Everything Sacred is Invisible

You Can't See Liberty, But it's Very There

Storytelling is a law unto itself. There are so many news stories of urgent importance that just aren’t that compelling as narratives. One of them is a story out of Philadelphia, which is being followed by my friend Jeff Anderson at the American Main Street Initiative, and by no one else, except sometimes his collaborator John Fonte of the Hudson Institute.

The story — and I’ll tell it quickly before you lose interest — involves a site called President’s House, located in a national park in Philadelphia. George Washington and John Adams lived on this site back in the day when Phili was our nation’s capital. Like many other national sites, the exhibit there was taken over by hate-filled wokesters who despise our country. They decked the place with “educational” signs slanted to attack Washington who, for those of you who attended public school, was one of the greatest men who ever lived. Anderson writes at the Federalist: “These signs spoke of ‘Washington’s Deceit’ and claimed he ‘mocked the nation’s pretense to be a beacon of liberty.’”

Our loveably pugilistic president had the signs replaced. Got sued. Won — because it’s a federal park. And then his victory was overturned by a leftist judge in Boston (!), who declared that all signs taken down by this administration anywhere in the country must be rehung. This is an illegal ruling out of keeping with the directives of the Supreme Court. The only question is whether the administration will be able to replace the signs in time for the celebration of this great nation’s 250^th birthday, July 4^th.

This, of course, is only one of the sites where signs and other educational tools need replacing. At the bookstore in Jefferson’s home Monticello, there are more books about slavery than about Jefferson himself. Washington’s Mt. Vernon is better, but the wokesters are embedded there and doing what they can to depict this first and best of presidents as an “enslaver.”

Leftists declare Trump is trying to “whitewash” American history. But, no, it is they who are trying to “blackwash” it, and unlike them, I am not making a cryptically racist comment. It’s the moral blackness of the thing I mean.

The thing is, I’m interested in history, and the lives of slaves is an important and fascinating subject. But that’s not why I visit Mt. Vernon or Monticello. I visit those places because of the great men who lived there. And they were great not because of their righteousness. No one is righteous; no, not one. They are great because, by their actions and thoughts and characters, they ushered a new era of liberty into this weary world.

You can’t see liberty. You can’t touch it, feel it, smell it. Yet if this spiritual reality is not, in fact, real, why should we care about slavery at all? We feel the injustice of the slave’s estate because we know this invisible right was implanted in them by the God of us all. And that knowledge found its greatest and most enduring political expression in the work accomplished by our founders — some of whom were slaveholders.

Everything sacred is invisible. Love, freedom, truth — only once has the font of all these holy holies made itself perceptible in flesh. The rest of the time we have to bring these things before our eyes ourselves, through our actions, rituals, words and celebrations — like the celebration of liberty on July 4^th.

I have written many times here and elsewhere about the sacred role of motherhood. Making a house a home. Making a meal an act of love. A thousand unnoticed sacrifices of desire, ambition and dignity that make this holy office visible in the person of a tired, sometimes bedraggled, occasionally frantic woman who really could use a glass of wine and a couple of minutes of peace and quiet. These women have all the flaws that female people have. There are a million moments when even they can’t see through the dirty diapers to the invisible holiness of the enterprise. But this is true of every human who becomes one end of a metaphor for something unseen and beautiful.

I know that there are people whose behaviors are so wicked that they lose their right to symbolize the values they espouse. Raise your hand against your wife and you are no head of a household. Rape a child and you can no longer call yourself a priest. Abort your baby and you have eradicated your motherhood. In each case, there may be repentance and forgiveness and redemption — by God’s incomprehensible grace — but in that moment, you have failed the ephemeral principle you were assigned to make real.

But to represent something great while being massively flawed — that is the best any of us can hope for. Our founding fathers did this, and did it in the midst of history, that chaotic and bloody mess. The very fact that so many men of such courage and intelligence and nobility — Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, Hamilton, on and on — were all together at one time and in one place, made manifest another invisible reality: the hand of God, gathering his forces to actualize that freedom which is the prerequisite of love.

So have a fabulous July 4^th without the slightest twinge of conscience. Men are sinful, yes, but God is great, and when men latch their wills to his, they are capable of magnificence. Like Washington and Jefferson and all the rest, they can make the sacred visible.