Dear Family,
The font for 'Independence Day' above is my attempt at giving you some little fireworks. The question is will the font make it through the various edits we need to get the bulletin done. Another mystery a lot like life!
I'm writing earlier than usual because I have another round in the hospital on the days I would normally be 'Twitching'. The people at Holy Cross are all great but the continuing saga of soggy lungs is so old it's got a beard.
So as I am thinking about 'Independence,' I realize the word can mean a whole lot of things depending on your situation, virtue and vice, both.
I'd like to be independent of drainage tubes. Yesterday, (June 23) the people of Great Britain narrowly voted themselves out of the European Union. Virtue or vice? I guess time will tell. My point is that when you look at so much of what happens in our society there seems - at least to me to be a tendency to want to separate and isolate. It's more than a simple desire for privacy which is important to all of us.
Often I think the desire to 'step apart' is a form of fearing the unknown. I find politicians appealing to that fear by various means. They think that the more they can make someone feel like a beleaguered "us", the easier it is to have a "them" to fear/shun/disrespect, etc. I don't want to get into a political discussion here. I'm simply wondering how the gospel gets lived in community when there seems to be so much that eschews community. I checked the Thesaurus for eschew: "avoids, shuns, abjures, disdains, have nothing to do with, give a wide berth to," and on and on.
Think of all those words and then think of Jesus trying to call people into one body, His Body. “Where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am in the midst." (Mt 18:20) "I gave them the same glory you gave me, so that they may be one, just as you and I are one." (Jn 17:22) "My commandment is this: love one another, just as I love you." (Jn 15:12) How many more do you need?
I think I may have written about this before, if not at St Sebaatian, then in a Midnight Musing at St. Louis. (You'll note that as I aged and moved north, midnights became twilights.)
One of the happiest memories of the Fourth of July that I have is in 1974 sitting on a small blanket on the Washington Mall with a small intimate group of 100,000+ people. We were there for the fireworks. There was also a kind of fair around the perimeter of the Mall where people were looking at things from other peoples' cultures and the like.
There is something about a colletive "ooohh" and an animated "aaaaahhhh" flowing out of the excitement of 100,000 folks. I certainly didn't become bosom buddies with any of those them but I sure appreciated them at the time. I even remember thinking, isn't it great that all of us are here despite the riots that hit D.C. and many other cities not so long before.
That's independence. I like to think of Franklin Roosevelts "Four Freedoms", the freedom of speech, the freedom of religion, the freedom from want, the freedom from fear. They are core values. Why? Because all of the 'freedoms' involve other people. None of them are lived in isolation.
To celebrate the Fourth of July is to be grateful to the Lord for a place where I have the freedoms that let me be His follower with you.
Let's light some fireworks!
In Jesus,
