Our Hallowed Homeland
Reverend Brad Carrier
January 13, 2002

Let us give homage to our hallowed homeland. You were born in a particular place, and that place may ever feel home to you. You love it as I love my Pontiac, Michigan, once home of Algonquin Chief Pontiac, birthground to me, home still to my people. Home is the place we were from or now live and the people we care about in both places. We love our homeland. It’s a sense of us, our lands, our meanings. 

We also have a collective homeland in our country’s founding place, initially in Philadelphia, and then and since, Washington, D. C. I was privileged to recently fly to Washington with my friend Tonette and my son Ben, for a week. We flew in Christmas Eve on the red eye, and home on New Year’s Eve, 2001 in time for 2002. 

On the flight, I kept a sharp eye out for any passengers lighting their shoes. They didn’t. A certain anxiety underpinned our flight and stay. The risk of a small bomb, or a spread of deadly germs, or even the sudden flash of a nuclear blast, were all unlikely, but feasible. Often, we don’t fully value something or someone till they’re gone. How often did we note the Twin Towers before last fall? We wanted to visit Washington while we could. Who can be certain it will last as long as it was built to last? Misused, misunderstood, Washington’s eternality is vulnerable.

Tonette used to administer an educational international relations organization there, and happens to still partly own an apartment, conveniently vacant for a while. Her neighborhood is a charming array of individualized brick and stone townhouses, freshly painted 18th century beauties. The masonry is superb. Closely spaced, they sit on wide streets with ample walks. At 3rd St. on East Capitol, the view from her front walk looks directly into the front steps of the beautiful white Capitol Building. 

We ventured daily into the orderly maze of huge buildings, walking mostly, but also riding underground in huge electric trains, only to be towered over by the massive buildings upon emerging. In city areas the buildings are thick, uniformly nine stories. In other areas, such as the main mall, vast open fields lead to large evocative buildings and shrines. The scale is grand, horizontally and vertically.

Walking across the mall in the cold wind on a bright day, one treads great distances to approach massive marvels of human-molded stone; majestic temples made mighty of columns and walls of marble, carved, cut and polished; statues grandly gleaming; meaning marked at pinnacles, truths honored there as the culmination of our highest art and yearnings. The mythic is manifest. Meaning and beauty cancel any chill one may otherwise have felt in the cold brightness of the blessed day.

Washington, D. C. is a place of pilgrimage. People converge from around our country and planet as to a place of profound power, peace and purpose. People process in piety and pride. They pray and play. Secular shrines set marvel and meaning amidst the central workings of our government. They all interweave.

People, and their people, were everywhere. Walking in the crowds, one hears many languages amiably spoken. Spanish, French, Russian and Japanese are common. Kids and aunts and dads and moms in their various garbs, skin tones and hair types, gather in entryways or pose close for pictures, a comfortable mingling of many kinds and cultures of people. How fluid and delightfully cosmopolitan! Because my family is made up of northern Europeans, Italians and Africans, I felt right at home. But where some mixed racial gatherings are suspicious and tense, Washington felt friendly. Strangers nod. All simply go about their business, together.

Of all the monuments and special buildings we saw, none inspired me more than the Library of Congress. It is sumptuous, elegant, grand, sacred, practical. Eight pillars support the grand dome of the central reading room: Religion, Science, Law, Poetry, Philosophy, Art, History, and Commerce. Inscribed at their peak are quotes, many from the Enlightenment that led to the founding of our country. "As one lamp lights another, nor grows less, so nobleness enkindleth nobleness," reminded me of our chalice and philosophy. "Books follow science, not science follows books." "Nature is the Art of God." "Man is the true Shikina." Favorite to me was Bacon’s: "The inquiry, knowledge, and belief of truth is the sovereign good of human nature." 

These lofty sentiments remind us of our better natures and higher callings. Virgil said, "The noblest motive is the public good," near akin to George Washington’s philosophy that government should serve the general welfare of all the people.

It is a bold humanism that founds our country. Just as religion and commerce are but two of the eight pillars in the library, so is there a balance of human aspirations and involvements depicted in our country’s shrines. We forget these days how humanistic our founding ideals are. People are free. They have the right to speak, pray, travel, assemble and own. The collective faith is that by protecting and practicing these freedoms we arrive at a fair, dynamic, creative, satisfying society. This humanism doesn’t war with religion. Rather, it incorporates it as one of our human interests and passions. But neither does it elevate religion or commerce to a power over us, as if the only aspects of our human wholeness and society. 

