Tag Archives: Barack Obama

Coming Together

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The inauguration of our new president the other day brought people together in an unusual communion. Something good happened, I think.

I noticed in a letter of St. Ignatius of Antioch to the Ephesians his insistence on that same thing: People have to keep together.”Try to gather together more frequently to give thanks to God and to praise him.” Satan’s powers are undermined and peace is promoted when you do this, the saint says.

The division Ignatius was trying to counter came, at least in part, because the church in his day–early in the 2nd century– faced a vacuum caused by the death of the apostles. The great figures who unified the church were gone, and new figures were emerging, some of them divisive.

New leaders were needed, true. New institutions had to be created. But just as important, people had to come together.

In crucial times, that’s what we all have to do.

“I have a dream”

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Some commentators on television yesterday were asking where President-elect Obama got his oratorical gifts. Spike Lee said he got it  from listening to black preachers, like Doctor Martin Luther King.

Probably true. He’s  listened to some good preachers in his lifetime, as so many other great political orators have. It’s a connection you don’t hear much about, but the preached word can finds its way into many places, into political speeches and political discourse, even into ordinary human conversations and people’s private thoughts.

An article in the New York Times today indicates that Barack Obama reads widely from classics like the Bible, Shakespeare, St. Augustine and from modern poets and novelists as well. He obviously appreciates the power of words.

Today we honor Doctor Martin Luther King, who also knew the power of words. A new book “King’s Dream”  reviewed in The Times yesterday analyzes his famous “I have a dream” speech which he gave at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington in 1963.

The “I have a dream” part of the speech was extemporized. It repeated a theme that ran through many of his sermons before, but was not in his written text that day.

Yet today it’s what most people remember  and the words are etched into our national consciousness. King’s  wife Coretta thought it ” flowed from higher places.”

Sermons, homelies, words. They’re so important. At their best, they make the Word known and call for his kingdom to come.

Barack Obama’s  inaugural address tomorrow will be the nearest thing we have in politics to a sermon.