What and Who Do We Belong To?
July 5, 2026 | Prepared for the Spiritual Feast
I grew up putting my hand over my heart every morning before school started. I did it before I had any idea what the words meant, before I knew what a republic was, or what indivisible meant, or why we were pledging to a piece of cloth. The gesture came first. My hand on my chest. My body committed before my mind caught up.
I've been thinking about that lately. About how allegiance works. About what it means to belong, and to what, and to whom, and whether those things are chosen or inherited or simply assumed.
The word allegiance comes from the Old French liege, the sworn bond between a lord and a vassal. Feudal. Hierarchical. Not chosen so much as assigned by birth and enforced by power. You belonged to your lord the way a field belongs to its owner. The pledge was less a spiritual act than a legal one, a claim made on your body and your labor.
We have dressed it up considerably since then. But what is underneath still hurts. In 1982, I read the book "The Ugly American," and then my family spent a couple of weeks traveling in Europe, where we sometimes claimed we were Canadian because we were ashamed to admit we were American. I noticed that complicated feeling again in recent months here in Portugal, where I now also belong. My passport says what it says, and... there's more.
But here is what I notice: the hand still goes to the heart. Even when the words are compelled, the gesture reaches toward something that feels like it should be sacred. Like the body knows that belonging is serious business. Like we are always, underneath the patriotism and the performance, reaching for something real, some actual web of obligation and love that holds us.
So today I want to ask what we are actually pledging when we do that.
Vern Barnet, a UU minister and interfaith teacher, wrote a different pledge. Not to a flag, not to a nation, but to the earth and all life — the fields and streams, the mountains and seas, the forests and deserts. One world, one creation, one home, indivisible. Endangered, he says, by greedy consumption. Degraded by faithlessness.
Faithlessness.
Not ignorance. Not carelessness. Faithlessness. As if the ecological crisis is, at its root, a failure of fidelity. A breaking of covenant with the living world that holds us. We were claimed by this earth, by soil and water and the long, patient work of evolution, and we have not held up our end.
That's a theological claim, not just an environmental one. It says: you belong to something. You always did. The question is whether you have been faithful to it.
And then there is Valarie Kaur, Sikh activist, lawyer, daughter of California farmers, who's declaration of Revolutionary Love is not a pledge to a nation or a landscape, but to people. She vows to treat them as siblings. To fight for a world where all can flourish. She answers Mr. Roger's question "Who is my neighbor?" with "you all are, especially the oppressed and downtrodden and overlooked."
She vows to love even opponents, not to agree with them, not to excuse harm, but to refuse to let hatred reshape the one who resists it.
And she vows to love herself. To protect her capacity for joy. To honor her ancestors whose bodies, breath, and blood call her to courage.
We choose to perceive this darkness not as the darkness of the tomb, but of the womb.
Kaur is not saying it will all be fine. She is saying: I am bound to this. I have made a covenant. I will push.
Barnet and Kaur are doing the same thing, on different scales. They are naming what they belong to, past the nation, past the performance, past the coerced pledge, and they are making it explicit. Saying it out loud. Putting a hand on the heart and meaning it.
That act, the naming, the vowing, the this is mine and I am its, is what faith looks like in practice. Not belief in an outcome. Not confidence that it will work. Commitment in the face of not knowing. Allegiance as a spiritual practice.
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Potawatomi botanist and writer, describes a grammar of animacy, the idea that the land is not an it but a thou. That belonging to a place means being in relationship with it, accountable to it, changed by it. You don't own the land. You are in covenant with it. That is a different kind of pledge entirely.
And if that's true of land, it's true of people too. The ones you belong to are the ones you are accountable to. The ones who can call you on your faithlessness. The ones whose flourishing is bound up with yours.
Today is July 5th. Yesterday the USA celebrated itself, its founding, its flag, its story. And there are things worth celebrating in that story, and things that story has buried, and most of us know both of those things are true at once.
But today, one day later, I want to ask the harder question. Not are you proud to be an American, but what are you actually pledged to? When you put your hand on your heart, right now, if you like, just as a gesture, just to feel where it lands:
What rises up?
Is it a flag? A nation? A particular vision of freedom that includes some people and not others?
Or is it the earth: the ground beneath you, the water you drink, the air that moves through you?
Or is it faces: specific people, communities, the ones whose names Kaur speaks aloud, the ones most likely to be abandoned by the pledges we make to abstractions?
Or is it something older and harder to name: belonging that runs back through your ancestors and forward through those who you love, a thread of obligation that was never about borders at all?
The hand on the heart is an old gesture. Older than any nation. It says: I am here. This matters. I am not neutral.
May you know what you are pledged to.
May your allegiance be worthy of the lives it touches.
May faithfulness, not hope, but faithfulness to what matters, be the ground you thrive on.
May you belong to something real.
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