What about an Inter-dependence Day?
A proposal and some thoughts.
Dear fellow traveler,
What a week it was. At least half the US seems to be in a panic. Is there anything left to say? Well, I am just a guest, not a voter in this country. I am neither blue nor red, but more a healthy purple. But I know that panic is never a good counsel. I have not spoken out politically here, but I feel it might be time simply to share some notes as a bystander based on my own experience having grown up behind the Iron Curtain. So I beg your patience and mercy as I try to speak from my heart to yours.
Below my stumbling words you will find a brief reflection from the archives that Chuck has rewritten for today pondering the idea of independence and proposing a new twist to it. So please feel free to just scroll right there and to skip my stumbling into politics!
But first, my humble take on the American dilemma of having to choose the nation’s future between two old and apparently quite flawed men. I grew up in the East German dictatorship. I think proposing to be a dictator even for a day is not a good idea. Or even a good joke. I am afraid half of America thinks it is. And also thinks that you can restrain a dictator after a day or two. I am afraid you can’t. Thus I am concerned indeed. I smell autocrats from far away as I have grown up under them (Putin has been a KGB agent back then in East Berlin). But I also regard this nation as the nation of the free, where people still respect each other for their different opinions, and work across the isle.
If you ask my opinion, I would not vote for appearance but for character (which would be a function out of displaying virtues vs. vices). I would choose a leader that I can imagine reading a bedtime story to my child. Even if we might not agree on issues.
Still, my greatest concern is a theological one:
Having lived under religious oppression where I was punished and excluded from higher education because I was a church kid, I have sympathy for all who feel their faith is under attack. But friends, the solution is not a state which writes your faith into law. It never can be. First, it would immediately exclude the faith of your neighbor or your neighbors’ neighbor. And secondly, Christian faith and force don’t mix well. Faith needs freedom and independence to grow. It can’t be ordered from above. Not even parents can truly give it to their children.
How can they? Only by living a convincing example. Surely they can also do it by force. But force does not produce faith. It produces injury.
So what angers me the most about the American dilemma is that Christian values have been highjacked to support unrestrained power. This happened because we were promised a solution to an issue we truly care about. I understand that people who do not share our beliefs or ethical stances can make life difficult (see Chuck’s essay about the purpose of the constitution below). But bringing God back by force isn’t the way, dear friend. It is simply what it says, force.
So the only way, dear friend is, to consult your heart: Does the candidate who stands for my values embody them, too? Does he even know them? Is he guided by virtues? Does he know how to listen? Does he know how to grieve? Does he show character when he loses? Is he kind and loving father and husband? Does he speak a way you would allow to have kids listen in? I know some say that the character of the leader does not matter as long as the issues are covered. I think character is all that matters in a situation of crisis. (One can still vote issues all the way down the ballot.)
Leaders of faith will serve with humility (why is the highest of all Christian virtues so neglected in the political landscape?). They will neither preach hate nor make fun of the weak. They will still be flawed. And they are not afraid to show it. (And we should not be afraid either). They will be guided by their faith, but not force that faith on others.
So join us in praying for this nation this Independence Day, dear fellow pilgrim, to find wisdom and peace, Almut with Chuck and little one.
And now Chuck’s reflection:
Interdependence Day.
Don't get me wrong, the 4th of July is a fine holiday that celebrates the founding of a great country that is slowly growing into its initial vision of freedom and justice for all. Let’s celebrate both the founding and the continuing development. But to do so, we need to grapple with our interdependence.
The picture above is of our small family in a borrowed canoe on a lake at a friend's cabin. A next door neighbor whom we barely know took the picture and sent it to us via the son-in-law of the friend. Our whole trip "up north" in Minnesota was supported by an infrastructure that others have tended, down to the kind woman and her shy child who tended the garden by the playground where we paused on our journey north.
Though we look like the idyllic, inward focused, nuclear family, we are surrounded by and embedded in communities of interdependence. We need them. And we need to celebrate them.
Too often we succumb to a harmful vision of independence that each person is an island responsible only for and to themselves. It underplays, assumes, and conceals our interdependence in order to glorify the rugged individualist. Henry Thoreau is often blamed for popularizing this vision, but he was not alone at his cabin in the woods on Walden Pond -- he had more visitors there than in the city (like all those who have a nice cabin on a lake). He used a borrowed axe to build his cabin. And there he wrote — a most social activity, one that longs for a reader — a book that still speaks to us today.
The test of all great religions is how they frame and implement compassion for the community. But not just “their” community. The test is also how they extend that compassion to the other, the stranger, and the outcast -- to those who are in danger of losing the supports of community. The Old Testament prophets (in writings revered by three major religions) call us to care for the stranger. The Christian Gospel gives us the task of loving our enemies. The Bodhisattvas center their lives on care for others. The Hindu principle of Ahimsa embraces even compassion for one’s enemies.
But these callings are not always well implemented. Religion has far too often served to divide us. We need an Interdependence Day to remind us of our connections with and need for each other.
The whole idea of a constitution-based United States (plural) was to find a way that a fractious people could learn to live together, for the common good. It was a recognition that we are interdependent, whether we want it or not. We need to tend to and celebrate our interdependence. Can we disagree and yet still love each other? Even the American Civil War “strained, but did not break our bonds of affection,” as the president who prosecuted that war pleaded.
We need a day to remind ourselves of this. We still struggle over who owns Independence Day. Can we again, today, respond to Lincoln’s plea?
An Interdependence Day might help. Perhaps we could set aside the Saturday after Thanksgiving as Interdependence Day. The Friday is taken by Native American Heritage day, another recognition of interdependence. These three together would be a welcome tonic in this most individualistic of nations.
But until then, let’s celebrate our interdependence this Independence Day.
Remember our interdependence on this Independence Day.
Yours, Chuck
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Ha - great minds! Here's my post from last year on Interdependence Day: https://open.substack.com/pub/almostnamedgrace/p/interdependence-day?r=25qkxh&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Thank you Almut and Chuck. An encouraging, thoughtful, and wise message to absorb.