Interesting to me was all the naked or near-naked people, mostly women, pictured in the paintings and statues. There are bare breasts displayed all over town, but in an innocent and artful way. When I got back to the apartment I’d say, "Tonette… I’ve been to the Library of Congress…" In one group painting Truth is represented by a totally naked woman, just standing there, the naked truth. However, in a book on the restoration of the Library of Congress, I saw how recent artists were subtly obscuring or covering many breasts. Is the naked truth offensive to our modern mores? 

What is the naked truth of our modern times, especially in relation to the noble ideals enshrined in our capitol city? There is and always has been an irony built into our ideals. We picture these people who gave them to us as gods, towering over our mere ordinary size. Jefferson was tall, even in our day he would have been tall, so all the more for his time. But he wasn’t sixteen feet tall. Nor was Lincoln a huge figure sitting in a massive throne. They were ordinary people with ordinary foibles founding extraordinary hopes and the mechanisms to facilitate them. We are awed and inspired by their statues, but do those statues help us live up to our larger selves? Are we what we wish they were so purely and well? Is not the price of freedom eternal vigilance? America self-creates. What country are we founding?

We loose another point in hero worship. The sentiment soothes but surrenders the truth. Christopher Columbus looks grand on his big horse. We might admire his "high faith and indomitable courage," as it says in the inscription, fully ignoring what evils he practiced and spread in the New World. We gaze with pride on the Native American atop the Capitol Building. "Freedom" is his or her name. But we forget his headdress was originally to be that of a freed Roman slave, which idea was rejected so as to not offend slave-holding states, and that the statue itself was cast by slaves here. Nor does Freedom face west to the mall and continent; he looks eastward. 

Blacks did most of the work of building the grand gleaming city, yet rarely are they memorialized, and still they live largely outside the boundaries of the white buildings. Just beyond the edges of the massive marble buildings lies typical urban blight. Buildings stand empty and boarded. Streets are strewn with litter. Homeless people beg. Could Washington D. C. be a show, a persona of noble grandeur used to mask ordinary people and difficult situations that persist in our country? Do we parade our piety to protect our pernicious powers? America is always ironic. We idolize and aspire but never quite live up to that which we claim. Did we tame the wilderness or exploit it? Have we been fair and generous or greedy and treacherous? Do lofty sentiments inscribed in our homeland’s most important city make us noble people? 

Such grumbles should be taken into account only if we admit we were and are flawed humans trying to be better. Would it be better if we had no Washington D.C.? What if we lost it to a bomb, lost to us, lost to our world? What if there were no lofty sentiments, no grand buildings, no passionate statues, no museums of art? What would guide us at all if we had no guides? What would inspire or goad us towards a just, humane and creative society were we to succumb to lies or cynicism? 

Why do we pick heroes? Did Jesus have the power or did he speak to a power in us? Does Jefferson make so much sense because he articulates something we agree with and aspire towards? He stands tall in his shrine, but he also smoked hemp and regularly bedded his black slave. Do these facts repudiate his life and words? No. He was an ordinary man who stepped forward at an auspicious time to give bold, wise words to our enduring faith and hope. Because he didn’t and we haven’t always lived up to those words doesn’t mean they’re to be ignored and forgotten. Rather, they tug in our hearts and minds, reminding us of our dear daring ideals. That we hesitate to admit our failing them is testament to their importance to us. Our unease at not fulfilling them bespeaks our knowing we still should. 

Natives of Washington tell me how much progress there’s been lately. In the past few decades crime has gone down in the inner city and the cosmopolitan nature of the mall has increased. It used to be largely white English speakers who toured the shrines. Foreigners stayed mostly near the embassies. Now all freely mingle in extraordinary ease. The museums tell not just the good news, but the human news. The Slavery and Holocaust museums are being joined by a new Native American museum. Washington is a shrine to human possibilities. Our aspiring, failing and aspiring again hallows our homeland. Let us hallow our beloved homeland by being founders ourselves, decent people holding noble aspirations, plans, efforts, and, bit by bit, actualizations. Like Camus, let us love both justice and our country.

The Thomas Jefferson and the F.D.R. Memorials are located out of the way, off the usual traveled path. They’re sidelined but not totally forgotten. They help balance the White House, surrounded by the massive Treasury and Commerce buildings. Jefferson’s and F.D.R.’s lives were flawed and their hopes only partially realized. But better to have some guides to truth, however imperfect, than none at all. Gradually, the truth is known. Though naked and vulnerable, she is still beautiful.