For Wilshire Baptist Church
I’ve seen it several times now: A woman walking down the street stops in front of our house, turns toward our door, raises her hand, makes upward waving motions, then turns and continues down the sidewalk. It’s unusual and a little bit unsettling, and it has me thinking about who she is and who we are and who we all are together.
On the one hand, it looks like she’s offering us a blessing. If so, then I welcome it and wonder what I can do in return. Perhaps run out to her with a bottle of cold water next time? But then in the dark corners of my imagination, I wonder if she’s casting a spell or a curse. But I don’t believe in such things, so I’ll stick with the blessing.
The woman is of uncertain age and ethnicity. She struggles to walk but gets some help from a tall, twisted walking stick. She’s dressed sort of raggedy and layered, and she’s over-dressed for these hot days, although perhaps she’s protecting herself from the sun. Our doorbell camera caught her once walking across our porch and sitting on our wicker chair for a moment.
In addition to wondering if she’s offering us a blessing, I also wonder if she’s a little bit crazy, but then she wouldn’t be the only one. After all, we live in a crazy, mixed-up time here in the United States. People are clamoring at our border for our perceived national blessings of freedom and prosperity, and we don’t know what to do about it. We argue over how best to administer the blessings of education, health care, meaningful jobs and safe and affordable housing. Instead of sharing, we end up hoarding, or at least that’s how it feels sometimes. We want our leaders to fix it but they are stuck; they sit on two sides of a political fence that has become its own border wall.
We have bunting on our porch railing. It’s been there since Memorial Day and we keep it up through Flag Day and July Fourth. It’s not meant to signal affiliation with a political party or a particular leaning. It’s really just an old-fashioned, perhaps quaint and nostalgic expression of patriotism and belief in a common dream for prosperity and freedom that is only possible when people from different backgrounds work together toward the common good. It’s a belief in a “promised land” of justice and equality that Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of, and that we’ve been traveling toward for 248 years but we’re still not there.
But we still have the dream, and we’re still working toward it in our own clumsy, inconsistent, unbalanced way. Maybe the woman’s hand motion is a salute to the red, white and blue hanging from our railing and the dream it represents. Maybe she still believes in the blessing, or maybe she feels the curse of our cultural selfishness.
George Mason, our pastor emeritus at Wilshire Baptist Church and founder of Faith Commons, said in a recent video, “Patriotism is love of country. Nationalism is hatred of ‘the other.’” I’d take it a step further and say country is not just geography; it’s the people inhabiting the land. Until we learn how to love the people, the country will continue to be a crazy mess.