Respect
A friend of mine somehow overlooked and never celebrated her son’s second birthday. It’s become a running family joke, probably because he recalls it and reminds her every year when his birthdays come around. But the older he gets, the better he likes it. He can claim to be a year younger than he actually is.
The church is long on anniversaries as special ways of remembering and has liturgies to celebrate and “keep” them. We call the one-time kind — baptism, confirmation, marriage, ordination, death — “crisis” liturgies, the repeating kind — birthdays, holidays — “cyclic.”
Independence Day is cyclic. So much so, that we tend to relish more the music, the celebration, the fireworks, the red, white, and bluishness of it all, than the meaning, the purpose. In this last decade of so many unilateral international policies, the language of the Declaration is even more worth our careful appreciation of our founders’ intentions as to what a new nation is about. It is well worth listening to National Public Radio as there is read the Declaration in their broadcast the morning of July 4th when all their staff with those familiar voices turn us through the great phrases. It can be a joyful and renewing reminder, as well, for a family to take time in their celebration to read together this short document, taking turns, paragraph by paragraph.
It begins… “When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”
In that preamble alone, there resides at the core of our national history our declared membership “among the powers of the earth,” our belief in Nature’s God, and our “decent respect to the opinions of mankind… ” We dare not allow ourselves or our leaders ever to forget this. Let us keep this anniversary and this celebration to remind us again and again of such stewardship.