Celebrating the Salad

 

Dear Friends

A quick google search for the origins of “As American as Mom, Baseball and Apple Pie” reveals there are many variations of this old idea of what everyone is for, including a 1974 commercial jingle for a car company. It dropped Mom and added Hot Dogs and Chevrolet!

Most people love family, sports and dessert in some form. It’s just that we cannot limit what, specifically, brings people great joy. Someone once said that America is not so much a melting pot but more like a salad bowl. While we still struggle to rally around founding ideals that should easily unite us---that all are created equal, with liberty and justice for all---we can still celebrate our diversity which can enrich everyone.  (A current movie I just saw, “In the Heights”, is a great example of this).

While it might be hard to replace mom, there are many different sports and foods, songs and movies, fashions, traditions and destinations, you name it, that stir the souls of Americans. The menus for what feed us are many. The selections and ingredients and ways of cooking and presenting them are unending.  

Among the prayers for our national life in the Book of Common Prayer is one called “For our Country”. Among its petitions is this: “…fashion into one united people the multitudes brought hither out of many kindreds and tongues…”

So can we try harder once in a while, say on the Fourth of July, to recognize that with all our rich diversity, we can still try to agree on a dressing for this delicious salad we call America, a dressing which can make all the ingredients better? A dressing made up of courtesy, kindness, respect for starters? A way of living for more than self or party or position?

May our sweet land of liberty, still evolving, still healing, still trying to live up to its ideals, remember that we are, indeed, one of all nations under and dependent on God. Let us commit to the opening words of that prayer, “For Our Country”:

Almighty God, who has given us this good land for our heritage, we humbly beseech thee that we may always prove ourselves a people mindful of thy favor and glad to do thy will.

John