Part One: From American Dreaming to Wide Awake
A three-part series for America’s 250th
“A nation is not a thing so much as a process; we’re not a particle, but a wave.” —Marianne Williamson
“We may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country.” —James Baldwin
I. The Candle and the Wound
USAmerica turned two hundred and fifty this month, and I have been trying to figure out what to feel.
I know what the fireworks wish to evoke. I know what feelings the flags folded into car windows and the beer commercials and the drone shows spelling 250 against the night sky want to swell in my chest. But a birthday is a strange thing to celebrate when the birthday-subject is not sure whether it wants to keep lurching forward in a zombified half-life, or whether it’s willing to let the parts of itself that are perishing finally die so that something truer can be born.
I’m not going about this perfectly at all, but I aim to inhabit the full range of life, from Spirit to sinew. So when it comes to reflecting on my country of birth, let me light a birthday candle for this aging, contradictory, God-haunted country — while I also refuse to look away from our national wound, which is deep, and old, and bleeding through its bandages afresh.
Here’s the unflinching truth as I see it in this summer of our two hundred and fiftieth year: we’re living through a season of graft dressed up as governance, of oligarchs seated at the head of the national table while the price of eggs and rent and ground beef climbs past the reach of the people who actually make our country work from day to day. We’re watching masked agents pull our neighbors out of courthouses and shopping centers, off factory floors and from the arms of their children, the administration in charge having the chutzpah to call it ‘order’ while the ostensible ‘opposition’ party sits nearly-mutely in the cuck chair. We de-fund vital aid projects the world over in the name of ‘government efficiency’ while millions of children starve. We are funding, arming, and shrugging at a butchery in Gaza that history will not let us un-see. We deny and dismantle vital common-good programs at home and abroad, running these ‘savings’ to war chests, mass-surveillance, billionaires and our world’s first newly-minted trillionaire, daring to call this massive wealth grift ‘big’ and ‘beautiful.’ We have made cruelty efficient and called it ‘strength.’
I do not pen this truth to stoke despair. I write it because lament is often the beginning of prayer; A broken spirit is my sacrifice, God. You won’t despise a heart, God, that is broken and crushed (Psalm 51:17, CEB) I don’t know how to reach credible hope without walking through this valley of the shadow of national death. As the author of Scripture’s Lamentations sorrowed,
“My eyes are spent with weeping;
my stomach churns;
my bile is poured out on the ground
because of the destruction of my people,
because infants and babes faint
in the streets of the city.”
(Lamentations 2:11, NRSVUE)
The prophets don’t look away, so I guess I won’t either.
But I want to propose something to you across this series — something I’ve come to believe deep in my belly: I believe the document this country was founded on was only ever half of the revolution. I believe the other half has been waiting, patient as a seed, in the soil of our shared history the entire time. And I believe the birthday gift this nation actually needs is not some tired reiteration of the Declaration of Independence.
It is a Declaration of Interdependence.
Let me show you what I mean.
II. The Debt in the Declaration
Let’s start with what we’re supposedly celebrating.
True confession: I’m not the most patriotic person. But the Declaration of Independence is a genuinely riveting artifact. Marianne Williamson, in Healing the Soul of America, calls it one of “the miracles of modern history” — the founders, heirs to the Enlightenment’s conviction of the inherent goodness of the human person, prying open “a doorway in a seemingly impenetrable wall of history. The Western world was stuck, and they unstuck it.” This strikes me as true, and I won’t let cynicism snatch it from me.
But Williamson is also honest enough to name the crack that ran through USAmerica’s foundation from the first pour of concrete: the majority of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence enslaved people. The men who wrote that “all men are created equal” held human beings as property while they wrote it. The USAmerican ideal was luminous. The practice was theft, and worse.
You want to know how that contradiction sounded to the people crushed beneath it? Open the Narrative of Sojourner Truth. Before Isabella’s own story even begins, the abolitionist preface that frames her Narrative turns the Fourth of July into an indictment:
“We hear your boasts of liberty, your shouts of independence… but, mingling with all these, and rising above them all, we also hear the clanking of chains! the shrieks and wailings of millions of your own countrymen, whom you wickedly hold in a state of slavery.”
That is the sound the founding made in the ears of the enslaved. Merry peals of bells and, underneath, the clanking of chains. The same air carrying both.
A century and a half later, James Baldwin gave this contradiction its most precise name. In Notes of a Native Son he wryly called it innocence — the American refusal to know what we have done. “It is only now beginning to be borne in on us,” he wrote, “very faintly… and very much against our will,” that our habit of painting the world in “glaring black and white” has cost us our “grasp of reality.” Baldwin levels an indictment I can’t contradict: “Anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.”
