in America in 1916 did not survive the war tide of World War One a mere two years later. Another huge wave of pacifism in the Oxford Movement in the 1930’s disappeared in the war response to Nazi fascism. Pacifism, like other ideals, can be patriotic, but it seems not to be able to stand by itself. Ideas and ideals need a grounded love.
Martin Luther King’s non-violence was one step in his revolution. American constitutionalism was the other. America was real to Martin Luther King. Non-violence was his Indian and Christian tool, but his dream was an American dream, an American realization of Isaiah, the Hebrew prophet’s dream of justice rolling down like a mighty stream.
Martin Luther King did not stand in front of the Lincoln Memorial to take a selfie, he stood there in an American tradition of equality, freedom and justice, and in the name of that dream deferred.
I was present in the congregation at Riverside Church the evening of April 4, 1967 when Dr. King came out against the war in Vietnam and yoked the Civil Rights Movement to the Anti-War Movement. It was a year to the night, and to the hour, that he was to be killed, and I believe he was killed for what he said that night at Riverside Church, the following sentence alone, a sentence that got Time magazine to call him a traitor. There, that night, Martin Luther King, glowing with a miraculous golden light, roared that “America is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” We were then, we may be more now. He said that as an American, using the Old Testament and Jesus tradition of shouting truth to power. He was a Critical Patriot.
Critical Patriotism—think also of Mark Twain– is one of the ten values most all Americans, 80-90 percent, agree upon and have over time. We have a patriotic tradition of criticizing the country—not just randomly or selfishly, but when the country betrays and strays from its birth-right ideals, and ideas, when it strays from what we love and believe America is.
Patriotism is a matter of a certain love. Patriotism is not nationalism. Nationalism is about an historical and state entity. Patriotism about a spiritual love. Patriotism is not tribalism. Tribalism is the shrunken clan of nationalism. It is always more about hate for the other than love for each other. Nor does patriotism exclude globalism. Rather patriotism is what we wear, our folk dress, to the global dance.
We know the story of Daedelus, the very inventive father. He even invented the labyrinth. And we know the story of his son, Icarus, who flew too high, too close to the sun, whose waxed-on wings melted, and who fell, maybe unnoticed, into the sea.
America, is, I think, like Icarus, dangerously high on the inflated ego of adolescence but ready for the wilderness initiation that turns wild boys into wise men, and lone boys into members of community, community usually held together by women.
So here is my message:
America as a nation is at a developmental turning point. It is best understood as a spiritual turning point. It is the bruising stumbling point of wound and pride, and as the spiritual traditions tell us, it is the point of invitation to a fuller heart, a deeper wisdom, and a more generous spirit.
A subtext of my message, and it may be hard to take. It is that hating the boy America will not do us, or him, any good. He’s not going to come home for that. He is armed and dangerous, and he is our boy. He can be redeemed or he can go off the rails, but he will not be changed by our hating him, nor will we. After all, he is our brother, our father, and ourselves.
People become American by believing in certain ideas. Those ideas are hardly distinguishable from the founding principles of Unitarian Universalism, as I read them. Thomas Jefferson, of course, thought the country would within a generation become all Unitarian. Unitarianism is the blood brother of Americanism, born of the same Enlightenment ideas and ideals.
The subtext of my message may be hard to take. “Patriotism as a Spiritual Practice?” Question mark?
Of course that is an outrageous idea, a paradox at best. So let’s look at that. Let’s look at the “ism” of Patriotism and why it seems like such a square peg in the round hole of spiritual practices.
There may be no deeper prejudice in the minds of Americans than our prejudices about patriotism. For some patriotism is just the bottom line of a given good, a good from which all others flow: the American way of life, life liberty and happiness, even Christianity, if not also just divine blessing.
For others patriotism is simply a masquerade for greedy tribalism, narrow interests, and a cover for a world of crimes, from Native Americans, to slave blacks, to Hiroshima, to Vietnam and beyond. Patriotism: the grim-rose path to delusions of grandeur.
Those who don the face of anti-patriotism often have a sorrowful defeated look on their faces, a victim’s resignation over the shake-your-head corruption of a once good idea. Those who don the pro-face of patriotism itself have the jutting chin of smug contempt, a smile of self-satisfaction, the unblinking eye of one who sees one thing clearly.
If we can move beyond the prejudices of patriotic flag waving or flag burning, what is there to love? What is the certain kind of love in patriotism? Is it love lost, or are we better off losing it with no love lost? There are many loves.
