My community of faith recently embarked on a dialogue concerning a "hot" issue. You know the kind... an issue that has polarized segments of our community, divided our body, invaded conversations, meetings, and services like a pesky summer weed.

The issue? Language for God. What names do we give the un-nameable One? Which metaphors free us up, which images tear us down? How has the language of our ancestors in the faith been alternately harmful and healing? As a community committed to mutuality and gender equality, how do our images of the Holy One shape the children in our midst?

It's a difficult conversation, one involving passion, perspective, and the potential for provocation. I have a deep commitment to gender inclusive language when it comes to God talk. As a clergywoman in a society and religious tradition that have fallen short in affirming women's gifts, I've encountered my share of scrapes and bruises along the spiritual path. So this conversation about language for God was not one I was eager to engage. I'd just as soon let old wounds heal.

But when it came time for this divisive dialogue, something extraordinary occurred. We sat in a circle, shifting uncomfortably, when our facilitator invited us to listen deeply to one another. Instead of theological debate, she asked us each to tell our stories about meaningful language for God. There was to be no cross talk, no debating someone else's experience. Just listening. Deep listening. We would honor each story with a short, reflective silence before the next voice spoke. We, who had been prepared to do battle, were completely disarmed by this gracious invitation to tell our stories. God's Spirit was in our midst, despite our differences.

As we celebrate Independence Day in the heat of July, I often find myself thirsting for--as Howard Zinn would say--"the people's" stories of our nation. I know what I was taught in his-story class, but I want to hear the voices on the fringe, telling stories that may sound strange to my ears. We celebrate Independence Day, but what became of the Native communities who roamed with the buffalo before Europeans discovered the "new world"? I'm hungry for the troubling stories of African women who cared for children in the Middle Passage even as they were tossed about in the stormy sea of slavery. I want to hear the stories of those who live and labor in the shadows, having risked their lives to enter our borders from Mexico.

I recently discovered a new definition of "enemy" as "the one whose story we have not heard." Perhaps an enemy is one whose story we do not want to hear, one whose experience we do not want to know, one whose grief we do not want to touch. But the truth, as Senator Obama recently said in a forum on faith and politics, is that we are all in this together.

We celebrate independence, but it seems that we’re more interdependent today than ever before. Beyond the borders of nation states that we have lined with fences and patrol with force, there’s an interdependency to our world that cannot be denied. Birds and butterflies migrate across borders with the ease of passing seasons. Disease, violence, and pollution travel quite freely between nations. A war on one side of the world means a change in prices at the pump on the other side. Such interconnectedness means that everything we do to others we also do to ourselves in light of our one, shared earth.

Alice Walker puts it like this: "It is always us and only us that we wound when we harm another. There is no way to be separate from the rest of creation. We indulge the fantasy of being separate to our own peril."

And that means that nuclear waste seeping into impoverished communities of color is our business, no matter where we live. It means that a federal budget that funds defunct Cold War weaponry instead of health care for vulnerable children ought to madden all mothers. It means that the stories of young men and women surging into Iraq to face the violence of a civil war are a part of our collective story as a nation.

As is our American custom, I invite you this 4th of July to celebrate with all people who have known the taste of freedom. Celebrate with all those who are no longer shackled--not by poverty or privilege, not by hatred or fear. The human experience is to taste freedom and know that it is good. But as we celebrate stories of freedom, recall, as Dr. King taught us, that "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." As we celebrate independence in an interdependent world, remember that our liberation is tied up with that of others half way around the world. We stand in need of one another, despite our differences.

Our reliance on militarism to bring peace and liberation is ultimately a spiritual failure. We have not cultivated a national spirit that urges us to reason with other nations, to seek reconciliation even in the face of deep conflict, to beat our swords into plowshares, and to use our resources to care for the "least of these." For these reasons, our faith compels us to honor our nation's independence only in light of our interdependence with other human beings all around this one, shared earth. So let's listen well. We may discover the un-nameable Spirit in our midst.

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