@HomewithDean - Homily 7/3

Tomorrow is July 4th. Tomorrow we celebrate what it means to be an American. And with that will come a lot of American pride. Some pride will be the best kind. The kind that looks like gratitude. But some of it, too much in fact, will be a hard, unyielding, arrogant kind of pride. The kind of pride that, as they say, comes before a fall.<br /><br />I’m grateful to be an American. But if I’m perfectly honest I find myself more and more dreaming of an America that I’m not actually living in. I love an America that is a Great Melting Pot. A place where very different people with very different life experiences and very different points of view come together and do the very hard work of listening to each other, learning about each other, warming to each other, and then melting into each other, even if just a little. I dream of the Melting Pot but I wake up to an America that has stopped melting. To melt is to soften, to change. Not change completely but enough to welcome another substance that has also softened and then together to become something new, an alloy, something greater than the sum of its parts. I guess my movement’s hat would say MAMA on it—Make America Melt Again. Because I’m tired of hard right and hard left and hard people in general. I no longer see any form of unyielding extreme as strength. I believe we’re all imperfect incomplete people. I believe none of us have all the answers. And if that’s true then being hard and unyielding isn’t a virtue. It’s a vice.<br /><br />According to organizational psychologist Adam Grant, preaching and prosecuting are what have taken the place of melting in American culture. I agree. These days we’re either preaching—telling everyone why we’re so right—or we’re prosecuting—telling everyone why they’re so wrong. We’ve given preaching and prosecuting so much place that we’re beginning to think that way to the exclusion of all else. Here’s the problem … both preaching and prosecuting predispose us against changing our minds. They are walls, not bridges. They are not de