Today felt like history in the raw, start to finish. Everyday is history, and for some more than others: but there are moments that resonate for such large groups, an entire country, culture, that you can’t help but stop, pause, catch your breath.
Pre-dawn today began with news of terrorist attacks in Kuwait, Tunisia, France. Horrific.
A few hours later, the news of the Supreme Court decision on same-sex marriage came through. It was so big, I couldn’t quite absorb it. Then, there Obama was in the Rose Garden, speaking with emotion of the decision. Like a thunderbolt, he ad libbed away from the prepared notes, sometimes justice is like a thunderbolt, arriving suddenly, almost shockingly after long slow and steady effort.
Mid-afternoon, in the car driving on the radio I heard Obama again, now in Charleston delivering the eulogy at Clementa Pinckney’s funeral. Pinckney was the 41-year old pastor of the historic Charleston AME church, murdered along with eight parishioners at a weekly Bible Study which that week had welcomed a stranger, a young white man, into their midst.
This eulogy, well it was something. Extraordinary. Obama can speak, for sure, and he knows his audience. This, was something else. I was mesmerized. Watch and listen here.
He spoke of the pastor’s goodness and legacy, of grace, of lives given to service. And then, the extraordinary became, well, superordinary. Obama began to sing Amazing Grace. Listening on the radio I wasn’t sure for a moment, could this be, the President? Really?
And there, on this beautiful early summer day, the extraordinary and the historic transcended to something else. I am just old enough, and lived just long enough in the South, to have not thought the country in 2008 was ready, quite, to elect Obama. When it happened, it felt like a fairy tale had come true. Good things do happen. History, like a river, flows on.
There today on the radio I heard Obama spontaneously break into Amazing Grace, during the eulogy of a black man from Charleston who was preaching at 13, became a pastor at 18 and a state senator at 23. On a day which began with murderous terrorist attacks several time zones east and proceeded to the Supreme Court’s historic decision and rolled on. Hate is so powerful, I thought, but love, love will always triumph. It may take time, long or short. But it will always win.
This is a photo that stands on my desk, totem, mantra, reminder.
I took it in July 1984, graffiti on the Wall in East Berlin; five years later that mightiest wall of oppression and resistance was coming down.
Today, it felt like a few more walls came down, worn away slowly by steady waves lapping at them day by day, til finally all at once they come down, crumble from the force of grace, of love.