Although the glass doesn’t allow the picture to come through clearly, I still find this image haunting . . .

Thomas Merton wrote the following on 22 July 1963, and I believe it to be as true — to me — today as it was — to him — then

How true it is that the great obligation of the Christian, especially now, is to prove himself a disciple of Christ by hating no one, that is to say, by condemning no one, rejecting no one. And how true that the impatience that fumes at others and damns them (especially whole classes, races, nations) is a sign of the weakness that is still unliberated, still not tracked by the Blood of Christ, and is still a stranger to the Cross.

A Year with Thomas Merton: Daily Meditations from His Journals; reading for July 24.

I find “hating no one” to be a challenge. I’m pretty good at it in the categories of “races, nations,” but I struggle with the “whole classes” bit. If classes are upper, middle, and lower, I can say with a relative confidence that I don’t hate anyone because of their status. But I struggle with the stubborn ignorance, the grasping, self-absorbed greed that seems inherent at all social levels. This probably means that it’s human and takes conscious effort and hard work to overcome.

Recently a couple of Facebook friends — one a beloved cousin — sent me a link to a song titled “Here in America” or “In God We Still Trust” or maybe “Here in America, in God We Still Trust.” My cousin asked me to forward it “if so led,” but I can’t in good conscience do so. The lyrics of the song are flat and clichéd (worse even in this trait than Lee Greenwood’s career-killing “God Bless the U.S.A.”), and the images in the accompanying video are saccharine patriotic and religious sentiment.

The song is American Christianity at its most sappy and, I believe, despite the pretty music, at its worst — the putting of America before (or at least equal to) Christ.

The older I become, the crankier I become about religion. Not about faith, the teachings of Christ, and the attempt to walk in his way, but about American Christianity as empty religiosity laying claim to an all-but-forgotten Christ who has — absolutely against his will and the life he lived — become just another icon of American mythology.

In what remains of the summer, which for me is that space of time between the ending of spring semester and the beginning of fall, I’m going to try and blog more often. Maybe come up with some regular types of posts–a version of throw-back Thursday or a Mondays with Merton or some such ideas as these.

I read a lot, so I think I might try to come up with some posts focused on that reading. This is the first of those posts, not all of which will be as long as what follows.

My friend Vallory recently shared an article about Christian mission trips that included these words:

Why do we want to go on mission trips to Honduras or El Salvador and help those poor children but we don’t want to let those same children fleeing for their lives come into our country?

Here’s my answer: letting them come in, live near us, become citizens, and share in our resources requires more than a narrow, circumscribed version of acting good. We feel great about ourselves when we send out Samaritan’s Purse boxes. We helped feed hungry kids! But what happens when the hungry kids come to us? What happens when they have no way to support themselves but their parents have chosen to flee here so that they don’t starve or get murdered? A box isn’t going to do it.

Why So Many Christians Want to Go On Mission Trips to Help Kids But Don’t Want Them Here

We should, indeed, “feel great about ourselves when we send out Samaritan’s Purse boxes” (apart from the fact that the organization is connected to Franklin Graham, in whom his fathers — earthly and heavenly — would, in my opinion, would be sorely disappointed). But it can’t stop there. Jesus didn’t say, “Hey, John, give this box of healing to that woman over there, who can take it to that other guy around the corner, who might not mind getting it to the leper colony.” Jesus went to the lepers himself. And, perhaps, more importantly, he welcomed the lepers to come to him.

Vallory also shared a post from John Pavlovitz and his blog, Stuff That Needs to Be Said. Here’s my favorite excerpt:

No, Donald Trump wasn’t anointed by God.
He isn’t an instrument of Divine will.
He isn’t Biblically hastening Armageddon or Jesus’ return.

He’s just a hateful, indecent, predatory fraud who is destroying the environment, stripping people of their human rights, and making America a global laughing-stock.

His ascension is not prophetic but pathetic, the result of:

Russian interference,
fake news,
gerrymandering,
voter suppression,
Hillary hatred,
Obama resentment,
Fox News brainwashing,
Democratic stumbles,
the votes of bigoted Evangelicals, whites terrified of losing market share, and third-party voters—and the inaction of 100 million Americans who couldn’t be bothered to participate in one of the greatest responsibilities of living here.

That’s it.

No Providence.
No Divine messages.
No Biblical prophecies.
No spiritual movements.

