Independence Day

My father had a way of cutting through things.

Ask him what the Constitution was actually for, and he wouldn’t talk about the founding fathers or the preamble or the Bill of Rights by number.

He’d just say:

“The right to be let alone.”

That was it. That was his whole civics lesson. The freedom to live on your own terms. To be a decent person, contribute to your community, and talk to your God in whatever way and manner seemed fit to you — without anyone else having a vote in the matter.

He wasn’t wrong. Justice Louis Brandeis said almost exactly the same thing in a Supreme Court dissent in 1928 — called it “the right most valued by civilized men.”

Your father may have been quoting a Supreme Court Justice without knowing it. Mine certainly was.

Today is the 250th anniversary of that idea being declared out loud.

Two and a half centuries of trying to live up to it. Getting it right sometimes. Getting it badly wrong other times. Still arguing about it — which is, honestly, exactly what the founders intended.

The argument is the point. The freedom to have it is the whole thing.

WHY IT MATTERS TO YOU TODAY

Today is Independence Day in the United States.

There will be flags and fireworks and arguments about what this country is and what it was supposed to be and whether it ever lived up to either.

All of that is worth having.

But underneath all of it is the original impulse — the stubborn human insistence that a person ought to be able to live their life without someone else’s permission.

If you are a sole practitioner — if you pray alone, or practice alone, or are simply making your way through the spiritual wilderness without a congregation telling you how to do it — you are living that impulse in its most personal form.

You are not harming anyone. You are not asking anyone to join you. You are simply exercising the most fundamental freedom there is:

The right to seek the sacred on your own terms, in your own way, in your own time.

Nobody gets a vote in that. Not the institution that told you that you were doing it wrong. Not the tradition that said you didn’t qualify. Not anyone.

Today, whatever else you do with it — take a moment to recognize that your solitary practice is not a consolation prize for someone who couldn’t make it work inside the walls.

It is freedom. Actual, constitutional, Brandeis-approved, your-father-knew-it-too freedom.

Exercise it without apology.