My wife and I headed to a small gathering on the beach near our home for the Fourth of July fireworks. Over our shoulders, we sensed a storm moving in, so the pyrotechnics crew launched early, trying to beat the deluge by a matter of minutes. We got our rockets’ red glare, our bombs bursting in air, right on schedule, and then hustled for the car as the sky turned a deep blue-purple, the color of a bruise under your skin the day after you banged your hand with a hammer. We hadn’t even reached our car before the real show arrived. Rolling thunder, accompanied by bolts of lightning, was very, very frightening, as if it meant business. The rain came down in sheets, and everyone got drenched.
The storm brought much-needed rain to our parched, drought-stricken New England summer. Then, 24 hours later, we settled in for two days of wet weather, with 5 more inches. Temperatures dropped to 64. Last week, we sweltered in the mid-90s. “Even the weather is captured by the cultural complex of extremes,” I thought.
Thomas Singer and Samuel Kimbles took Carl Jung’s idea about individuals and asked what happens when we apply it to groups. Jung spent a career mapping the personal complex, that stubborn cluster of memory and emotion that hijacks a person’s behavior without asking permission first. Singer and Kimbles wondered if nations carry the same kind of luggage. They called the result a cultural complex, defined as an emotionally charged gathering of ideas and images that cluster around an archetypal core. In plain English: a cultural complex works the same way a personal one does, except the patient is an entire nation.
It has a history and old injuries that were never properly examined. Nobody set the country down for fifty years of Tuesday afternoons on a couch. So the wound just waits, like a splinter under the skin, until something touches it.
Watch what happens at a football game when a player kneels during the anthem. The reaction is almost never actually about the player’s knee. It is about a flag that has absorbed a century of unexamined feeling, war dead, and immigrant hope, and Jim Crow and Iwo Jima all folded into one piece of cloth, and when that cloth gets touched wrong, the response arrives before anyone has time to think. That is the complex talking, not the citizen. Singer and Kimbles would say the symbol has been activated. I would say it looks a lot like a man snapping at his wife over a dish left in the sink, when what he is really furious about runs deeper. Same wiring, bigger flag.
That is the trouble with a cultural complex. It does not ask you to think. It grabs you and beckons you to salute, or else.
That aspect of American civil religion baffles me. How can a symbol meant to signify “we are together” almost instantly become a message of “agree with me and hate the others”? This isn’t patriotism; it’s a complex emotional reaction. Singer’s entire effort has been to help us see that a country can be as unconscious and reactive as a person on a therapy couch.
Reinhold Niebuhr articulated a similar idea fifty years before Singer coined the term. In The Irony of American History, Niebuhr’s central point was that America was not uniquely evil; rather, the issue was almost the opposite. He argued that our greatest threat isn’t enemies but our belief in our innocence. A nation convinced of its inherent goodness might justify almost any action as virtuous. An unexamined wound doesn’t remain silent; it seeks someone to blame.
In stormy times, the whole task of life and faith is to discern which things deserve our devotion. For me, that’s not an uncritical process. Discerning who we are and who we have been as a nation is the ultimate act of patriotism. I’m struck by how we are increasingly moving into two camps. One heralds all the virtues of our 250 years, while the other sees only a horrific and brutal history. The truth is, we have been a heroic and inventive nation while simultaneously enslaving people and demonizing others. Both can be true. Both are true realities of the uniquely American experience.
Years ago, I faced a challenge in a congregation I served about the proper place for the US flag in worship. Many meetings were dominated by ideas, opinions, and mostly strong emotions. Members from different perspectives passionately shared their views on whether the flag should be in that space. At the time, I lacked the tools to grasp the underlying forces at play. Now, I recognize it as a manifestation of complex emotions triggered in people, almost as if they could not control themselves. That small debate offers a glimpse of the larger discussion still to come. If I had to revisit that experience, I’d lead the congregation through a more thoughtful approach centered around a spiritual trek into our individual and collective complexes.
In the storms of our current crisis of democracy, we are all circling a question. What to do with our own national unexamined grief? Yes, grief lies beneath this national identity. Like a parent who lost a child and never said goodbye, or a middle-aged worker experiencing the injustice of economic dislocation. Grief over losses of many kinds lies beneath our collective complex. There’s a blue and purple bruise hanging over it all.
We live in times when claiming any word can be fraught with discomfort or outrage. Patriotism and Christianity are two examples for me. These words can be tied to forces of cruelty and ignorance. But they are also connected to liberation and graciousness. Yes, there may have been times when embracing these words was easier, but those are not our current times. We live in a storm, and what’s required is to give those words new meaning.
The rain broke the drought. It also dropped the temperature by thirty degrees in a day, which felt less like relief than a small violence. That’s what a real storm does. It doesn’t ask permission, and it doesn’t clean up after itself.
We cannot simply opt out of patriotism, nor can we take an easy path with it. The goal isn’t to defend or dismiss the flag, but to reflect on it as you would an old wound, asking what it’s protecting and what it fears. This process is slower and less satisfying than choosing a side. But sorting through is what love actually asks of us, in a marriage and in a country. Some nights, it looks like standing in the rain with the person you married, soaked through, fireworks echoing around, and staying anyway.
More to Come,
Previously Published on The Notebooks of James Hazelwood
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