Just ordinary human beings who chose really, really poorly when they should have known better.

Pavlovitz, John, “God Has Nothing to Do with Trump Being President,” John Pavlovitz: Stuff That Needs to Be Said. Accessed 13 June 2019.

One thing that has become continually clearer to me over my years of reading and teaching American literature from early indigenous materials to Columbus, from John Winthrop to Emily Dickinson, is that “America” is in a perpetual state of decay. (I’ll write more on this later, as it’s something I’ve been tracking through the literature.) And the struggles the USA faces today are in one sense or another the same struggles the country has faced since its inception.

I’ll provide a handful of quotations below from thinkers and writers whose work sees behind the curtain of American mythology. First, Trappist monk Thomas Merton gives his take on what lies beneath the nation’s pimpled skin:

. . . I have undergone my dose of exposure to American society in the ’60s. . . . I love the people I run into, but I pity them for having to live as they do, and I think the world of U.S.A. in 1967 is a world of crass, blind, overstimulated, phony, lying stupidity. . . . The temper of the country is one of blindness, fat, self-satisfied, ruthless, mindless corruption. A lot of people are uneasy about it but helpless to do anything against it. The rest are perfectly content with the rat race as it is, and with its competitive, acquisitive, hurtling, souped-up drive into nowhere. A massively aimless, baseless, shrewd cockiness that simply exalts itself without purpose. The mindless orgasm, in which there is no satisfaction, only spasm.

Merton, Thomas, “May 28: On America in the Sixties,” A Year with Thomas Merton: Daily Meditations from His Journals. (Merton wrote this on 27 May 1967.)

So writes Merton in 1967, but this shade of the American character is, in part, the reeking residue of the rotten practice of slavery. Here’s Frederick Douglass, a self-freed man, speaking on 5 July 1852 to a mixed-race group continuing their Independence Day celebration in Rochester, New York. The feelings of whites hearing this can easily be imagined, but I wonder about the freed or self-freed or free-born blacks, particularly those who were — perhaps mindlessly — caught up in the celebration. Douglass’s final paragraph should knock all of us to our knees and bears quoting in its entirety:

What to the American slave is your Fourth of July? I answer, a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless: your denunciations of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgiving, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy–a thin veil to cover up crimes that would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States at this very hour.

Douglass, Frederick, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”

“But slavery is over,” we might argue, and we would be technically correct. The racism, prejudice, and greed that supported the institution, however, remain with us. I know a white Christian woman who recently pointed to a magazine focused on a black audience and asked, “Why do they have to have their own magazine?” “Why not?” I’m sorry to admit I was unable to ask. How long has the black community in the USA had a public voice in comparison to the white community?

Similarly, John Stonestreet, president of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview, recently said this on The World and Everything in It:

If there’s a group right now whose expansion of rights—even beyond rights into privileges—is most evident, it’s the LGBT community. There’s not a systemic set of persecutions or dehumanizations against this group of people. It’s remarkable, in fact, whatever essentially it seems they want to claim, they can have.

“Culture Friday: Unalienable Rights and Stranger Things,” The World and Everything in It, 12 July 2019.

Likewise, how long has this group had any access to rights and privileges? If LGBTQ folks are excited and emboldened by the recent level acceptance in the public sphere, then where’s the blame? I’m sure Protestants did the same in the wake of the Reformation. I’m sure white American males did the same in the wake of the Revolution. The mistake — if I may be so bold as to describe it thus — this Christian woman and man make in their comments regarding race and gender is to be blinded by labels to the humanity behind the labels. To paraphrase Thoreau from “Resistance to Civil Government,” we should be humans first, and only afterward, if absolutely necessary, citizens of this country or that / adherents of this religion or that or none / members of this political party or that or none / persons of one race or ethnicity or age or gender or sexual preference or economic bracket, etc.

Our endless pitting of “us” against “them” — however “us” and “them” are defined — demands labels to identify the sides. But identity labels limit and undermine humanity; that is, labels are dehumanizing. Again, however, our politics and economics and religion work only in the context of labeling, which, I believe, works only in the context of dehumanization.