This is the debt in the founding document. The ideals themselves have legs, but we shackled them. We wrote a promissory note to the human race and then spent two and a half centuries finding reasons not to pay. In his iconic I Have a Dream speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr., put it unforgettably:
We have come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’ But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this check — a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice. We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to open the doors of opportunity to all of God’s children. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood.
In the last year of his life, King diagnosed our ills with a physician’s exactness: America suffers “a high blood pressure of creeds and an anemia of deeds.”
USAmerica overflows with declarations, but seems to believe good intentions are enough. As the Neville Brothers sang in their haunting 1989 rendition of Bob Dylan’s With God on Our Side:
Oh, the history books tell it
They tell it so well
The cavalries charged, and the Indians fell
The cavalries charged, and the Indians died
Oh, the country was young then, with God on its sideThe Spanish-American War had its day
And the Civil War to us, was soon laid away
And the names of the heroes, I was made to memorize
With guns in their hands, and God on their side
So before we blow out any candles, let us at least be a country grown-up enough to admit whose blood is in the cake.
III. Wide Awake and Seeking Rebirth
But here’s where the candle reignites: there has always been another America firing beneath the official one, like a bunsen burner keeping our casserole warm. Not the United States of conquest and contract, but a stranger, more mystical country, forever convinced it could be born again.
Mitch Horowitz tells this secret history in his first book, Occult America. Before there was a United States, there was a twenty-one-year-old mystic named Johannes Kelpius leading forty German pilgrims to the banks of the Wissahickon Creek outside Philadelphia in 1694 — where they lived in caves and a log tabernacle, scanning the stars through a telescope for signs of a new age. Before there was a Constitution, the Burned-Over District of upstate New York was already boiling with utopian communes and perfectionist experiments, people who believed heaven could be built, here, out of timber, shared property, and sheer spiritual audacity.
Even our currency carries the code. Turn over a dollar bill and you will find this Great Seal — this unfinished pyramid, all-seeing eye, and the Latin motto Annuit Coeptis Novus Ordo Seclorum, “God Smiles on Our New Order of the Ages.” Horowitz notes that the design was begun, fittingly, on July 4th, 1776, under a committee that included Franklin, Jefferson, and Adams. Williamson reads that seal as our unique national scripture, a country declaring at its birth that it was not finished — it was a becoming.
I know what you might be thinking. Say “pyramid and all-seeing eye” and half of us flinch Illuminati — the ostensible millenia-spanning conspiracy at once above-top-secret yet somehow littering AM radio, YouTube rabbit holes, and our gaudiest music videos. Or maybe you’re flinching in the other direction, seeing Egypt’s pyramids inextricably as monuments to imperial power, quarried on the backs of enslaved and conscripted labor, the very Egypt the Hebrew captives fled with Pharaoh’s chariots at their heels. Pyramids, like crosses and other archetypal symbols, can have so many valid readings, including as logos of hidden or imperial force. I’m not asking you to un-see any of these.
But I invite you to consider that the founders may have intended yet a third reading on the Seal: a pyramid deliberately left unfinished, its capstone not resting in human hands but floating free, an eye of Providence hovering over the gap. That is not the tomb of a god-king, but its opposite — a monument confessing its own incompleteness, a nation admitting at its birth that it could not finish itself; worldly achievement is nothing without a blessing it cannot manufacture. The empire-pyramid says we built this and we own it. The unfinished pyramid says we are not done, and we are not God.
One is a boast, but the other is a prayer. I’m interested in the prayer.
This current of holy restlessness runs straight through the people this country tried hardest to break. Horowitz shows us Marcus Garvey harnessing the “mind power” of American metaphysics as a path to Black liberation, teaching disenfranchised people to feel, in his presence, “a spiritual awakening.” He shows us one-time Methodist minister Wallace D. Wattles — the man whose little book The Science of Getting Rich later spawned the infamous manifest-o The Secret — who actually intended his “science of getting rich” as a doctrine of wealth redistribution, mind-power aimed at overthrowing the barons of industry. (This was after he penned a pair of books about Jesus from a New Thought and Socialist point of view) Horowitz shows us Henry Wallace, FDR’s mystically-oriented vice president, staring at that unfinished pyramid and dreaming aloud of a “spiritual New Deal,” a “New Deal of the Ages” that would place “that which is fine in humanity above that which is low and sordid and mean and hateful and grabbing.”
And then there’s a story that sustains the fires of my own practice, the one Jon Woodson tells in To Make a New Race. In 1920s Harlem, a circle of the Renaissance’s most brilliant writers — Jean Toomer, and around him figures like Nella Larsen, Wallace Thurman, George Schuyler, Melvin Tolson — surreptitiously became students of the Greco-Armenian mystic G. I. Gurdjieff.
