Finding Our Way Home

Reflections on 250 Years

Last night at the Mariners game, I found myself singing the national anthem.

I realized it had been a long time since I had sung it with much conviction. Like many people, I have spent the last few years feeling more discouraged than proud about our country. But there I was, surrounded by thousands of strangers (mostof them Blue Jay fans!) joining my voice with theirs. (PS—I sang O Canada with gusto, too! Those Canadians are fun!)

As I sang, another thought quietly surfaced.

What if we have been teaching ourselves the wrong song?

The national anthem is a remarkable story of survival. It remembers a flag still standing through a night of rockets and bombs. It tells us that a nation endured an attack.

But it says very little about why the nation exists in the first place.

What if, alongside singing the anthem, we knew the Declaration of Independence by heart?

What if our children learned not only that “the flag was still there,” but that all people are created equal, endowed with dignity, and entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?

The anthem celebrates survival. The Declaration describes a vision.

One tells us that the nation endured. The other tells us what the nation hoped to become.

Every nation has more than one origin story, and America certainly does.

One story begins in Jamestown, where commerce, wealth, land hunger, and eventually slavery shaped the earliest English settlement. Another begins in Plymouth, where imperfect people nevertheless imagined themselves bound together by covenant, gratitude, and a common life.

Neither story is complete by itself. Neither is innocent. Plymouth has its own shadows, especially in the treatment of Indigenous people. But the two stories still symbolize something important. Jamestown reminds us of the temptation to build a nation on extraction and profit. Plymouth reminds us of the possibility of covenant and shared responsibility.

Maybe our national struggle has always been between those two impulses.

When Abraham Lincoln established Thanksgiving in the middle of the Civil War, I wonder if he was inviting the country to remember not merely where we had come from, but which of our founding stories we wanted to nurture. In a time of division, he reached for gratitude, humility, and a shared table.

Perhaps every generation has to choose again.

This summer, I have also been struck by another song—“Take Me Home, Country Roads,” which has become a kind of unofficial anthem for the U.S. soccer team and its fans.

It is an odd choice, in a way. It is not a patriotic song in the usual sense. It does not mention America, freedom, flags, or war. It is simply a song about longing for home.

And somehow that feels right.

This U.S. team, with roots and family stories stretching across the world, may be giving us a picture of the America many of us still long for: not a nation where everyone becomes the same, but a nation where many roads can lead home.

Maybe that is the home we are trying to get back to.

Not a perfect past. Not nostalgia. Not the myth that America was ever simple or pure. But the true home of our independence: the promise of the Declaration itself.

Before there was an anthem, there was an argument. Before there was a flag still standing over a battlefield, there was a claim about human dignity: that rights are not handed down by kings or governments, and that the purpose of a nation is to protect the life, liberty, and flourishing of its people.

That is the home road worth traveling.

So maybe this Fourth of July, the question is not only whether the flag is still there.

Maybe the question is whether we still know the way home.