Notes from my Knapsack 6-22-23

Notes from my Knapsack 6-22-23
Jeff Gill

Just another Granville Fourth of July
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It's coming again, the Fourth of July. The day we celebrate the birth of the United States of America, from the formalization of our Declaration of Independence in 1776.

We do well to note as we celebrate that birthdate that in fact we didn't have it all figured out at the start. It took until 1787 for us to cook up a Constitution; we had Articles of Confederation but they didn't get the job done. A committee on canals and waterways at Annapolis exceeded their brief and went on to Philadelphia, and we can all be thankful they did.

Yet they didn't get the job fully done, either. Who was included in "all men are created equal" wasn't sorted out for many years, let alone both men and women. Declaring our independence was a first step, and even once they had organized us "in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty," the Constitution required amendments, and we're likely not done with those.

What we celebrate is the idea of America. In the same year Denison University was established in the still rough settlement of Granville, Ohio, back on the Atlantic coast in Boston a Baptist minister named Samuel Francis Smith wrote in 1831: "My country, 'tis of Thee, Sweet Land of Liberty, Of thee I sing…"

Those words were meant to displace the lyrics of "God Save the King." Keep in mind it was just eighteen years since Great Britain had burned the White House and Capitol building, and shot up Navy ships in Boston harbor. Loyalists had slowly come back to Massachusetts but there were still hard feelings with the old school Patriots, and patriotism needed reinforcement, or so Rev. Smith believed.

"I love thy rocks and rills," we sing with him, the very fabric of the country from stony shorelines to inland ridges, even to "Thy woods and templed hills," the prominences of our natural skyline all the worship architecture we need, to compliment simple American meetinghouses in the valleys below.

"My heart with rapture thrills," sounds very 1831, but it's a level of enthusiasm we might want to carry forward from that era. Denison's alma mater still sings about their school "The name that sets our souls on fire/ And makes our senses thrill."

We can be very modern and cynical and dispassionate, but I would submit there's something to letting our hearts thrill with rapture over the ideals of freedom and equality our nation was established to advance. Have we always made the most of those initial promises? Is there a ways yet to go? Certainly. No fair analysis can dispute either challenge.

Yet for all the drama and pageantry of the recent coronation, God save King Charles, but God send he not rule over me or mine. We left that behind, or at least for the tabloids to cover. We pledge allegiance to an aspirational symbol with stars of a new constellation and stripes of thirteen colonies willing to launch that experiment in liberty, not to a person born of a particular royal lineage.

I welcome a time and a community festival to celebrating my country, which is for me, a sweet land of liberty, and may yet be for many more, and would sing with deep emotion, rapturously or in rap or musically however, that I am thankful the experiment continues.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he has a special relationship with the Granville Fourth of July parade. Tell him what makes you rapturous at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.