I’ll end this rant with a couple of quotations from Margaret Fuller’s 1845 essay, “Fourth of July”:

Much has been achieved since the first Declaration of Independence. America is rich and strong; she has shown great talent and energy; vast prospects of aggrandizement open before her. But the noble sentiment which she expressed in her early youth is tarnished; she has shown that righteousness is not her chief desire, and her name is no longer a watch-word for the highest hopes to the rest of the world. She knows this, but takes it very easily; she feels she is growing richer and more powerful, and that seems to suffice her.

Near the close of her essay, Fuller tries to imagine the individual — in the gendered language of her time — who would serve as a savior from all of this lecherous seeking and grabbing and hoarding that is such a big part of American life these days:

We know not where to look for an example of all or many of the virtues we would seek from the man who is to begin the new dynasty that is needed of Fathers of the Country. The Country needs to be born again; she is polluted with the lust of power, the lust of gain. She needs Fathers good enough to be God-fathers–men who will stand sponsors at the baptism with all they possess, with all the goodness they can cherish, and all the wisdom they can win, to lead this child the way she should go, and never one step in another.

Well, for one thing, I aged ten years in the spaces between and on either end of those dots. In 1979, I turned 21; in 2019, I’ll turn 61. Forty years of good life in those spaces, with very little to complain about–personally speaking, of course.

I’ve thought a lot about 1979 lately, the summer of that year especially. In the spring, I was a music major at Mars Hill College, and I’d just qualified to enter the performance track. So, the fall semester would be a lot to look forward to. And it would be a lot of work. I’m not sure exactly when I realized that I didn’t have the dexterity to be a great flute player, but in the compressed timetable of memory, the realization probably came close behind the success of making the cut for a focus on performance.

Meanwhile, back at the homeplace in Walnut, my folks sold my uncle some pastureland. I’m not sure how much they received for it, but I know they set aside $5,000 to divide between my brother and me. He took his and used it to set himself up with a place to live when he graduated from NC State. I decided that I wanted to take mine early, like the proverbial Prodigal Son, and go to Europe, so I signed up for a MHC study-abroad summer program that would have me studying somewhere in England for six weeks or so, after which I would have another two weeks to travel some on my own.

But sometime in the middle of that spring semester, somebody from Brevard College came through putting up posters for tours conducted by a company called American-European Student Union, Inc. (AESU). Their tours were just short of eight weeks long promised to take me to seventeen countries. No study, just travel.

“That’s what I want to do,” I said. And that’s what I did.

I left home in the middle of June and joined AESU 616 (so named because our tour began on June 16) in London, England. Between then and the first days in August, we traveled on a Mercedes bus–some forty-eight college students, an Austrian tour guide not much older than we were, and an Italian bus driver.

This summer of 2019, about a dozen from the ’79 tour celebrated our 40th year of friendship in Sicily, about which I will have more to say in the next few weeks — and more to show with lovely pictures. I’ve long thought that the trip — with the reunion added — would make a good novel, so I’m some forty-five pages into such a beast. More on that later as well.

For now, I’m just going to point out that the summer of 1979 was when President Jimmy Carter recognized a “crisis of confidence” in the American people and described two possible paths for America. One was “the path of common purpose and the restoration of American values. That path leads to true freedom for our nation and ourselves.” I feel certain that he wholeheartedly believed that we Americans would rise to the occasion, as we had done so often in the nation’s history.

But we didn’t. We disappointed President Carter and ourselves by taking the other path, which, in a speech given on 15 July 1979, he described this way:

One is a path . . . leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.

“A Crisis of Confidence”

Doesn’t that description seem unfortunately like the behavior that has brought us to July 2019 after culminating in results of the 2016 presidential election? (If interested, see Susan Delacourt’s “How Jimmy Carter Predicted Donald Trump — in 1979”).

The long downward slide from 1979 to 2019 began with Carter’s defeat and the election of a B-movie actor, then hit what I hope is rock bottom with the election of an ignorant and arrogant reality TV star and 3rd-rate stand-up-comedian wannabe. Compare, if you dare, President Carter’s speech referenced above to Trump’s attempt to commemorate Independence Day on 4 July 2019:

The Continental Army suffered a bitter winter of Valley Forge, found glory across the waters of the Delaware and seized victory from Cornwallis at Yorktown. Our Army manned the air, it rammed the ramparts, it took over airports, it did everything it had to do and at Ft. McHenry under the rocket’s red glare had nothing but victory. When dawn came, the star-spangled banner waved defiant.

Check out the cogent analysis of how the above might have come about.

I will now close my eyes and think of Sicily.