Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Emma Lazarus (1883), The New Colossus

h/t: Fr Peter-Michael Preble

To be sure because we live in a fallen world and because we are part of a sinful humanity, we will always fall short not only of the glory of God as the Apostle says (see Romans 3:23) but even of those ideals which we call our own.

And to this we must add the constant temptation to twist our ideals–and God’s glory–to our own selfish ends. And if this is true for the whole human family how can it be any less true for the American People?

As a People and as a Nation it is good to remember on Independence Day that we are bound not by blood or soil but by the ideals reflected in Emma Lazarus’s poem The New Colossus. The aspirations it extols are noble ones and seen from a certain angle they are deeply consonant with the celebration of the Eucharist.

It is in the Eucharist that common things are made sublime and the merely created comes to burn and shine with the Divine fire. Likewise America strives to ennoble the common man, to allow his dignity to shine through but without that “storied pomp” that so easily distracts us from our shared dignity as creatures created in God’s image and called to live in His likeness.

But it is precisely here, in America’s close parallel to humanity’s Eucharistic potential that we see not only what is most noble in America but also the source of our greatest temptations. No matter how closely the American ideal comes to the Eucharist, it is only through the latter that “the many” can hope to become, as the American motto (E pluribus unum) has it, “one.” In this life it is only in the Eucharist that many become one and do so in such a manner that the dignity and uniqueness of each person is able to shine forth in harmony with the common good.

But even in the Eucharist this harmony of person and community is fleeting. Not because of any lack in the Eucharist. Rather it is because just as the American ideal points beyond itself and is only fulfilled in this life in the Eucharist, so too our celebration of the Eucharist points beyond itself and is fulfilled only in the Kingdom of God.

The relationship here is like what we see in Hebrews. America, the Eucharist and the Kingdom are in turn the shadow, the image and the reality (see Hebrew 10:1). America’s political genius is our willing embrace to be governed humbly. We purposefully established a limited government to safe guard the rights of a people who understand that the good things we embrace and the life we seek to foster is only a relative good.

The goodness of America and the American People is (as our critics will often remind us in a disparaging and condescending tone) a derivative good. We are only good by participation not nature.

And our temptation?

On the one hand, it is the common temptation of all humanity, of each nation and every person. To forget that to the degree that we are good at all, we are si because of God’s benevolence not our own efforts. The goodness of America and the American People that Lazarus lauds in her poem are the fruit of our personal and shared obedience to the law of nature and nature’s God.

And so, on the other hand, we find ourselves always tempted to forget that though our ideals are not uniquely ours but common to all humanity.  And these ideals can’t be imposed without thereby violating them. While evil can be limited by force, goodness can only be embraced freely, without coercion.

So happy Fourth of July America!

But never forget that what we have we have as a gift from a loving God. We are merely the stewards of this gift, not its master much less its source.  We can’t be ourselves if we forget that this gift, like all God’s gifts, comes with the heavy responsibility of obedience–personal and national–to God’s will.

At its best our polity points beyond itself, in this life, to the Eucharist and, in the Eucharist, to that Kingdom which is to come.

And at its, or rather, our worst?

Well, we are at our lowest when we think highly of ourselves. We are never so bad at being Americans as when we fail to remember that we are at best only “an almost chosen people” whose best belongs not to us but to God.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory