Fr Mark Schultz
Dear Friend,
Today is Independence Day!
As a way of approaching our readings appointed for today (particularly those for Evening Prayer)...I’m thinking of Simone Weil. “What’s new?” you might be asking yourself. Well, particularly today, I’m thinking of the distinction that Weil makes in Gravity and Grace and The Need for Roots between a nation/State and a country. The former, she believes, feeds off of, vitiates and always attempts to consume the latter in order to maintain itself. The State, for Weil, is always a (blood)thirsty idol. Country, however, is different. For Weil, country is a way of talking about a community connected in the present to both past and future; a means by which things of real beauty—ways of relating that express a specific facet of the wonder of what it means to be and express our humanity, the beauty of a language, the beauty of cultural and artistic expressions and practices—a means by which all of these things are preserved, traditioned, challenged, re-imagined and authentically re-expressed. “Charity,” she writes, “can and should love in every country all that is a condition of the spiritual development of individuals […]. But a nation as such cannot be the object of supernatural love. It has no soul. It is a Great Beast” (G&G, 169). While patriotism very often names the love of the glory (such as it is) of a nation (the love of the patria that Wilfred Owen famously decried in his poem “In Dulce et Decorum Est”), the love of a country is “a poignantly tender feeling for some beautiful, precious, fragile and perishable object” (NfR, 170). Moreover, this sort of compassion for country “can keep its eyes open on injustices, cruelties, mistakes, falsehoods, crimes and scandals contained in the country’s past, its present and in its ambitions in general, quite openly and fearlessly, and without being thereby diminished; the love being only rendered thereby more painful” (NfR, 171). We don't ignore the brokenness of the world in order to love it, but we allow that brokenness to move us to greater depths of compassion. For Weil, love of country is prophetic or it’s not love of country: it’s worship of the state.
With that in our thoughts, when we read today in John’s Revelation of the coming of the New Jerusalem we might be able to avoid some rather unfortunate thinking. Because it might be easy to think, given the day on which the reading is appointed, that the church understands the United States to be the New Jerusalem. But it doesn’t. The Book of Revelation is a searing indictment of the Roman state and of all states, including ours. When we read in Micah of the mountain of the Lord’s House to which the peoples of the world will stream, we can avoid thinking we’re meant to understand ourselves as this holy mountain. Because we’re not. The church is not engaging here in American exceptionalism or triumphalism. The church is making us aware of the divine standard of mercy, goodness, justice, and peace embodied in the Kingdom of God by which all nations will be judged and into which all countries will find themselves gathered, redeemed and fulfilled. The church is pointing out the pattern to which our civic and communal life ought to conform but which we too often attempt to withstand.
The church is moving us, in other words, to greater depths of compassion and a fuller expression of prophetic love.
Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+