Dear Friends,
Happy Fourth! May you find time today to think about and find the special, enduring qualities in our common life!
We can describe the United States as a land of dreamers and workers. On this 245th birthday of our republic, let’s salute both, for both are needed to restore meaning and coherence to our nation. I say this because we are, in many ways, in need of dreaming new dreams and working with conviction and humor to exercise our morally and socially conscious lives anew.
If we work only, we run the risk of becoming over-tired or cynical. If we dream only, we accomplish nothing and waste our gift of life. The two, taken together, create new ways of shaping our lives so that we stand over against naysayers who predict that our democracy will dissolve in the not-too distant future.
But our working and dreaming, making connections and creating patterns for a better life for all, have to face, address and overcome some awful/awesome challenges: domestic terrorism, racism, sexism, gun control and a missing self-control, drug addiction, climate issues.
“The American dream,” as Robert Bellah and associates wrote years ago in Habits of the Heart, “is often a very private dream of being a star, the uniquely successful and admirable one, who stands out from the crowd that ordinary folk who don’t know how. And since we have believed in that dream for a long time and worked very hard to make it come true,” they continue, “it is hard for us to give it up, even though it contradicts another dream we have – that of living in a society that would be really worth living in.” That society is one transformed with new emphasis on liberty and justice, with economic, medical and educational resources available for all its citizens. A Utopian dream? Perhaps, but it is, in fact, a dream that lives in every human heart…a dream we have yet to fulfill.
We find certain tensions alive among us as we celebrate this particular American birthday. In the midst of our tensions, believers in God ask, “How do we know whether we are indeed following the vision, the call of our God to live and let live fully?” The Scriptures say, “Where your treasure is, there also is your heart” (Matthew 6.21).
Where is our treasure as a nation? Where do we invest our resources? On education, our children, housing, health care, jobs? Do we lift-up the marginalized and the poor?
As the American public, people like you and me need to encourage government, business and all those places that stimulate the American outlook to take up new initiatives in social responsibility and economic democracy.
On this birthday of our country, we need to explore anew and rededicate ourselves to the vision of our God and work of our ancestors who took up the task of building the United States. Let us accept the challenge and not be awed by its enormity. Let us work together, laugh together, find time to play together. Let us embrace one another as human beings and set aside the differences in our makeup. As fellow dreamers and workers, may we work toward a 246th anniversary more whole and holy than we experience this year.
~Sister Joan Sobala
