A Patriot’s Prayer

Jason Schlude for the Avon Hills Salon

Dear gentlemen and gentlewomen of democracy, let us speak of centuries, a century of days and the centuries of years. We have been called, from on high, to freedom—the freedom to adopt a unified voice, with which to declare an end to diversity in America, an end to equity in America, an end to inclusion in America, and finally at long last, an end to justice in America. Liberated from creeds of self-criticism, we are free only to celebrate ourselves.

But let us ask: Is this truly the song of patriotism that we hold as our inheritance from mothers and fathers who have birthed and nourished humanity across the ages?

What of Mary Magdalene, who refused to abandon Jesus on the cross and at the tomb, publicly rejecting his condemnation by political authorities? Her loyalty was to the victim of injustice. Not only was Antigone brave at the grave. What of Jesus himself, who demanded all to exchange the mores of exclusion for the action of radical inclusion. His was a new kingdom founded on the inversion of hierarchy. Here the poor, the sick, foreigners—all—found a home.

Homer sung of Odysseus, his poem a testament to a husband and father’s commitment to the home. But it was also an accusation he had been gone too long, his delay a source of immense pain. Sappho, one of the greatest poets of ancient Greece, put women at the center of the cosmos, their beauty, joy, sorrow, and commitment to one another a challenge to the world of men and their uncompromising needs. Her imagination was the spouse of resistance.

In Athens, democracy’s birthplace, Thucydides knew history must harbor truth. He wrote of an Athenian ultimatum to an independent isle, Melos: join our confederacy—or else. The Melians appealed to morality, but the Athenians besieged Melos, murdered the men, enslaved the rest, and colonized the island. His contemporary Euripides even staged it. True to tragedy, he offered his audience a myth, Hecuba and Andromache and other Trojans who survived the destruction of Troy, only to sit in its smoking shadow awaiting assignments as slaves to one Greek “hero” or another. But all must have known they were contemplating the rape of the Melians. For the Athenians, art was confrontation and education.

Neither Socrates nor Perpetua budged for falsehood. The holy horsefly bit the ass of every Athenian he could. He pressed them in a sprint for wisdom, the winners taking an unusual prize: self-knowledge of ignorance and shortcoming. Perpetua was Christian, and her father knew the consequences. Begged to play pagan, Perpetua refused; she could be none other than she was—a voice for God, not propagandist for the emperor. Stubborn states executed both.

Jefferson inscribed all men are created equal—a bedrock principle for our country and its river of humanity. And yet the bloody fields of Gettysburg flowing into it compelled Lincoln to cry for a new birth of freedom nearly a century later. In one form or another, liberty is ever the anthem we sing to animate the American spirit, even when the oxygen is thin.

It can be hard to breathe—for some impossibly hard—on so high a hill.

King understood—all too well. Facing cynical calls for conformity and patience, he embraced constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Beset by bars in a Birmingham jail, he conversed with Christ, Socrates, Jefferson, and Lincoln. Scribbled in the free margins of a newspaper, he kindled a fire with their ideas and fed it with his own sacrifice. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere … the goal of America is freedom.

Let us pray loudly this patriot’s prayer.