Louisville Process Theology Network

Obama's Religion, II

Feb 13, 2009

We?’ve read in biographies and histories about Abraham and Mary Lincoln?’s grief on the deaths of two of their children. Through their grieving they sought to better understand the meaning of young lives cut short by diseases and other circumstances beyond our control.

Lincoln knew this kind of grief too well. He had previously suffered the premature deaths of his mother and sister. Barak Obama has also experienced this pain in his own mother?’s premature death.

(Page 224) "..... (My) beliefs were driven home two years ago when I flew down to Birmingham, Alabama, to deliver a speech at the city?’s Civil Rights Institute.

The institute is right across the street from Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, the site where in 1963, four young children ---- Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, and Denise McNair ---- lost their lives when a bomb planted by white supremacists exploded during Sunday school....

How could (their families) endure the anguish unless they were certain that some purpose lay behind their children?’s murders, that some meaning could be found in immeasurable loss? ....

My thoughts turned to my mother and her final days, after cancer had spread through her body and it was clear there was no coming back. She had admitted to me during the course of her illness that she was not ready to die; the suddenness of it all had taken her by surprise, as if the physical world she loved so much had turned on her, betrayed her.

And although she fought valiantly, endured the pain and the chemotherapy with grace and good humor to the very end, more than once I saw fear flash across her eyes.

More than fear of pain or fear of the unknown, it was the sheer loneliness of death that frightened here, I think --- it was the notion that on this final journey, on this last adventure, she would have no one to fully share her experience with her, no one who could marvel with her at her body?’s capacity to inflict pain on itself, or laugh at the stark absurdity of life once one?’s hair starts falling out and one?’s salivary glands shut down.

I carried such thoughts with me as I made my speech. Later that night, back home in Chicago, I sat at the dinner table, watching Malia and Sasha as they laughed and bickered and resisted their string beans before their mother chased them up the stairs to their baths.

Alone in the kitchen washing the dishes, I imagined my two girls growing up, and I felt the ache that every parent must feel at one time or another, that desire to snatch up each moment of your child?’s presence and never let go --- to preserve every gesture, to lock in for all eternity the sight of their curls or the feel of their finger clasped around yours.

I thought of Sasha asking once what happened when you die --- 'I don?’t want to die, Daddy,' she had added matter of factly --- and I hugged her and said, 'You?’ve got a long, long way before you have to worry about that,' which had seemed to satisfy her.

I wondered whether I should have told her the truth, that I wasn?’t sure what happens when we die, any more than I was sure of where the soul resides or what existed before the Big Bang.

Walking upstairs, though, I knew what I hoped for ?– that my mother was together in some way with those four little girls, capable in some fashion of embracing them, of finding joy in their spirits.

I know that tucking in my daughters that night, I grasped a little bit of heaven."