Rick Warren’s Prayer and Mine [a guest post]

editor’s note: i received this from patrick after one of my warren invocation diatribes. while i personally remain hot and bothered by his inclusion, patrick makes a lot of excellent — and loving — points in his meditation on this subject. i want to thank him for allowing getangrywithme to share his writing with our readers. jackie

A number of people have asked me to get all hot and bothered by Obama’s invitation to Rick Warren. Here’s why I’m not:

Though the idea of listening to Rick Warren give an invocation at Obama’s inauguration doesn’t fill me with unalloyed ecstasy, I’m taking a wait-and-see attitude about this for several reasons. During the election Warren invited Obama to speak at his church, and took considerable heat for it from other fundamentalists. That suggests Warren is a person with whom bridges might be built. Obama is returning Warren’s invitation, albeit in a very public way that some of us are less than comfortable with. But this gesture is precisely what Obama SAID he would do, this kind of thing. I mean in the sense that he promised a new paradigm in which people who disagree intensely can still talk and relate and live alongside one another without spewing bile or calling down fire from heaven upon one another. “No Drama Obama,” remember? Partly what this wonderful epithet means is that when people are getting their underwear in a fearful wad with old anger, Obama won’t be. He doesn’t seem to take personally any of the terrible challenges we face; his temperament is made of some noncombustible stuff different from what most of the rest of us are made of. This is a person who can create openings where none seemed possible, and that’s precisely why I voted for him.

I’m not saying anger against Warren or people who think like him wasn’t or isn’t justified, but there comes a point where you’ve got to drop the story and start trying to relate with people who don’t agree with you—especially anyone who makes respectful gestures toward a sane discourse, as Warren has. It’s the same in any relationship: do we want to be “right,” or do we want peace, a real peace, in which everybody is allowed to feel and enjoy their own worth? Obviously it isn’t going to be easy: look at the Middle East—how far has clinging to their stories gotten them there? Somebody’s got to try something DIFFERENT, and I think that’s what Obama is doing. Love takes risks like this, inviting an enemy to the table. No doubt it’s going to be uncomfortable for everyone, but what surprises me is that anyone on the left thought we’d have no brave emotional and spiritual work to do, on our own parts, to make peace. Did we expect all the compromise would have to be on the other side?

It’s no good asking Obama to fix things, if we’re not willing to make peace ourselves. We’re going to have to stretch outside our comfort zones, and this gesture of Obama’s is just a little hint of how and in what ways we may need to do it. Obama hasn’t asked us to break bread with Hitler, and he didn’t give Warren a post in the cabinet. He asked Warren to stand up and read a prayer on a day many of us consider a new beginning. To anyone who is shocked or hurt by this gesture, I ask you to consider that this is precisely the kind of new beginning Obama promised: one in which old, intractable angers might gradually be put aside, so that suffering might decrease. But this can only happen if we give Obama—or someone, anyone—a chance to have some new ideas and act upon them. The old ideas, good as some of them were or we thought they were, have gotten us—here, where we need to take a deep breath and start over.

Let’s drop even the story of how hard we worked to get Obama elected, and what we therefore deserve to have happen. Yes, of course we worked hard. So what? FOR what? So we could stay locked in the same karmic dyad of Red against Blue? So we could triumph over Red and grind them into the earth the way they’ve ground us? If so, we voted for a delusion, because there can’t be peace among people who aren’t willing to imagine peace, or to extend themselves for peace. And peace doesn’t mean my enemy crushed and humiliated, which is precisely the seed of endless war.

We may have to soil our precious doctrinal purity for peace, and to me that’s OK: it isn’t going to kill us to listen to Rick Warren read a prayer. Let’s judge the eventual Obama tree by its fruits, and let’s give it a chance to bear some fruit. I voted for him, not because I thought he would do everything I want him to do, but because I thought he might have some ideas, some methods, some skillful means, that are even better than anything that might have occurred to me. Let’s watch the man work, and see what we can learn about him and ourselves.

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