Sound of Silence
A friend of mine stopped wearing her wristwatch in an effort to force herself to ask others for the time and as a reminder to cool it on her increasingly brash independent behavior.
Those who declared our independence a couple of hundred years ago probably didn’t wear wristwatches. Maybe that’s why their Declaration submitted their arguments to a candid world and to God. They didn’t seem so much to want affirmation where they felt uncertainty, but to want to witness to the inseparably relational nature of human being. Ironically, their conviction that we are actually interdependent was the sound of silence in their great document.
For a recent while, we lost sight of the considerable courage of our founders and replaced it with bravado. Their political experiment was the total opposite of unilateralism and, instead, proved to be the very gift to humankind we’ve so pitifully claimed to offer by saying “my way or the highway.” Thanks be to God, it doesn’t quite seem to be that way anymore.
Maybe this Day of remembering, we might leave our watches at home and remember how our founders even inspired the French to join us two centuries ago.