Election and Exceptionalism

The conclusion to last night's Presidential Address from the Oval Office regarding the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill Crisis:

"Each year, at the beginning of shrimping season, the region's fishermen take part in a tradition that was brought to America long ago by fishing immigrants from Europe. It's called 'The Blessing of the Fleet,' and today it's a celebration where clergy from different religions gather to say a prayer for the safety and success of the men and women who will soon head out to sea - some for weeks at a time.

"The ceremony goes on in good times and in bad. It took place after Katrina, and it took place a few weeks ago - at the beginning of the most difficult season these fishermen have ever faced. And still, they came and they prayed. For as a priest and former fisherman once said of the tradition, 'The blessing is not that God has promised to remove all obstacles and dangers. The blessing is that He is with us always, 'a blessing that's granted '...even in the midst of the storm.'

"The oil spill is not the last crisis America will face. This nation has known hard times before and we will surely know them again. What sees us through - what has always seen us through - is our strength, our resilience, and our unyielding faith that something better awaits us if we summon the courage to reach for it. Tonight, we pray for that courage. We pray for the people of the Gulf. And we pray that a hand may guide us through the storm towards a brighter day. Thank you, God Bless You, and may God Bless the United States of America."

In my estimation Barack Obama once again gives insight into his personal religion, while also giving a religious gloss to the general situation--at least its solution. He offers a complex traditional equation: generic faith, national courage, and trust in a guiding and steadfast Providence.

I suspect that faith, courage and trust are principles significant to Mr. Obama's sense of Self. Perhaps his seeming equanimity, which some criticize as a lack of passion, relates to a core belief of being elected (in a religious sense) and in communion with his God.

And I further suspect that those who disparage him by mockingly calling him "The Messiah" somehow share a similar outlook and ironically project notions of Divine election and exceptionalism on him. This is to say that of recent political personalities, Mr. Obama is the one who, in popular connsciousness, seems "chosen" to fill his office and shape a national destiny--for better or worse depending on your political outlook.

Where's the Love?

Then: Joe

It is one of the most poignant experiences of my ministry.

The setting: a bleak and decrepit little town in Western Pennsylvania not far from New Castle, circa 1980. The town had been an enclave for East European immigrants who worked the steel mills of the region when the steel industry was booming. It had become a place of closed storefronts and old folks left behind.

Joe, the deceased was a more recent immigrant, part of the jetsam of World War II from the region of contentious ethnic groups that became Yugoslavia. He had an old house and a dumpling shaped girlfriend who’d lived with him, a scandal in this insular community.

His only relative, a niece who lived in California with Unitarian ties, had called me in Youngstown. Niece, the girl friend, and I sat in the living area of Joe’s modest home, in the gray twilight of a bleak winter’s afternoon, drinking his homemade wine from cream cheese glasses. The strong wine warmed the belly and lessened the gloom. The niece told Joe’s story.

As the war progressed, Joe’s village was taken over by an unfriendly group of guerillas who threatened to raze and kill. Joe made an impassioned plea for mercy, declaring “Aren’t we all brothers?” His plaintive appeal saved the village.

After the war, in his new American town, Joe and a few other locals had a dispute with the town’s Catholic Church and were excommunicated. As a result they couldn’t be buried in the church’s consecrated graveyard (not to mention buried by a Unitarian minister!). But they’d made plans. The excommunicants had bought a parcel adjacent to the graveyard and as they died, one after another, the little graveyard filled up. The Church had retaliated, erecting an ugly barbed wire fence where the unconsecrated land began. The message was unmistakable, the symbolism as obvious as a crown of thorns.

As I pronounced the words by the graveside, before a handful of dispassionate people, I looked past the granite tombstones embedded with medallion portraits of the deceased, to the barbed wire fence, and beyond to the so-called consecrated land and stolid church. Clots of snow fell from a leaden sky and wind cut my cheeks.

Were the tears in my eyes from weather. Or were they from an aching grief for the inhumanity of a religion too proud of itself to simply love as its prophet had so clearly commanded?

Now: Janine

I remembered Joe’s burial and the enduring image of the barbed wire fence when I recently learned of an Edgewater woman, Janine Denomme, a lifelong Catholic of prodigious involvement with her Church who was denied, in no uncertain terms, the final rites of her beloved faith, because she had audaciously been ordained as a priest by a dissident Catholic group, Roman Catholic Womenpriests. (She was weeks away from death by advancing cancer.) The hierarchy declared she had self-excommunicated.

Once again I look across a barbed wire fence, musing on the spiritual irony of the actions of a Church founded on the principle of transcendent love.

Paul once declared that love trumps faith: “Faith, hope, and love abide, these three…but the greatest of these is love.”

Where’s the love?