Albert Camus wrote, "Yes, there is beauty and there are the humiliated.  Whatever difficulties the enterprise may present, I would like never to be unfaithful either to one or the other."   It was a crisp Marin morning and I was biking the Paradise loop as a stunning sunrise filled the sky with hues of gold, blues and purples, and a Stellar Jay squawked its canticle to the dawn.  I felt an unspeakable gratitude to God roll over me.  While I stopped to take it all in, Chuck Quick and 53 of our high school students and their sponsors were a universe away in Mexico starting a day of house building.

 This week Chuck said to me, "If we helped better the life of just one Mexican child, this whole trip was worth it for me.  If we impacted the lives of our teens, we will have made a difference" Those children in the Free Trade Zone are Camus' "humiliated."  The beauty of 54 people who built homes and a portion of a good future for others matched the beauty of the sunrise.  I treasured that morning for the beauty it revealed as well as for the light it cast on the dark side of the human condition in Mexico, and for the way our Mexico Mission Team reflected its light in the beauty of their labors.

 In 1893, Katherine Lee Bates, professor of English at Wellesley College, was faithful to both beauty and the humiliated when she wrote the hymn, "O Beautiful for Spacious Skies" - depending on your generation or hymn book, it is known as "America The Beautiful."  Two epiphanies grounded her hymn.  She visited the Columbian Exposition on the Chicago Lagoon and was deeply moved by its alabaster white look.  She wrote, "The White City [as the Exhibition was called] made such a strong appeal to patriotic feelings that it was in no small degree responsible for at least the last stanzaÉ. It was with this quickened and deepened sense of America that we went on, my New England eyes delighting in the wind-waved gold of the vast wheat fields"  - "O beautiful for spacious skies, For amber waves of grainÉ."

 The second epiphany was atop the 15,000' Pike's Peak.  She captured the vast sunrise and vistas in a simple line, "For purple mountain majesties."  Bates, who apparently had no church ties, was so profoundly affected by God's artistry that she wrote this hymn in one sitting after descending the mountain.

 Her respect for pilgrims extends beyond those who landed at Plymouth Rock.  Her hymn gratefully acknowledges those who dared to cross the uncharted eastern mountains, explored the "fruited plains," struggled over the daunting Rockies, and found their way to the golden hills of California. Her hymn reminds us of all the "pilgrims" who faced the trials and dangers of the wilderness and who "A thoroughfare for freedom beat."

 The third stanza celebrates an essential truth, "O beautiful for heroes proved in liberating strife, Who more than self their country loved, And mercy more than lifeÉ." We sing of those who sought freedom from staggering and unjust debt, from the chains of poverty and despair, and for the right to have a voice in their destiny and that of the nation.  From "purple mountain majesties" to "liberating strife," Bates twice reveals, in the first and fourth stanzas, her vision of the fulfillment of the American dream, "May GodÉcrown thy good with brotherhood From sea to shining sea!"

 In this petition, Bates stayed faithful to beauty and the humiliated.  She knew that only the unity of brotherhood and sisterhood would fulfill the dream and realize freedom.  Bates wrote of "Alabaster cities gleam," knowing that a short distance from the Exposition, countless African Americans and immigrants labored in near-slavery conditions for miserly pay, and existed in the horrible slums that Upton Sinclair would graphically portray in his work, The Jungle.

The hymn understood the unfinished work begun thirty years to the year earlier with the Emancipation Proclamation.  There could be no "Alabaster cities gleam, undimmed by human tears" until America was a united human community without poverty, racism, exploitation by the rich and privileged, or indifference to the core values formed at the creation of this nation.

The following lines in the second and third stanzas transform this piece from a parochial hymn into a national anthem: "America! America!  God mend thine every flaw, Confirm thy soul in self-control, Thy liberty in law." And, "America!  America!  May God thy gold refine Till all success be nobleness And every gain divine."  She balanced beauty and the humiliated by noting the success of every person, not just the rich, as nobleness, and the gains of every person, not just the powerful, as divine.

Unlike The Star Spangled Banner, Bate's hymn squarely faced the nation's beauties and its troubles, and humbly petitioned God to "mend" our every flaw, and help each generation advance America's dream and high calling.  This hymn that would be the national anthem is patriotism with its eyes open, its humility in place, and its passion tested in its shortcomings.

On Wednesday, Independence Day, take time to meditate on Katherine Lee Bates' words, pray and make her verses your own, and join the parade of patriots seeking to fulfill the last stanza: "O beautiful for patriot dream That sees beyond the years Thine alabaster cities gleam, Undimmed by human tears!  America!  America!  God shed [Your] grace on thee And crown thy good with brotherhood From sea to shining sea!"