Dear UU Miami Family,
Today is the eve of our nation’s 250th birthday. Some of us will be or are in Fort Lauderdale at the We The People March, standing in the summer heat for the country we envision, and just maybe, the country we still believe in.
The news tells us Americans are unsure whether to celebrate at all. I understand the hesitation. But however each of us marks the calendar tomorrow, it remains a momentous date for a nation whose existence changed the course of human history. So tonight I am sitting with an old immigrant’s question. What do I mean when I say I am proud to be an American?
The answer is as simple as it is complicated, full of context and contradiction. Which is, in truth, exactly who we have been as a people for 250 years.
I was born in a nation whose freedom was ripped away by a tyrant. For my family, America was never an abstraction. It was a promise of a better future, a promise that would have to be hard fought and constantly chased until you lived into it fully. That chase taught me something people born free can forget. The promise was never a place of arrival. The promise is the pursuit.
Consider what actually happened 250 years ago. A gathering of farmers, printers, intellectuals, and yes, even Unitarians, looked at the most powerful empire on Earth and rejected its deepest idea. Every throne in human history has rested on the same claim, that some people are born worth more than others. Worth flowed downward, from heaven to king to noble to commoner, thinning as it went, until at the bottom it ran out entirely. The Declaration reversed the current. Worth does not descend from a crown. It rises from the person. It arrives with the birth. It cannot be earned, and therefore it cannot be revoked.
They wrote it and did not live it. The enslaved, the women, the Native nations whose democratic confederacies helped inspire the vision, all stood outside the signers’ small circle. Here is the strange grace of the thing. The words were larger than the men, and the words kept working after the men stopped. Frederick Douglass held the Declaration up to a slaveholding country like a mirror and asked what the Fourth of July could mean to the enslaved. The women at Seneca Falls rewrote the sentence to say plainly that women are created equal too. Dr. King called the founders’ words a promissory note and came to collect. Generation after generation has sued this nation in the court of its own founding sentence. And generation after generation has won new ground.
This Sunday, the first morning of our nation’s 251st year, UU Miami begins a summer-long exploration called #BeingUU, walking the principles of our faith one at a time. We begin with the First Principle: the inherent worth and dignity of every person. Listen to what that sentence is. It is the Declaration’s claim carried past the place where the founders stopped. Every person. No asterisk. No exceptions written in invisible ink. Our Unitarian and Universalist ancestors helped draft the country’s promise. Their descendants kept revising it toward honesty, and the First Principle is what “created equal” sounds like when it finally grows up.
Which brings us to this anniversary, because we are facing a familiar situation. There is a king at the gate of our great experiment, and many seem willing to let him in. We should be precise about what we are seeing. One man stands at the gate, but the thing seeking entry is far older than he is. It is the ancient system of ranked worth, taking its last breath, hoping to replicate itself in enough minds and souls to outrun its own collapse. Every tyranny begins as a theology. It preaches that some lives count and others do not. Cruelty is its liturgy. Fear is its hymn. And against it, for 250 years, has stood a single sentence, written once for a nation and once for a faith.
Just like 250 years ago, there still exists a people who believe some simple truths. Democracy works. Pluralism is innovation. When people are free to be themselves and given a level field in every corner of our society, we all win. Maybe I am naive. Maybe I am wrong. Or just maybe I am touching something most of us still know, and still believe.
So on this Fourth of July, I am proud to be an American. Pride, in this country, has never meant satisfaction. It means custody. The experiment is unfinished, the promissory note is still circulating, and the next chapter has our names on it. Tomorrow, believe the words in that rebellious document one more time: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
And on Sunday morning, come help us make them truer. We will start where the country started, with the worth no king can grant and no tyrant can take away. There is a chair here with your name on it.
Peace,
Rev. Dr. Harold Marrero
Minister, UU Miami