This year we will gather under sun and tree and sometimes under storm clouds, and we will grill meats and swim pools and lakes and watch explosions become fascinations, 

and we will say we are celebrating independence from tyranny, freedom from oppression, and we will tell the story of how we got here in a familiar, grammar school idiom, a Sunday school idiom, with heroes and villains and destiny under a power we’ll name God because we are deeply, irretrievably spiritual beings, 

and we will not be wrong, but we will not be right, either, because we are deeply physical beings, and physical beings who are also spiritual beings will always struggle to make agree the boundlessness of their hearts with the strain of getting up out of the couch and the ease with which the spark of life can fade away against the night sky, 

and we are mythological beings, meaning we explain and justify and inspire and repress with the power of stores, stories without which we have only the barrage of sensations and ideas that cannot cohere on their own, and this contradiction (I’m talking again about the body and the spirit), this affront to infinity, always tempts us to tell stories that deny the one or the other, 

and so we have the lionizers and hagiographers who insist history is a parade of great men who penetrate the intransigence of the physical and exert their will to reshape reality, which attracts us because we hope by touching the hems of these lions’ garments some share of their anointing will fall to us and make us little emperors and CEOs by proxy, lesser but not least (because this story always has a least), 

and we have the denouncers and discontents who believe by rejecting hagiography they are protecting themselves and standing up for those the lions otherwise would eat, which attracts us because we want to believe in justice and that we should not divide ourselves into lions and antelopes because we are all the same or ought to be treated as such, but also we feel the breath of the lion on our necks and want to believe we can keep it at bay, 

and each story is a story of hope, and each story is a story of fear, for we are forever struggling between two other stories, a story of abundance and a story of scarcity, or call it plenty and want, or enough and not enough, or call it love and control, 

and it seems to me our histories show us that, more often than not, those who choose control over love will rise to authority over their peers and, because their peers have frequent cause to be afraid or to feel out of control, will permit and even praise this ascension, and we will put power on the heights and accept our own belittlement, and the controllers will have obedience and get their way but will not have love, 

and those who choose love over control emerge on the margins of authority, and they earn our love because they show us how to believe it is possible to care for one another, and they show us how to find power in the plains and among those the lions would call sheep, but in the controllers they inspire ire, envy, and fear, because love is more difficult to control than the dispersal of red and blue flames from a cardboard tube launched over the lake at nightfall, 

and those who put their faith in control scorn the lovers, throw rocks and bricks at them, revile their children, and scream at them to go away, and this allows the lions to chase them out of town, throw them in jail, assassinate and crucify them, and later to put their pictures on the wall and tell us how important they were, because the big stories can always absorb the other stories, which makes them powerful and dangerous, 

and, here’s the thing, no one thinks they’re telling the wrong story, which is why the controllers love to talk about love and why the lovers assure themselves they do not want control, but we are all bad at holding the two in tension, abundance and scarcity, hope and fear, the spiritual and the physical, love and control, but they must be in tension, how can they not be in tension and we still be human beings, 

and when we cannot hold this tension we slip inevitably into nihilism, for what is nihilism except the rejection of the real and obscuring the face of the other with the brilliance of the myth, for the woman across from you, the man under the policeman’s knee, the child crying in the rubble on the TV, each is deeply physical and deeply spiritual, and we know this and we feel convicted by the indignities they suffer, even the self-appointed lions must feel this, 

and we must respond by choosing love or control, and control works by finding the words that make it okay for others to suffer if it makes us feel safe, and love works by finding the words that make us stake our safety to lessen the suffering of others, and both the lionizers and the denouncers have words that blur the face of the other, and both the lionizers and the denouncers have words to justify this erasure of the divine, 

and we’re all wrong, we have to be, 

because we all have to stand up to walk across the room, and we none of us have the power to control things so that nobody suffers, and this is an affront to the love we want so desperately to believe in, and these two stories, these struggling forces, bound in their own story of either/or vying with creative tension, they will be there at the picnic table and under the flags and in the parades with their streamers and candy and firetrucks, and we will want to choose control over love because we like better to celebrate than to mourn, to take a break than to take action, and we will try not to think about the people who believed in the values we are celebrating but have been denied access to them, the people who were told what rules to follow and were then betrayed by us and sent to a strange land, the people who were told they had rights and were then stripped of them by the fiat of a single, miserable man and by the hordes of us who are placing our bets on the story about the lions and hoping that somehow the lions will bless us even as they destroy others, and we will want to believe it is okay to purchase security at the cost of a few million people we do not know 

because it is hard to tell a story that sees the face of each of a few million persons, 

especially when those faces tell new stories we don’t understand, but we have always been a country struggling to figure out if freedom comes from the ones with the prisons and the guns or from the ones with the magic markers standing behind the pop-up ballot boxes, 

and we have always been a country struggling to figure out if love is a nice feeling between people or a political force that changes how we care about each other, 

and I cannot tell you which story will win because I, too, crack and groan when I get up off my beach towel, and you cannot tell me which will win because you have to get up to use the porta-john, too, and that means we each and all are choosing, each moment, which story we believe in, or how to believe in our stories, 

and if that is not faith I don’t know what is, 

and this year many of us fear that our fellow Americans have lost faith in America because there is so much to fear, that they believe rights come from the lions and not from our common spiritual nature, 

and yet the people who have most passionately carried the torch for this country’s values have done so from the other side of them, and those of us who have never had to fight for them must learn their stories and tell their stories and reaffirm, insistently, stubbornly, faithfully, that love is a story worth believing in and a story worth shaping our society by, 

and so this year, under the sun and the canopies and the layers of sunscreen we will greet and shake hands with and hug deeply spiritual and deeply physical people, people living in the tension between enough and not enough, and we will celebrate what we have, and it is good to be grateful, 

but may we also mourn what we lack and what we have taken away and the damage we have wrought, for if we cannot love what we cannot control, we will try to control what should be loved, and then the nihilists, who for this moment are having their way, who are painting red, white, and blue crosses on their faces and laughing at our suffering, who are every day challenging our faith in love, then they will win, 

and if they win it will not mean they were right but that we did not have faith enough to believe in the harder story, and the harder story is the more beautiful story, the story of the judge who does not condemn, of the pariah who stops to help his abuser, of the god who would rather we keep speaking his name in vain than act like just another lion,

because a freedom that glories in another’s oppression is synonymous with that oppression, while true love, we are told, casts out fear, and fears not to reach out its hand, to give from its plenty, to share its burgers and potato salad and make room on the blanket for another, and what else is this love but the truest form of freedom, and who are we if we prefer anything less?