And yet we have our moments. Every once in a while, I think, we actually long to be what out of darkness and mystery we are called to be; when we hunger for holiness even so, even if we'd never use the word. There come moments, I think, even in the midst of all our cynicism and worldliness and childishness, maybe especially then, when there's something about the saints of the earth that bowls us over a little.

I mean real saints. I mean saints as men and women who are made not out of plaster and platitude and moral perfection but out of human flesh in all its richness and quirkiness for the simple reason that there's nothing else around except human flesh to make saints out of. I mean saints as human beings who have their rough edges and their blind spots like everybody else but whose lives are transparent to something so extraordinary that every once in a while it stops us dead in our tracks.

I remember going to see the movie Ghandi when it first came out, for instance. We were the usual kind of noisy, restless Saturday night crowd as we sat there waiting for the lights to dim with our popcorn and soda pop, girl friends and boy friends, our legs draped over the backs of empty seats; but by the time the movie came to a close with the flames of Ghandi's funeral pyre filling the entire screen, there wasn't a sound or a movement in that whole theater, and we filed out of there -- teenagers and senior citizens, blacks and whites, swingers and squares -- in as deep and telling a silence as I've ever been part of or has ever been part of me.

"Like newborn babes, long for the pure spiritual milk that by it you may grow up to salvation, for you have tasted of the kindness of the Lord," Peter wrote. We had tasted it. In the life of that little bandy-legged, bespectacled man with his spinning wheel and his bare feet and whatever he had in the way of selfless passion for peace, and passionate opposition to every form of violence, we had all of us tasted something that at least for a few moments that Saturday night made every other kind of life seem empty, something that at least for the moment I think every last one of us longed for the way in a far country you yearn for home.

"Ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests, a holy nation." Can a nation be holy? It's hard to imagine it. Some element of a nation maybe, some remnant or root. "A shoot coming forth from the stump of Jesse," as Isaiah put it, "that with righteousness shall judge the poor and decide with equity for the meek of the earth."

The 18th century men and women who founded this nation dreamed just such a high and holy dream for us, too, and gave their first settlements over here names to match. New Haven, New Hope, they called them -- names that almost bring tears to your eyes if you listen to what they are saying, or once said. Providence, Concord, Salem, which is shalom, the peace that passeth all understanding.

Dreams like that die hard, and please God there's still some echo of them in the air around us. But the way things have turned out, the meek of the earth are scared stiff at the power we have to blow the earth to smithereens a hundred times over and at our failure year after year after year to work out with our enemies a way of limiting that ghastly power. In this richest of nations, the poor go to bed hungry, if they're lucky enough to have a bed, because after the staggering amounts we spend to defend ourselves, there isn't enough left over to feed the ones we're defending, to help give them decent roofs over their heads, decent schools for their kids, decent care when they're sick and old.