True Patriotism: More Than a President or Politics or Flag

"The only title in our democracy superior to that of President is the title of citizen."

--Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis

I don’t usually think of myself as very patriotic. Sure: I fly an American flag outside my house. I stand up and take off my hat at a baseball game and sing the national anthem when the chords of that ancient song are played. I choke up when watching an old World War II movie, as the actors make a gallant and courageous stand, and the corny music swells and I get all teary. I vote whenever I can, hope my fellow citizens do as well.

But I think it’s rare to witness a deeper patriotic moment and remember how precious the title of American citizen really is. How blessed I am to have the rights and the responsibilities that accompany citizenship. How grateful I am to call America home, even as I’m frustrated at how we sometimes fail to live up to the ideals that are supposed to embody our place in the world. 

Values: like justice, fairness, and freedom. Defending the powerless. Opening our arms to those who flee persecution and poverty. Liberty and justice for all, everyone, no one left out.

So, it surprised me on a recent summer night at how moved I was to watch a group of twenty immigrants take the oath of American citizenship. It happened, of all places, on a baseball field, on a warm and humid August night, between innings at a minor league game in Dayton, Ohio. The Dayton Dragons are celebrating their twentieth anniversary this summer and to mark that birthday they treated me and 7,909 other fans to an unexpected lesson in patriotism.

Assembled by the third base line was a group of twenty people: men and women, of many colors and backgrounds, from many countries, all so excited to be taking this profound step. In the front row, two women wore hijabs, traditional dress for some observant Muslims. One woman enthusiastically waved an American flag. In the back row, a tall man wore a jaunty black hat and had a smile a mile wide. Before them stood a federal judge, incongruous in his formal black robes. And then the crowd: we all stood up and the stadium grew quiet and those soon to be citizens raised their rights hands, and said in unison….

"I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic….”

What struck me as the most powerful promise in that short oath, was that each person was asked to respect, honor and defend the United States Constitution, the circa 1789 collection of ultimate laws that bind us all together as Americans. Those new citizens were not asked to honor a person or a political party or the President or the Congress or any other government official. They were not required to be liberal or conservative, to say they’d live in just a red state or a blue state in the future. 

There was no religious test in the oath, no requirement that if you come to the United States and seek to call it home you have to be a Christian or a Jew or a Muslim, or claim no faith. That oath didn’t ask if they’d come here to flee political persecution or crime or poverty or to go to college or to start a business or to just be free.

All the oath required was that they each agree to live by the democratic norms and hopes spelled out in the 230-year old document that binds us as a nation; and that they will always defend the laws contained within it, the Constitution, even with their lives, if necessary.

To see these men and women freely make those promises: for me, that embodied true patriotism. 

Patriotism in action, patriotism as love of country, of democracy, of the rule of law. And not because some particular person occupies the Oval Office. Presidents come and go, to be judged by history and the goodness of the country that they leave behind, or not. Patriotism: not partisanship, not everyone for themselves but instead, E Pluribus Unum, from many, one.

Patriotism: not the posing kind, the mere sporting of a cheap metal flag pin on a lapel, or preening before a bank of American flags at a press conference, as if these actions alone makes one a patriot. 

No. Real patriotism always runs deep, in in the living, in the doing. Patriotism sees one’s political opponent, not as an enemy of the people, but instead the loyal opposition, Patriotism is generous, invites people from around the world to join the United States, to bring with them their cultures, adding to the rich tapestry of the American experiment. Patriotism is found in actual service to fellow citizens: in the armed forces, in volunteerism, in caring for your neighbor.

When’s the last time you really appreciated your life as a citizen and could you or I live up to the oath of citizenship? Patriotic questions--we all should ask and we all should answer.

For the Love Of...Love What You Do. Do What You Love

“You see, you spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball, and in the end, it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.”  

 --baseball pitcher Billy Chapel, from the film “For the Love of the Game”

$1,100 per month, and that’s just when they play.

That’s the minimum pay level guaranteed in a standard minor league baseball player contract and since most player’s seasons are at best four months long, well…there’s not a lot of money to be made if you are a player on one of the more than 200 teams in the United States. A minor league player’s dream, of course, is to make it to the big leagues, to play for a major league team, like the Boston Red Sox, to make it to the show, in the parlance of the game. If you do get to play at the Triple A level, the last rung up the ladder before the majors, you can make a minimum of about $40,000 per year.

Which still isn’t a lot of money. Which begs the question: then why do they play?

Why do they grind it out day after day after day? Up early for extra batting practice, then a three-hour game, then load up your stuff on the bus, no first-class seats here. Then a long trip at dawn the next morning after sleeping in a Motel 6 or a Red Roof Inn. Hundreds of miles to go before the next game in Reading, Pennsylvania or Bridgeport, Connecticut or Toledo, Ohio. Not very glamorous. Not a lot of press in the locker room. So much time away from loved ones. And always work, so much hard work: thousands of swings of the bat and tosses of the ball, and all for a dream that probably won’t come true.

And yet they still play.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, as I’m in the midst of a 12-day, five-game, 14-state 2,117-mile baseball road trip that is taking me from Boston to Aberdeen, Maryland, to Hickory, North Carolina, to Dayton, Ohio, to Akron, Ohio, to Binghamton, New York and then back home.  To watch teams with names like the Iron Birds and the Crawdads and the Dragons and the Rubber Ducks and the Rumble Ponies, and that’s after also taking in, earlier this summer, games featuring the Pawtucket, Rhode Island Red Sox and the Saint Paul Saints too.

