'In Liberating Strife'

America has been much on my mind these summer days. Barraged by media events--all the way from "America's Got Talent" through the release yesterday of of two American hostages from North Korea to what seems more and more like an unending war in the Middle East--there seems nowhere to hide from competition and human strife.

Perhaps our greatest temptation in the events that thus engage us as a nation--personally and socially--is simply to wish they were not so, to hide ourselves as it were from the competition and strife they represent, thinking somehow they have little to do with us. But in reality there is no hiding. "No man is an island, entire of itself," as the poet once put it. We are all as human beings both involved in and part of the human struggle all over this world for freedom and meaning and hope.

Somehow or other, I don't know why, I woke early this morning with "America the Beautiful" on my mind. Just phrases at first, like "liberating strife," sent me to seek out the whole of it (The Covenant Hymnal: A Worshipbook, No. 737). And in the seeking I found comfort in the perspectives it offers--not only of "spacious skies and amber waves of grain," and "purple mountain majesties above the fruited plain," but also in "heroes proved in liberating strife," and "patriot dream that sees beyond the years."

Only the God who created us all can renew in us that ability to see beyond our years the meaning of it all. And surely, once seeing, we must come time and again to understand, as Abraham Lincoln so beautifully put it, that "we cannot escape history." Our role, rather, especially as those who believe and live in him, must be to learn that the life we so much seek requires our full participation in the struggles of our time and place. Only then will we experience for ourselves and leave behind for others the sense of liberation our forebears endowed to us.