Spiritual Common Sense

On this day in l945, Trinity, the first nuclear device, was detonated in the New Mexico desert 120 miles south of Santa Fe.  From a distance of 10,000 yards, scientists observed as a mushroom shaped cloud of searing light stretched 40,000 feet into the air, generating a destructive power equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT.

It was the beginning of the Atomic Age.

Science teaches us – and this test demonstrated – that matter can neither be created nor destroyed.  Something cannot become nothing.  “It’s all energy,” Einstein explained.

In accepting the Nobel Prize, Sir James Jean extended Einstein’s observation this way.  “The more we look at particles on the sub-atomic level,” he said, “the more we see processes and the less we see things.”

Until that time it was widely held that everything was finite, and that, as such, any one thing could be separated from every other thing.  The dismantling of this classical vision of separateness confirmed the understanding theologians had long held about the unity of life.

Every thing, every one is related.  We are bound together by love.

Love is the most powerful force on earth, the manifestation of God in you, and the center of your relationship with others.  It is how we participate with God in His purposes for mankind.

The power of the atom bomb pales by comparison.

The Declaration of Independence was adopted two days after the Second Continental Congress approved the legal separation of the Thirteen Colonies from Great Britain.  The document was intended to be a formal statement detailing the reasons for the separation but it did much more than that, laying the foundation for the government that would follow.

The preamble to the Declaration contains some of the most significant and memorable words in the English language:  We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. 

This one sentence changed the world.  It conveyed the promise of America, a commitment to a society with a people representational of all aspects of humanity liberated to find the fullest expression of their hopes and dreams.  It established America as an ideal to cherish and a dream to pursue.

The Declaration of Independence also foreshadowed the preamble to the Constitution of the United States with its proud declaration of power and claim of responsibility –  “We the people of the United States.”  We are the architects of our government, it says.  We will determine the nature of our society.  We – the people – are in control.  The world had never seen anything like it before.

The seeds planted in Philadelphia in l776 have spread across globe.  Some have fallen on fertile ground, where they were nurtured and warmly embraced.  Others have blossomed in barren and forbidding places, forcing their way up through concrete resistance and cracking walls of oppression – bringing down the Berlin wall, liberating Poland, and, most vividly and dramatically in our time, ending apartheid in South Africa.

You can hear the echo of the Declaration of Independence in Nelson Mandela’s 1994 inaugural address.  “We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous?” he said, quoting Marianne Williamson.  “Actually, who are you not to be?  You are a child of God…We are born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us.  It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone.”

You can see it in the precedent Mandela set by following in Washington’s footsteps, walking away when he could easily have been President for life, choosing principle over power.  You see it again in his generosity of spirit, the way he replaced separation with inclusion, racial hate with color blind kindness, antagonism and division with understanding and reconciliation.  Proof yet again that big things from small seeds grow.

The day after formal vote for separation and the day before the Declaration of Independence was adopted, John Adams wrote his wife.  He said, “It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty and solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more.”

It has and it should – forever more.  Happy Independence Day!

There is a question in every problem we perceive.  For Billy Shore, it was embedded in a news report of a famine in a distant land.  The headline said: “200,000 to Die this Summer in Ethiopia.”

“The calamity had not yet struck; the experts could see it coming, but they could also see that nothing was going to be done to stop it,” Billy recalls. “To me, the newspaper story read like an invitation to act.”

Almost immediately, Billy’s impulse blossomed into a charity known as Share Our Strength.  Since it was created in the Fall of l984, Share Our Strength has raised more than $376 million to fight hunger.  Recently, Share Our Strength launched “The No Kid Hungry” campaign – an ambitious effort to end childhood hunger in America that has already helped bring more than 34 million additional meals to kids who need them.

“It takes more than food to end hunger,” Billy says.  “Without a doubt our greatest challenge is to make people care about alleviating the effects of poverty, to make them want to do something about it in the first place, and to make them feel that they can.”