Gurdjieff’s Fourth Way seeks to integrate heart, mind, and strength into heightened attentiveness, recognizing the field of reciprocal participation he proposes is an all-encompassing ‘Ray of Creation.’ This esoteric wing of the Harlem Renaissance had as their aim nothing less than to dissolve the entire architecture of American racism at the level of consciousness itself. They believed, Woodson writes, that they could “thoroughly transform American culture” — because racism was, in their eyes, a kind of sleep, and their work was to wake people up. Toomer put it as a creed: “Above race values there are culture values. Above culture there are conscious values. The values of Mankind and Consciousness are identical.” They were trying, in the most literal sense, to make a new race — a humanity beyond the lie of division and opression based on race — by evolving a new kind of awareness.
Here’s what I find strange thing about this word — awake. It keeps surfacing in the American story whenever justice is at stake, as if the whole struggle could be reduced to a quarrel between sleepers and the wide-awake.
Eighty years before Toomer’s circle set out to wake America from her race-based trance, a different movement was making wakefulness its literal name. In the spring of 1860, a handful of young dry-goods clerks in Hartford lit torches to escort an antislavery speaker safely home, throwing on black capes to keep the oil from ruining their clothes and calling themselves the Wide Awakes. Within months their ranks swelled to half a million, marching in silent midnight columns from Bangor to San Francisco — a youth movement named, as one of them put it, for their vigilance against the slave system. They were interracial where that was dangerous; a company of two hundred Black men marched as the West Boston Wide Awakes under a banner that read God Never Made a Tyrant or a Slave. And on their membership badge, above the broken shackles, they printed a single open, watching eye. (Wide Awake: The Forgotten Force That Elected Lincoln and Spurred the Civil War by Jon Grinspan is well-worth reading.) A good stirring is hard to put back to sleep: the Wide-Awakes inspired a resurgence in 2020 when pandemic and racial awakening gripped our nation afresh; our attention spans seem far more numbed and overwhelmed now, but this new iteration seeks to keep us alert with art and provocation to this day.
Speaking of our stretched attention: Even more recently, a Brooklyn collective called the Strother School of Radical Attention, together with its wider circle of Friends of Attention, has taken up a similar vigil under a banner they call attention activism — the work of resisting what they name the “fracking of human attention” by coercive digital technologies.
Their 2026 manifesto Attensity! treats our scattered, monetized minds not as a personal failing but as a genuine front in the fight for our humanity, calling us back toward study, sanctuary, and one another. When they reached out to me — fittingly, through the very social media feeds we’re all trying to look up from — I recognized kin.
It’s quite the evolution: the same eye the empire stamped on its money, reclaimed here as the emblem of a people refusing to look away. Vigilance as a spiritual discipline. Attention as resistance. It is the oldest instruction in the Black freedom tradition — stay woke, keep your eyes open — a watchword for staying morally awake in a country forever tempted back to sleep. Reactionary forces in our own moment turning “woke” into a sneer, a slur hurled at anyone who insists on seeing what power would rather we not see, is not an accident. It is exactly what you would expect the sleepers to say. Gurdjieff and Toomer had the diagnosis right; so did the abolitionists, and so did our grandmothers: the first sin is soul-sleep, and the first act of resistance is simply to wake up, and to help each other stay that way.
These phrases provide a shock to my system:
A new order of the ages.
A Spiritual New Deal.
To make a new race.
Befriending Attention.
Wide-Awake.
As I said, I’m not terribly patriotic. But this is the Deep American Dream that fires my moral imagination and political will. The stirring underneath the impoverished American Dream of ‘getting mine.’
It’s like Leonard Cohen sang, full of wit and hope:
It’s coming to America first,
the cradle of the best and of the worst.
It’s here they got the range
and the machinery for change
and it’s here they got the spiritual thirst.It’s here the family’s broken
and it’s here the lonely say
that the heart has got to open
in a fundamental way:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.
Maybe more than a ‘dream,’ it’s the American Wakefulness of being remade — inwardly and outwardly, personally and collectively, all at once.
This is the tradition I am claiming today. This is the country I am lighting her birthday candle for.
Stay tuned for Part Two:The Road Not Taken. A candle needs a night to burn in. And exactly fifty years ago, this country stumbled through a night much like our own: a disgraced president, a lost war, an economy in free-fall, a people wondering if the whole experiment had been a fraud. Out of that darkness came a revival I’ve spent my whole life warming my hands at — and grieving. Because it stood at a fork in the road, and it mostly chose the broad path of spiritual and national destruction. (I’m referring, of course, to the Jesus Movement of the 1970s.) Next time, I’ll take you to that fork, introduce you to the ones who took the road less traveled, and tell you why I think we’re standing in the very same crossroads right now on the road to genuine interdependence. Subscribe here if you don’t already so you don’t miss it.
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Forbidden Hymns | John Francis O’Mara
Troubling the Waters: Navigating Apocalyptic Currents with Jim Perkinson
The American Black Church Experience: A conversation with Dr. Julius Bailey of San Francisco Theological Seminary
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