Dear Friends,
This week we celebrate the Fourth of July and all the unique civic rituals that go with it. For disciples of Jesus it is a celebration that garners mixed feelings, for we acknowledge Christ as our ruler and king – not a government, no matter how democratic it may be. Christ is the goal of our heart’s desire. Love of country does not figure anywhere in the teachings of Jesus. Patriotism and nationalism are concepts that are far from the gospel Jesus preached. Still, there may be some deeply human patterns that can make even patriotism work in a Christian’s life.
Several years ago, David Bentley Hart wrote an essay in First Things about love of country. In it he argues that love needs to move from what is close to us to what is more general. Which is to say that loving America in general will not foster genuine national loyalty, however, loving baseball and apple pie— particular things— will do so. He said, “love of country is most ennobling, I think, when it is most concrete, and when it rises up out local loyalties, particular experiences, and natural customs. Otherwise, it has only the quality of appreciation, or even of reverence, but not of the profoundest emotional attachment.” Hart goes on to enumerate more than fifty particularly American things he loved, and his list ranged from the Marx Brothers to Samuel Barber and Miles Davis.
I thought his essay made a very good point. He reflects a similar theme to St. John in his letters, “if we say we love God and don’t love each other, we are liars. We cannot see God. So how can we love God, if we don’t love the people we can see?” Our neighbors are visible, touchable, and knowable. They speak our language. However, St. John says love of “people we can see” is a prerequisite for loving the unseen God. That which is easy to love leads to that which is more difficult to love. Love pulls us outward and apart. When we stretch love of self, we love neighbors.
Here is the conclusion of his essay:
Some might still complain that even the most comprehensive and adoring enumeration of the particularities of America still does not amount to a confession of faith in America as a cause, or America as the great historical exception or new human beginning, or America as the ideal destiny of humankind. And indeed it does not. But it is a genuine expression of great love, nonetheless.
And, I would argue, it has the true shape of all love that is rightly ordered. All true charity, love that is purged of selfishness and egoism, begins in attachment to what is most intimate and familiar. This is where the soul acquires its first and indispensable tutelage in love, and from which it then ventures out to embrace ever more of reality without forsaking its first loyalty, extending the circle of its sympathy by analogy to its own primordial affections…The proper love of country, it seems to me, should have the form of this egressus and regressus :a deep attachment to what is near at hand that is still free from any presumptuous belief in the lesser value of things that are far away, and that is therefore able to grow beyond the local towards the universal, beyond the nation to a larger culture, beyond that to other cultures, and ideally towards the embrace of all humanity and all of creation. That is, at any rate, the only kind of patriotism that I fully understand, and that I find it possible to see as a spiritual virtue. And, I may be wrong, but it seems to me also to be a patriotism that, of its nature, should express itself with a certain seemly humility, and an effortless generosity.
If days like the 4th of July are to have any spiritual value for us, they must help us move from the local to the universal, from the neighbor who is next to me to the neighbor who lives far away. The celebrations on the fourth should not be times of pride and boasting, but should be a time of humility and prayer. On the fourth, please do the American thing: barbeques and beer, apple pie and music, swimming at the lake and shooting off fireworks – do so because God has made it easy to love the things that are near us. However, do not let it end there. Real love is not confining, but expansive. May your love bring you to the point where you can even love your enemies – as Jesus taught.
Peace,
Fr. Damian