Inaugural Prayers
Inaugural Prayers
By Clint McCoy
The second time I heard him pray in public, at some now forgotten ecumenical gathering where the faithful had come together across denominational boundaries, I told him that I hoped to grow in my capacity to pray with the faith and beauty and passion he displayed, with the capacity to invite others into my prayers, to be able to give the gift whereby my words could clothe their thoughts, where God could be at work because of me and in spite of me.
Bob inspired me to believe that it was possible to be brought near, or to lead others near, to the Eternal Heart that beats for us. It would be pretentious for me to think that I ever developed that capacity. But because of the way Bob’s public prayers affected me, I found myself hopeful that God might use my prayers in a way that could so gather others close to God that even if they had no faith, and could not imagine hearing the Eternal Heart beat, they might lean closer to hear it.
Several years later, after listening to a faculty member of an English department address parents whose children were entering high school, I wrote her privately, remarking about the way she had used male language so exclusively that it made me uncomfortable. Perhaps my awareness of her language was piqued because it was my daughter who was entering the high school. I understood the teacher’s dilemma, I said in my letter to her: those of us who had been taught to diagram sentences had also been taught that, when it comes to personal pronouns, the default gender is male. I called her attention to Martin Marty’s A Cry of Absence: Reflections on the Winter of the Heart, which I had only recently read at the time. It had become for me a model for inclusivity in language. It was after this white male had read that white male’s book, with its patterned, alternating use of gender, that I appreciated anew the way in which language could embrace the whole of the human race, and felt both good and complete when all were included.
Near the close of the powerful inaugural moment on January 20, 2009, the inclusivity of the Rev. Joseph Lowery’s benediction tugged at my sensibilities. His prayer wrapped arms around me, and brought me into that time and space, and not only me, but generations that had come before and would come after. In that moment I wrote on my facebook page, “I thank God for Joseph Lowery.” And then I clicked out of facebook as the prayer ended. The television coverage turned towards other acts of celebration; I turned the television’s sound down, and went back to work.
Later in the day I discovered comments on my facebook page made by some friends and colleagues. Several spoke disparagingly of Rev. Warren’s prayer of invocation. On the other hand, an evangelical friend pointed out to those who felt that Warren’s prayer was odious, that the spectrum of Christian theology was present in the inauguration, implying that surely the prayers together were a testimony to President Obama’s desire to bring people together, to recognize differences and to respectfully honor them.
I found myself that day writing to my daughter, a leader in her Episcopal congregation, saying that I didn’t suspect the particular words matter to God who must hear beyond the words. I think to myself perhaps God winces when words communicate odious attitudes; perhaps God cringes when the thoughts are selfish. I’m happy to let God separate the wheat from the chaff, even when it comes to the emotional impact of public prayers. And yet, I know also that words are important. In the public square, the words that frame our thoughts matter. In our spiritual lives, words matter. I know this because I’ve known pray-ers who had the capacity to wrap their arms around me with their words, and pull me in. I’ve known writers whose words leveraged and broadened my experience, and led me to yearn for language that embraces others.
Rev. Warren used language that sought to embrace people who were different from him. Muslims could hear an echo of their faith in the heralding of the “compassionate and merciful one.” Jews could recognize the echo of the Shema: “Hear O Israel the Lord your God is One.” He brought heaven and earth together in honoring the memory of Martin Luther King, Jr., and gave the triumphant Kingdom a living frame, imagining Dr. King and the hosts of heaven shouting for joy at the election of Barack Obama and all that it means. He sought to give a thankful voice to America’s promised gifts for all: freedom and justice. He sought to echo in prayer the new President’s own longing and vision for our country – new clarity for our aims, responsibility for our actions, humility in our approaches, civility in our attitudes. He remembered Malia and Sasha, and so honored children everywhere.
Some took offense at the language in Rev. Warren’s opening and closing. Although I know that God is larger than Father, greater than any metaphor, undeniably Father is one term the gospels indicate that Jesus used when he prayed, a somewhat revolutionary, personal attribution that he taught his disciples. The inclusiveness of the invocation’s corpus not-withstanding, people who were not Christian had to climb a high fence to surmount the opening and closing images if they were to have been embraced by that prayer. Some people were left as spiritual by-standers. My guess is that Rev. Warren would equate giving up the distinctiveness of his faith, represented in using the word Father as Jesus taught, with denying his Lord, something he is unwilling to do. From my perspective it is a faithful and limited view, but I believe in time fences can also be broken down without sacrificing integrity.
