Weekend Reading - 07.05.19





Happy Friday, everyone! I hope you had a wonderful 4th. Nick & the kids have been camping this week so there's been lots of swimming, kayaking, and marshmallow roasting in our world this week.

I've been thinking a lot about this quote from Elizabeth Freeman, the first African-American slave to sue for her freedom and win here in Massachusetts:

Any time while I was a slave, if one minute's freedom had been offered to me, and I had been told that I must die at the end of that minute, I would have taken it just to stand one minute on God's earth a free woman.
Freedom is so very dear, friends.  I pray that we who have tasted this freedom and who have experienced the American dream will hold a deep sense of responsibility to honor and care for those who have sacrificed to protect those freedoms and also a deep sense of responsibility to extend that freedom to those Americans who have a very different experience of this country.

I've only got one recommended read for you this week, and it's Frederick Douglas's speech, "What to the Slave is the 4th of July?" I read it a few nights ago when the fireworks exploding all around our house were so jarring there was no way I could fall asleep. Douglas's words are so poignant to our present moment. It's well worth reading the sermon in its entirety, but the part that touched me most deeply is below:
'By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yea! we wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there, they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they who wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How can we sing the Lord's song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth.
Fellow citizens; above your national, tumultuous joy I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are today rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, 'may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth!' To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. 
Be safe this weekend, friends. Be well, and as you celebrate, I pray you take a moment to express your gratitude for what freedom has meant in your life and to cultivate compassion for those who are still longing to be free.





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