First of three parts
The melting pot is an outdated image of the United States. We need a new metaphor to define the Nation.
Cecilia González-Andrieu follows who and how our societies evolve through history and helps identify our early sense of Americanism, wrote the following article for the American Magazine.
‘“The Storm, 2020”, by John August Swanson, based on a reflection in ‘Urbi et Orbi,’ by Pope Francis on the Gospel of Mark becomes real for us in the United States.
“As a society and as individuals, we do not yet have sufficient distance to understand the lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic. Discerning them may take a lifetime, but we should at least begin.
“How will future generations judge our response to the pandemic? The virus has exposed many truths about humanity and the ways we organize ourselves as societies. While we are adaptable, we are vulnerable. One painful reality is overwhelmingly evident: The privileged are less at risk than the poor. We are a nation that has exalted individualism but in the end relies on the strength of community. Did the image of the American melting pot help us become the people we needed to be or did it ultimately harm us?
“The COVID-19 virus has exposed many truths about humanity and the ways we organize ourselves as societies. While we are adaptable, we are also vulnerable.
“I imagine students researching periodicals (maybe even this article) decades or centuries from now, looking for what this moment felt like to the people facing this pandemic. Let me address them—well, actually, let me address you.
“Dear future reader: As I write, most of us are subsisting on confusing theories, indeterminate fears, tenuous hopes and, in the best of cases, bits of science and some awareness of the lessons of history. Some of us are looking back, just as you are. There is continuity and discontinuity between us and the past, and we are trying to learn from both. In this quest, a few of us are asking questions to connect our past, the disconcerting present, and the hoped-for future. I am sure we agree that generalizations are risky, but there seems to be an almost universal reaction to this moment: Incredulity. Much of what we thought we knew, valued and could not live without is vanishing, and many of us just do not know how to feel.
“I am a theologian who is part of the Catholic tradition, and engaging with this moment at its depth is most assuredly the work theologians are called to right now. I pray Christianity is flourishing and thriving in the future as you read this article. If it is, it means we did something right.
“A complicated tradition
“One of the advantages of belonging to a religious tradition spanning two millennia ought to be a heightened awareness of the precariousness of history, the unsettling quality of life as it unfolds and the constant need to adapt. Christians should be the kind of people who understand that faith as lived in the world provides the gift of reflecting on the fragility and temporality of everything, and most importantly of our own lives.
“This is a complicated thing. We know ourselves heirs of a promise that transcends the brief span of our individual lives; the promise of the resurrection. At the same time, we know that we will get there not by avoiding our fragile materiality but by living fully into it. The one we follow, Jesus of Nazareth, began his ministry at a wedding party, abundantly filling the cups of his fellow guests. The party was fleeting, just an instant in history, but for that one moment a group of people rejoiced and delighted as they toasted the bride and groom with the finest wine.
“The Christian tradition expresses this apparent duality humans inhabit with the symbol of the reign of God. Christ tells us the kingdom of God is not a place, but an event that discloses God’s purpose and vision for all reality. It broke in at the wedding in the small village of Cana. It discloses itself at food banks, hospitals, liturgies, and family tables. It is promised as the eschatological banquet, where the last shall be first as we share a common table. The reign of God is both here and not yet, evanescent and eternal, earthly and heavenly, embodied and transcendent. What we do every moment matters precisely because it can help build the reign bit by bit until the day when all creation returns to God in fullness.
“Just as our religious beliefs help us wrestle with the challenge of being made of finite matter and transcending spirit, the way we humans create is a persistent reminder of our spirit-filled temporality. Loving music, we might ruminate and grieve because Mozart died so unexpectedly young. If we love classical paintings, we might contemplate a scene of great bounty, all the while knowing it did not last. If we love architecture, we might be moved to tears by sun-bleached ruins, thinking back to the people who built and gave life to these spaces. To live in the world means to know its awe-inspiring fragility and to realize that through its loveliness everything communicates its impermanence.
“What we do every moment matters precisely because it can help build the reign of God bit by bit until the day when all creation returns to God in fullness.
“At this moment, when human vulnerability has been so thoroughly unmasked that it hurts, my contemporaries and I must choose how to live this truth. There are those who choose denial, hanging on to an illusion of invulnerability and refusing the possibility that our lives are not our private property but are meant to be shared in community. Some people disdain wearing masks or keeping distant or acknowledge that we cannot buy our way out of a global pandemic. Regrettably, many of us simply act out of self-serving egoism. As we see the daunting scarcity of jobs, loss of economic mobility and diminishment of privilege, we lash out against the weak and decide we are somehow more deserving than anyone else, without regard for anyone left behind.
Continued at thevoice.us/introspection-for-national-metaphor-new-definition