Mi dia de la indepencia

Normally, I am in an Episcopal church somewhere, praying the office, or, hopefully, communing.  It's important to me to observe the Fourth of July with both confession and thansgiving.

   This year, I walked about 12 kilometers over a mountain - mostly in a light drizzle.  I had a most wonderful piece of pan with pate, which reminded me of a 4th I celebrated nine years ago with a friend, Myra, under a bridge under cover from rain in a national park in North Carolina.  The rhododenrums and mountain laurel shed their petals in the rain that year, and made a blanket along the river, and a lovely stream of petals floating past us.  I am grateful for the freedoms this earth affords us, and that being a citizen in the US affords, though I lament the loss of our hope for righteousness.  While I am inspired by the reclaiming of hope Sen. Obama has sounded, I wonder if we are being attentive to hopefulness beyond ourselves, or whether we are merely hopeful in ourselves.  There is a difference.

   In the quiet, in the drizzle, mostly alone, walking against a the flow of occasional pilgrims, I realized something I was only able to put words to a couple of days later as I read in the devotion booklet, Forward Day-by-Day: that our freedom is bound up in community, not in isolation.  That is where our hopefulness has lost its vision in the US: it's righteousness - the vision of hope has turned to what Soelle calls death by bread alone.  Being alone.

   I think this was inspired by the collect for US dia de la indepencia: "grant that we and all the people of this land may have grace to maintain our liberties in righteousness and peace...."