In the prayerful moment of Joseph Lowery’s benediction, I was caught up in the gravitas of his life experience. He spoke in a way and from a personal perspective that a white male could hardly fathom; and yet at the same time I felt immediately embraced, pulled in, as he prayed. He began with words not his own, and a vision of God that would have embraced Father, but would have been large enough to stretch beyond the family to all of living history. He began with words not his own, which he made his own, and made the nation’s own: “God of our weary years, God of our silent tears, thou who has brought us thus far along the way… Shadowed beneath thy hand may we forever stand -- true to thee, O God, and true to our native land.” The emotional crescendo of that closing lyric, penned more than a century ago by James Weldon Johnson and his brother J. Rosamond, brought to mind the verse of Emma Lazarus’ poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door.” I thought Rev. Lowery, with history and dignity and beauty, wove all Americans into the tapestry of his prayer. A white male, I could pray those words as song. In fact, the words sang in me as he said them. The benediction had, from its beginning, caught me up in prayer. At that moment I wrote on my facebook page, “Thank God for Joseph Lowery,” and hit the enter key. Perhaps I should have written, “Thank God for the Johnson brothers and their vision.”
Later in the evening, when I returned to facebook, I was surprised to read a conversation between two friends that showed up on my page, in which one of them remarked that her cubicle neighbor at work was upset by Lowery’s prayer; her co-worker had asked, “When can I stop feeling bad about being white?” I was perplexed. She felt excluded by an imposed guilt? The benediction elevated not only our nation, but the community of nations. It spoke the hope for stability restored, brokenness mended, wounds healed. It was honest about the seeds of greed and corruption that have been sewn, having produced a whirlwind of havoc and heartbreak. Rev. Lowery prayed for forgiveness and spiritual unity and support, and a willingness to put the community before self. He asked for the capacity to choose love over hate, tolerance over intolerance, inclusion rather than exclusion. Recognizing that most of us don’t live on mountaintops, he prayed for the capacity to take the mountaintop power into our homes, work places, temples, mosques, and churches. He spoke the names of the Obamas, and in speaking the names of the girls, hallowed children and angels alike. He invoked the memory of the saints; he added a little a touch of racial levity that caused some to chuckle and others to frown.
I am surprised at how similar the prayers were in their scope, in the integrity of their composition. In an online article for U.S. News and World Report Dan Gilgoff described the recent history of Jesus-invoking inaugural prayers, indicating that while Rev. Warren’s invocation was inclusive on one hand, Warren could preserve the sense of inclusivity, the way Billy Graham had before him, only by framing his allusion to Jesus in personal terms (“I humbly ask this in the name of the one who changed my life…”). And there is my rub with Rev. Warren: not that Jesus is not a life changer, but that when Warren separated himself from those he was leading in prayer, he fenced me out, not because of his convictions, but because he had stopped praying and had taken up apologetics. It is always a temptation to preach through prayer, addressing those gathered with an aside.
And while I broke into a smile at the conclusion of Rev. Lowery’s benediction, the prayerful moment was broken for me by his turn from praying to preaching: “when black will not be asked to get back; when brown can stick around; when yellow will be mellow; when the red man can get ahead, man; and when white will embrace what is right.” I embrace the sentiments. I subscribe to the vision. I believe God has a sense of humor and can ignore petty poetry at the conclusion of a decorous, holy, breath-taking, wondrous national moment. I can chuckle and get beyond it because so much dignity preceded it. I know there were some who must have loved it.
“It is not right that one prayer should be compared to another, or should diminish another,” I wrote to my daughter that day. I put that in print to her because I knew I had done it: I had elevated Lowery’s benediction over Warren’s invocation. I didn’t want to admit it, but I had. I had done it because the one prayer had wrapped its arms around me for a time as the other had not. But a day’s distance brought me in touch with the grace in the other prayer as well. And while I regret the sexist language of holy exclusivity when it occurs in public prayer, I nevertheless heartily pray the sentiments at the invocation’s core.
In the end, it was that wondrous national moment that had my heart singing. And it was my being in that moment that was the real prayer, in which, out of my own poverty of spirit, I had what one person of faith once called sighs too deep for words. It is an article of my faith – and here I am preaching not praying -- that the Spirit transformed those deep sighs into perfect prayers. And for me that made the inauguration of Barack Obama, with its book-ended prayers, perfect.
Clint McCoy, Executive for Partnerships
Synod of the Northeast, PC(USA)
January 22, 20009
