The nation that once dreamed of being a new hope, a new haven, for the world, has become instead one of the two great bullies of the world who blunder and bluster their way toward unspeakable horror. Maybe that's the way it inevitably is with all nations. They're so huge and complex. By definition they're so exclusively concerned with their own self-interest conceived in the narrowest terms that they have no eye for holiness, of all things, no ears to hear the great command to be saints, no heart to break at the thought of what this world could be -- the friends we could be as nations, the common problems we could help each other solve, all the human anguish we could join together to heal.

You and I are the eyes and ears. You and I are the heart. It's to us that Peter's letter is addressed, "so put away all guile and insincerity and envy and all slander," he says. No shophar sounds or has to sound. It's as quiet as the scratching of a pen, as familiar as the sight of our own faces in the mirror.

We've always known what was wrong with us. The malice in us even at our most civilized: the way we focus on the worst in the people we know and then rejoice when the disasters overtake them that we believe they so richly deserve. Our insincerity: our phoniness, the masks we do our real business behind. The envy: the way other people's luck can sting like wasps. And all slander: all the ways we have of putting each other down, making such caricatures of each other that we treat each other like caricatures, even when we love each other. All this infantile nonsense and nastiness. Put it away! Peter says. Before nations can be holy, you must be holy. Grow up to salvation. For Christ's sake, grow up.

People at my stage of the game -- 58 come July? For us isn't it a little too late? People at your stage of the game? For you isn't it a little too early. No, I don't think so. Never too late, never too early, to grow up, to be holy. We've already tasted it -- tasted the kindness of the Lord, Peter says. That's such a haunting thought.

I think you can see it in our eyes sometimes. Just the way you can see something more than animal in animals' eyes. I think you can sometimes see something more than human in human eyes, even your eyes and mine. I think we belong to holiness even when we can't believe it exists anywhere, let alone in ourselves. That's why everybody left that crowded shopping-mall movie theater in such unearthly silence. It's why it's hard not to be haunted by that famous photograph of the only things that Ghandi owned at his death: his glasses and his watch, his sandals, a bowl and spoon, a book of songs. What does any of us own to match such riches as that?

Children that we are, even you and I, who have given up so little, know in our hearts not only that it's more blessed to give than to receive but that it's also more fun -- the kind of holy fun that wells up like tears in the eyes of saints, the kind of blessed fun in which we lose ourselves and at the same time begin to find ourselves, to grow up into the selves we were created to become.