Most of us, I suspect, can relate to Billy’s story.  How often, as we listen to the evening news or talk to friends, do we discover something that troubles our souls and offends our sense of justice?

Against our will and almost without thought, we are tempted to ask how God could let this happen.  We are like the mystic who, deep in prayer, considered the poor, the hungry and homeless, and cried out, “Oh Lord, I know you are a loving God but how can you permit these evils to exist and do nothing to help these suffering people?”  In the silence of the heart came the answer.  “I have done something about them.  I made you.”

The most persistent question in life is – “What are you going to do about it?  Like Billy Shore, we must find the courage to listen to our goodness and act on it.

I distinctly remember the moment I looked down and saw my father’s hand coming out of my sleeve.  Until then, I had always thought I was my Mother’s son.   Since then, I have found myself thinking I am becoming more and more like my Dad every day.

Is it the age, I wonder – me catching up on the staggered track of life – or does it have more to do with the fact that I am now a Father myself?  More and more I find myself saying the things he used to say, doing the things he used to do, and marveling at how much smarter he seems now than he was then.

My father was a strong man, dynamic, and dramatic.  A man of firm conviction, he expressed his opinions frequently and forcefully.  For him, everything was monochromatic, black or white, right or wrong.  There were no shades of grey or extenuating circumstances.

He walked into harm’s way daily for 20 years to put food on our table and seemed fearless until the day I came home with 7 stitches in my lip and blood covering my shirt.  Before I could tell him what happened, he erupted like a volcano.

I remember the moment clearly because it was one of those ‘aha’ moments.  My first reaction was – “Why is he yelling at me now?”  It seemed he was always yelling at me.  Then I realized he wasn’t yelling at me.  He was yelling for me.  He was yelling because he was afraid – not for himself, but for his son.

More than anything my Dad wanted me to get an education.  At first I thought it was because this was something he had been denied.  Now I know it had more to do with a Father’s desire to see a son reach his highest possibilities.  My son taught me that lesson.

Memorial Day was created to commemorate the men and women who died serving our country.  The numbers are sobering:  Eight thousand soldiers died in combat during the Revolutionary War; 53,402 died during World War I; 291,557 in World War II; 33,746 in Korea; and 47,355 in Vietnam – just to name the wars everyone remembers.  So far, we have lost 3,352 men and women in combat in Iraq and 2,227 in Afghanistan.

While we honor their memories, in truth there is little we can say about them that matters – no amount of speeches, flowers, or parades can honor them as they deserve to be honored.  The only way to do that is to live the values they died for.

In this context and at this time, when we mourn the loss of some of our best and brightest and celebrate their sacrifice, it is worth remembering the values they sanctified with their lives, why our nation is unique in the history of the world, and – from the perspective of a veteran of the Vietnam War – what makes this country worth fighting for.

To oldest and probably best answer came from Alexis de Tocqueville.  In 1831 in his book Democracy in America, De Tocqueville concluded spirituality and the desire for religious freedom was the “point of departure” for the entire American experience.  He said, “It must never be forgotten that religion gave birth to Anglo-American society.”

While it has become less fashionable to talk about the role of religion in public life, its influence is constant and undeniable.  Our Founding Fathers were deeply religious.  The values they used to shape our society were founded on religious principles and, in particular, the Christian way of life.

Religion is of such importance in our lives that John Adams, our second President, concluded:  “Our constitution was designed only for a moral and religious people.  It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.”

To de Tocqueville this relationship was as much practical as it was spiritual. He saw the faith of our fathers and the institutionalization of their beliefs in our democracy as part of the genius of America.  “The Americans are fond of explaining almost all the actions of their lives by the principle of interest rightly understood,” he explained. “They show with complacency how an enlightened regard for themselves constantly prompts them to assist each other.”

The essence of America rests here – in the difference between saying, ‘I am my brother’s keeper’ and ‘I am my brother.’  It is the embodiment and actualization of the Golden Rule.  In America when we are at our best, there is no “us” and “them.”  There is only US.