Ancient Truth | Modern Sound

This is my last week as a Brit.  On Wednesday I go through the swearing in ceremony and become a citizen of the United States.  Growing up in the seventies my view of America and what it was all about was defined by TV shows like “Starsky & Hutch” and “Dallas”.  It is a sobering thought to think that these are the prisms through which the world looks into America.  My dad, big Tam, liked America too.  But it was the land of Western stories of Louis L’Amour that he liked.  My dad was born too late – he would have been Rooster Cogburn in another life – he was born to be an upright man who would bring order from chaos, sixgun in hand.  Because of him, to this day, I can’t resist (who can) a good Western.  Despite being brought up in a Scottish mining village, me becoming an American seems more like predestination than a cosmic fluke.

 Even so, this has been a good last week to be a Brit.  The Brits had their best Olympics for 100 years.  Actually, exactly 100 years, because it was in 1908 in London the last time Great Britain was this great at the Olympics.  Even that is a bit of a cheat however.  In London in 1908 the British team fielded over a third of all competitors and there were a few Olympic events that year where the entire field was British.  So, I think it is fair to say that 2008 Beijing is the greatest ever Olympics as far as Great Britain is concerned.  On reading the stories of the athletes in the newspapers I am struck with a change in the athletes which I think represents a change in the culture.  We in Britain, especially Scotland, have been famous for the plucky effort which comes up famously short of success.  As a nation, we flatter to deceive.  It seems that these are not the Brits of 2008 however.  These current Olympians have a decidedly different outlook.  One cyclist was described as an athlete who “doesn’t do silver”.  Another went all out on the last corner and fell going for gold rather than settling for silver.  Getting nothing was better than just settling for second best.  I like them.  They are winners and they have a lot to teach us.  Just this week I was in a meeting at work where one of my colleagues suggested that the bid for work we had submitted was “competitive”.  Trying to emulate the British Olympians I told him being competitive wasn’t good enough I wanted to win.   On Wednesday all this will change in a way I am not sure of.  I will in some way stop being British and start being an American.   Since 1991 it has been like being a stranger in a strange land as I wander around trying to figure out the customs of another place and another culture.  I have lived in Houston and I still have not worked it out – maybe that is the point of course.  Maybe you only figure it all out at the end like the crime novels I like so much.  When I think about it becoming an American is a bit like becoming a Christian was for me.  I was close enough to the church as a kid to kind of know what it was about in a peripheral way but there was still a lot that I wasn’t familiar with.  I had to learn (am learning of course) to be a Christian.  I couldn’t count on those vaguely remembered stories from Sunday school; I had to make them my own.  I had watched the church in action and admired it but I only understood it when I became involved in it.  I didn’t know what forgiveness was until my wife forgave me.  I didn’t know what righteousness was until I saw it in the life of my mother in law.  And so, in living and working amongst other Christian people I gradually came to know what it means to be a Christian.  No Damascus moment for me.  Instead more like Pilgrims Progress, a journey yet to be finished. So, over my years living in here my view of Americathrough the lenses of “Dallas” and “Starsky & Hutch” has obviously changed.  I have learned to deeply appreciate Jefferson and Washington and the constitution.  The constitution, for example, applies to all who set foot in these lands, not just citizens.  That seems to me to point to how the framers of the constitution knew that this would be a special place that would offer unique solace to those who arrived here.  It did then and still does.  Do you know of another document like this – I don’t.   

A long time ago - in fact before there was a Great Britain - Jon Donne the English Elizabethan poet and Bishop wrote a poem to commemorate his marriage to Ann, the love of his life.  He called her a “new found land” which was the phrase of course that was used to describe the new continent across the sea.  He, a Brit, found in Ann what I found in Karen, a place of beauty, mystery, and danger, untamed by any man.  Like America.  So, this week I move from alien to citizen, Brit to American.  Thanks for the open arms.