Inaugural Prayers
Did it seem to anyone else that everywhere you looked in Washington, DC, the last few days, someone was praying? And someone was complaining about said prayers? Opening prayer at Sunday's kickoff concert at Lincoln Memorial. Inauguration day morning prayer service at St. John's Church. Inaugural invocation. Inaugural benediction. Blessing before Presidential luncheon. Prayer for Senator Ted Kennedy. Whoever said liberals banished God from the public sphere must not have been listening. The Dallas Morning News Religion blog had no shortage of topics, spilling over to the Opinion blog and Trailblazers blog.
The Rev. Rick Warren may have been given the prime speaking spot, with the inauguration invocation, but the Rev Joseph Lowery stole the show with the benediction. Long after people forget what Rick Warren said (like immediately), people will remember and smile at Joseph Lowery's closing:
"We ask you to help us work for that day
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 can embrace what is right.
That all those who do justice and love mercy say Amen."
Inaugural Hope
Blogger Bethany, in a post on her blog, The Eleventy Billionth Blog, reasonably points out that, "whether you were pleased with the results of the election or not, ... hope should be the overwhelming response of any Inauguration Day, regardless of who is taking the oath."
Leave it to Trey Garrison, in a comment, to disagree.
"I think the desire to rule over your fellow free men and women is a sickness. I’m further repulsed by the kind of drive it takes to achieve this power at whatever level, from city council to the office of POTUS."Trey Garrison mischaracterizes the American experience. He sees government, not as us, but as them. He sees our President not as a leader of free people, freely chosen, but as an authoritarian ruler of a "nationalist, quasi-police state." He sees American government not as the world's longest-lasting democratic republic, but as anathema to liberty. Garrison says that "It’s far beyond the point that any viable man or party will enact my wishes -- for a government that leaves honest people alone to live as they choose -- so I won’t waste my time trying to reform it."
It must suck to be Trey Garrison. For someone who says he doesn't care what Obama and others of his kind have to say, Garrison sure does spend a lot of time criticizing it. Garrison is not able to rejoice in community, in common cause, in Abraham Lincoln's America and its noble cause of "government of the people, by the people, for the people." Garrison probably doesn't want my sympathy, he probably feels good about himself, but he sure makes depressing reading for others. He is Typhoid Trey, immune from the disease himself, but spreading pessimism and despair to others.
To get the bitter taste of Trey Garrison out of my mouth, I'll close with a quotation offered by Peggy Noonan yesterday. She quoted from William Wordsworth's poem about the French Revolution. The spirit of the early days of that historic time was similar to the feelings that many Americans will take away from yesterday's inauguration of Barack Obama:
"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!"
2 comments:
The kind of adolescent "you're not the boss of me" libertarianism Garrison espouses already seems as dated as the hula hoop.
Dated... and bitter. I suspect the last week has been harder on Trey Garrison than even he recognizes.
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