Yes, I’m a baseball geek. I love the game. But there is even more joy to be had, beyond the fun of seeing these young men compete. Beyond exploring these often forgotten and overlooked American cities, many hardscrabble and struggling to survive. Beyond eating a boatload of hot dogs and drinking a river of diet Coke. 

For me there is something poetic and beautiful and right about seeing human beings do something for the sheer love of it. Because to be a minor league player: you just have to have a fire in your belly, a desire in your heart, a motivation--beyond dollars and cents--to do what they do. To play.

For the love of the game.

I see that passion in the players I watch on late Sunday afternoons, in games played on a muggy and hot diamond, and on cool July nights with the sliver of an orange moon hanging in the sky, and on late summer’s evenings as the promise of the season begins to fade, to give way to the inevitably of the autumn.

And still they play because they love what they do. They play for the love of the game.

All of us should have such a love in our lives. To do something because we have to do it, we so want to do it, for in doing this one thing, we just feel more alive. We somehow know that we have been made by our Creator to do it.  We embrace this vocation or hobby or pastime or sport because it feels as if it is in our very bones. 

For the love of…and so when we swing a bat or write an essay or sing a song or parent a child or grow a flower or hike a trail or do whatever we have to do: our souls soar.  It feels like some kind of prayer in the doing, the playing, the creating, the living.

So, I send greetings from the ballparks of America, from so many playing fields, where adults get to play a child’s game and in doing so, they still love what they do. They love the game.

And you? What do you love to do? May you seek it. Find it. Practice it. Enjoy it. Play it. Share it. Love it. Just love it.

Me? I’m on to the next game.

 

  

The Gun of Hate. The Heart of Love. What Will It Be America?

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre; The Falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”

--W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”

The worst part, perhaps, is our collective inability to do something, to do anything. 

About El Paso. About Dayton.  I don’t even have to name what has brought infamy and pain to these two American cities.  We know the all too familiar story by now. It was guns. It was hate. It was death. It was awful, that awfulness magnified and multiplied now in the days afterwards, when once again, chances are very good that in spite of everyone who died and was injured, the trauma that will linger, the hearts broken wide open….

Nothing will change.

Oh yes…the politicians will cry out for change. For new laws or no laws or a curtailment of gun rights or a defense of gun rights or increased mental health vigilance. The story of mass violence will be beaten to death by the press, by our 24-hour non-stop media machine that in a weird way lives for such events. It buries America under millions of words and thousands of images and then lines up pundits and so-called “experts” to tell us what to think and what to do. 

Candidates for office and office holders have already pounced on the news to assign blame. Too many guns. Too much hateful rhetoric by the President. Too many mentally ill people with access to guns but little or no access to decent and affordable mental health care.  Too many spiritual platitudes about thoughts and prayers. Too much hate speech and hate communities living in the dark corners of the internet, festering in that cyber secret world, where the cranks and the white supremacists and the aggrieved nurse their hatred to the point of murder, mass murder. 

What we don’t talk about, what we won’t talk about is the deeper truth that America is in spiritual crisis. We are a country coming apart at the seams, maybe even on the brink of anarchy. This crisis is not just about our leaders. Not just about gun control or the second amendment. Not just about those we elect to office, who collectively are unwilling to set aside love of self and love of party to find common ground and actually govern, as we need them to.

This is about the larger question of just who we are: as a people, as a community, as children of God, we who share a common geographic home but seem unable to remember anymore what is supposed to bind us together as Americans. Our civic heritage is not supposed to be about violence or hatred or distrust of the other or might makes right or every person for themselves. That’s not the America I know and love. But that is the America too many of us now experience in 2019. America as a place where folks are scared and so we rightly wonder and worry just how it all might all end.

The spiritual writer leader Marianne Williamson is a candidate for president and many in the press and culture dismiss her as a crackpot, completely out of place on the stage with all those career politicians. But in the last debate she named what ails America. In her words, it is “...the dark underbelly of American society, the racism, the bigotry…this dark psychic force of the collectivized hatred…in this country.”

This past weekend I actually missed the news about Dayton and El Paso because I was with almost ten thousand people who were laser focused on just one goal: to make this world a more loving and merciful place. Folks like bicycle riders, and volunteers, and cancer survivors, and cheering neighbors and friends: we all worked together, and all to find a cure for cancer. To help the sick and the dying. To comfort the mourning. To stand for hope, together, as one community.

I’m not naive enough to believe that an event like the Pan Mass Challenge ride, which will raise more than $60 million for cancer care and research…that it alone can stem the rising tide of hate in America. Yet it still gives me hope, because it teaches me that the answer to America’s spiritual crisis and America’s spiritual poverty is finally love.

Love in action. Love for neighbor, all neighbors, not just the ones who are your mirror image. The answer to the dark forces at work in America are the values that make America, America. Freedom. Justice. Fair play. Compassion. Mercy for the hurting. Welcome to the stranger. Safety and security on our streets and in our homes and where we worship. 

And love. Always, always, love. And if we don’t love?

“The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere, The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst, Are full of passionate intensity.”  (W.B. Yeats)

We can love. We can hate. We can work each day to bring hope into the world. We can succumb to cynicism and lash out.  We can arm ourselves to the teeth.  We can arm ourselves with non-violence. 

The crisis is real. To love or to hate. What will it be America?