"Reclaiming Patriotism"
Julie Madden, Roger Dick and Nancy Gormley
Sunday, July 2nd 2006

Julie: I came to America in 1914 by way of Philadelphia…that’s where I got off the boat. And then I came to Baltimore. It was the most beautiful place you’ve ever seen in your life. There were lights everywhere! You should have seen the lights they had! It was a holiday. I don’t remember which one, but there were lights everywhere! It was a celebration of lights! I thought they were for me. Sam was an American… Sam was an American….
---Sam…on the 4th of July, from the movie “Avalon”

Roger: ‘We have a fortress city,
the walls and ramparts provide safety.
Open the gates! Let the upright nation come in,
The nation that keeps faith!
This is the plan decreed: you will guarantee peace,
The peace entrusted to you.
Trust in Yahweh forever,
For Yahweh is a rock forever.
He has brought low the dwellers on the heights,
The lofty citadel;
He lays it low, brings it to the ground,
Flings it down in the dust.
It will be trodden under foot,
By the feet of the needy, the steps of the weak.’
--The Book of Isaiah

Nancy: 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-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
--- “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus

Roger: I have enjoyed my life, its disappointments outweighed by its pleasures. I have loved my country in a way that some people consider sentimental and out of style. I still do and I remain an optimist, with joy and without apology, about this country and about the American experiment in democracy.
--- Hubert Humphrey

Nancy: With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan--to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.
---Abraham Lincoln

Julie: Come. I will make the continent indissoluble;
I will make the most splendid race the sun ever yet shone upon;
I will make divine magnetic lands,
With the love of comrades,
With the love of life-long comrades.
Nancy: I will plant companionship thick as trees along all the rivers of America,
And along the shores of the great lakes, and all over the prairies;
I will make inseparable cities, with their arms about each other’s necks:
By the love of comrades,
By the manly love of comrades.
Roger: For you these, from me, O Democracy, to serve you, ma femme!
For you! For you, I am trilling these songs,
In the love of comrades,
In the high-towering love of comrades.
Julie: Democracy! Near at hand to you a throat is now inflating itself and joyfully singing.
-- Walt Whitman

Song: America the Beautiful verse and chorus

Julie: There is nothing unique about American nationalism. Unlike American nationalism, American patriotism is unique. The United States of America is “the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed…set forth…in the Declaration of Independence.” As summed up in the nation’s motto, E Pluribus Unum – “out of many, one” – this creed is universal, not parochial. It does not read “All Americans are created equal.” To the extent that the United States betrays its own ideals, American patriotism holds the nation under judgment. Patriotic fidelity to the nation’s creed remains challenging, but it invests the nation with spiritual purpose and a moral destiny. American nationalism betrays that destiny. What we need today are a few more patriots.
-- The Rev. Forrest Church

Nancy: War is assuredly the darkest abyss into which humanity can descend. Iraq is no exception. Our daunting task, as peace activists, is to continue our passionate call to stop the madness, to demand that foreign troops withdraw, to support a genuine Iraq-driven peacemaking process and to seek justice and reparations for all the Iraqi victims. There is another profound and urgent reason to end this war now, and that reason is to save us from destroying ourselves as a nation, to save us from becoming so utterly desensitized to violence and mass killing of the “other” that we fall ever deeper into the abyss. This war will destroy the warriors well before it destroys our alleged foes.
--- Kristina Gronquist

Julie: We won’t talk about losing. There is enough talk about losing. What has been done this summer cannot have been done in vain.

Roger: I did not say anything. I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them now for a long time, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and we had read them, on posters that were slapped up over other posters. There were many words that you could not stand to hear, and finally only the names of places had dignity. Beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates, abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene. I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.
---Ernest Hemingway, “A Farewell to Arms”

Julie: The war against Iraq is as disastrous as it is unnecessary; perhaps in terms of its wisdom, purpose and motives, the worst war in American history. Our military men and women were not called to defend America, but rather to attack Iraq. They were not called to die for America, but rather to kill for their country. What more unpatriotic thing could we have asked of our sons and daughters?”
---William Sloane Coffin

Nancy: Beloved, I am writing a new commandment to you, which holds true in Him and among you, for the darkness is passing away, and the true light is already shining. Whoever says he is in the light, yet hates his brother, is still in the darkness; he walks in darkness and does not know where he is going because the darkness has blinded his eyes. Beloved, let us love one another, because love is of God. If God so loved us, we also must love one another.
---The apostle Paul

Today we pray for the dreams of our country, that they may not be extinguished – Lord have mercy (Lord have mercy)

We pray in grief for suffering we have caused – Lord have mercy (Lord have mercy)

We pray for the courage to change from a path of violence and destruction to one that fosters true security and peace in the world – Christ have mercy (Christ have mercy)

Song: Blowin’ in the Wind

Julie: A human being is part of the whole called by us the universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.
---Albert Einstein

Roger: My path back to God has been decked with more roses than thorns. Working to weed out racism, militarism and sexism kept me dancing. I was constantly on the lookout for kindred spirits – dreamers and rebels scheming to humanize lofty institutions. Now toward evening, having conquered the universal wolf, the nobility of every person has come into my focus and affection. As a pilgrim on the planet earth, God has guided me constantly toward ways to grow in love.
---Harvey Egan

Julie: The Dalai Lama told President Clinton, in a private meeting at the White House in the early 1990s: ‘You are the most powerful man in the world. Every decision you make should be motivated by compassion.’ In reality, each of us is the most powerful person in our own world. We too would do well to follow this audacious advice.
--- Lama Surya Das

Roger: None of us will ever know what can happen when we, too, begin to live out the message of Jesus, when we’re willing to risk our careers, our good standing in the community, risk even going to jail in order to reject war and follow the way of Christ. But if enough of us begin to follow this way, surely there will come a profound change within our church, within our countries, ultimately within our world. We will reject the way of Empire and we will follow the prophetic way of Jesus, the way of love, the way of nonviolence, the only way to peace.
---Bishop Thomas Gumbleton

Nancy: History says, don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that a farther shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
And cures and healing wells.
---“Cure at Troy” by Seamus Heaney

Song: This Is My Song from Finlandia