One thing we can love has been called our inventiveness, our ability to re-invent ourselves. It should more rightly be called creativity. In science we call it experimentalism. America is great at that. In religion we call it transformation. America spawns transformational beliefs. In spiritual practice we call this ability to change, “letting go.” That is our new one.
We don’t often look at the dark side of how these creative processes work. But they work, in science or the humanities, from out of a cloud of unknowing and a dark night of the soul, from facing defeat and failure and trying something new and better. I forget how many light bulbs Edison tried first, and the 23 others who tried before him. Many tried the airplane and the Wright brothers often. Morally as well we emerge from unknowing and dark nights. Light comes from darkness; and as Winston Churchill said, Americans usually get it right but only after exhausting every other possibility.
What is it that energizes such creativity? It is tragedy: defeat, failure, and the willingness to look at it and feel it and know it and then to rise.
Anyone in psychotherapy or recovery knows that change comes from dark looking and hard feeling.
The experiment of our new country, dedicated to freedom, but with slaves, failed. It just failed. The civil war proved it was a failure, but it also proved more, that the system, as it was, failed to fix it. Slavery was a tragedy. The civil war was a tragedy from that tragedy, not just the 600,000 lost, but a tragic failure of our system to solve this sinful problem.
And the icon of this tragic time is Abraham Lincoln, and Lincoln was a man who first failed at everything he did and out of his failures and tragedies gained the wisdom and maturity, the power and mercy, to love the better angels of his nature and ours and to find a path to recreate America, to help us to a new birth and a new definition of union.
So this has been done before. It takes our ability to cope with tragedy, with loss, with failed dreams, with insurmountable faults, and then, then to live on. That is spiritual transformation.
Life responds to us when we say we are sorry. When we look at our faults. When we pay for our sins.
This wonderful poem by Barbaria Maria in our bulletin tells us of the other great national sin, other than slavery, our genocide of the native populations. Here is another place where we can face the tragedy of ourselves. From that facing comes mercy and new life, a path for justice, and a new and more whole, if not more perfect, union, a community of newly bonded people in the multiplicities that make up the nation.
That is the power of love, love and mercy, born from tragedy. We have seen this in various degrees in post-Nazi Germany, in post-militarized Japan, in post-Apartheid South Africa, and in post-civil war Ireland: all facing tragedy and looking for truth and then reconciliation. The present German openness to refugees has been credited to so many Germans having been refugees.
Patriotism then is for us a call to tragedy, to sorrow and to guilt. Patriotism then is also a remembering of the enlightenment ideals and ideas that were made known in the creation of this contingent experiment called America. Patriotism then is something that spiritual people have the gift for. Who else has a place from which to accept tragedy than those who chose to live by the spirit and by belief in ideas?
I have mentioned the sacred traditions of religions. They tell us of the transformation of the young hero into the wise and merciful life giver. We also have a secular story from 12th and 13th century France. The myth of Parsifal, the innocent fool boy who follows the warrior ways of the Red Knight—the ultimate adolescent boy—until he returns to the suffering kingdom.
And we live in the suffering kingdom, the place where the green does not return in the spring and the king is sickly and wounded. T.S. Eliot just called it the wasteland.
Parsifal enters this tragic kingdom and asks, “Who serves around here? Who serves whom around here?” He learns that the long sought Grail, the Holy Grail, is given sanctuary in the center of the castle along with the Grail King. So he asks, since all are looking for the good happy life that the grail is supposed to bring, “Whom does the Grail Serve?” And the answer is the Grail serves the Grail King. In other words, it does not serve us, but serves a higher power. The love-sacred power of the universe is rapt in a mystical love with God, teaching us how to live: in other words, serving life.
We are on the brink of learning this fully. Life is not here to serve us. We are here to serve life. Is that not the spiritual lesson of our climate change crisis? The earth is here for us and more importantly now we are here for the earth.
By the way the grail is the cup of the Feminine: the bounteous cornucopia of life. The masculine story has a feminine end. The Grail is who God serves and who serves God. That is the circle we need to enter, where glory is in self-giving to the other, and the others.
The historian Arnold Toynbee says that empires fail when they lose the grail, their self-sacrifice for a larger service. Then they do two things. They militarize everything and separate into an elite who then require that the rest of the masses serve them.
It is time for a patriotic turn towards what we are as a country and towards our tragic maturity.
Let it be so.
