This Wide and Wonderful Land Needs a Rebirth of Soul

We are a nation of immigrants and descendants of immigrants. The voices and stories of immigrants remind us of our history. They can give us perspective (and hopefully wisdom) as we move into the ever-renewing future. My friend Alice Scott-Ferguson immigrated to America from Scotland as an adult. About her roots, she writes:

“In a land of deep class divides, my parents were not from the nobility or elite or formally educated. They were people of the land and sea in the farthest reaches of the United Kingdom, the Shetland Islands, where the sun never sets in summer and the aurora borealis dances in the long, dark winter skies.”

Many of my ancestors also came from the Scotland, Ireland, and England—but way back during the Colonial period. They crossed the Atlantic to the New World for economic opportunity (survival?) and for religious and personal liberty. Each generation moved steadily westward across the expanding frontier, seeking new beginnings and opportunities, until they reached the Pacific Ocean. And now some of us have moved back eastward. My ancestors include farmers, preachers, teachers, homesteaders, soldiers, and laborers. Many generations of blood, sweat, and tears have soaked into this land from shore to shore.

We are America. “This Land is My Land” we have sung with gusto. But I wonder: Does our subjectivity make it hard—even impossible—for us to take an objective look at our country, our land, our nation? Have we become full of “hubris,” as Alice has penned (in her poem below)?

I think the voices of immigrants, who continue to choose to come to “America the Beautiful” to seek life and opportunity and freedom, are voices we need to hear and heed if we want to “trade our hubris for humility,” as expressed beautifully in this poem:

America the Beautiful

Pilgrim from a more restricted place
to America, the parent
of my progression
land of my adoption.

Country of limitless opportunity
for me and my progeny,
ever grateful
sometimes sad
land divided
in agony
in greed
in need
of a re-birth of soul
into a vibrant whole
not of uniformity
but of unity
in our differences
in our sameness
with the world
though still we hold
that glorious space
of being
a framework
of freedom.

Wide and wonderful land
open your arms of welcome
let us love one another
let us not fear one another
let us harness the love
and discover fire again.

Let us trade our hubris for humility,
thee and me.

~Alice Scott Ferguson

(excerpted from Pausing in the Passing Places)

Photo credit: Original Oil Painting by Amy Whitehouse