America the Beautiful

SCRIPTURE:  There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God— having a form of godliness but denying its power. 2 Timothy 3:1-5 NIV

QUOTE: O beautiful for pilgrim feet / Whose stern impassioned stress / A thoroughfare for freedom beat / Across the wilderness. / America! America! God mend thine ev’ry flaw, / Confirm thy soul in self-control, / Thy liberty in law.
 – Katharine Lee Bates, 1895, America the Beautiful, verse 2

THOUGHT: I was so tempted to cut the scripture reference down a few verses this morning, but how does one decide what to take out? It’s a  discouraging list, and I doubt Katharine Lee Bates thought it was true of her country the day in 1893 she got to the top of Pikes Peak with a group of fellow teachers using a prairie wagon first, and mules when the wagon couldn’t go any further. Hours afterward, she penned the hauntingly beautiful lyric we now call America the Beautiful.

How prescient, among lyrics about the incredible natural beauty of the nation that surrounds us, to find a poet acknowledging the cost (who more than self their country loved, vs. 3) and the self-government necessary to keep our country free and beautiful; to find in a song that’s a national treasure, a prayer that God might mend our every flaw and do the confirming necessary in our own souls.

Paul tells young Timothy that in the last days, people will trade in self-control for something like radical individualism, a social theory that elevates individual freedom over collective freedom. Here in the United States, the seeds were planted long ago by the same rugged individualists we admire among our pilgrims and pioneers, whose lives and determination to build a “thoroughfare for freedom” radiated self-control as well as a love of liberty. But to a radical individualist who no longer believes in God, there is only liberty. There are no rules or laws except the ones they favor. There is no moral law or code, except what they claim at any given moment. The seeds planted so long ago are springing up in a people increasingly narcissistic, ungrateful, unholy, unforgiving, treacherous, and rash. A people who love pleasure and dismiss God.

We are in trouble America the beautiful.

PRAYER: Oh God, mend our every flaw, and confirm the soul of our nation in self-control and its liberty in law.