U.S. president Barack Obama’s inauguration speech was a faith exercise.
He said America’s turnaround is not going to happen just because Obama willed it. Change, he insisted, will have to begin in every American.
What impressed me was his conviction that it would. I think I know where that faith in his people comes from.
I recently ran across a book that he wrote during his community organizing days in Chicago. It’s called After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois.
He tells about a woman who asked him why, if he had a law degree, he was spending his time doing community organizing.
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“The answer…is in these people,” he told her. “In helping a group of housewives sit across the negotiating table with the mayor of America’s third largest city and hold their own, or a retired steelworker stand before a TV camera and give voice to the dreams he has for his grandchild’s future, one discovers the most significant and satisfying contribution organizing can make. …Organizing teaches as nothing else does the beauty and strength of everyday people.”
In my work with rural churches and communities, that’s been my experience too. I’ve found that the true poverty of communities in crisis is not the loss of jobs, or local institutions, or young people – bad as those are. Nor is it bankruptcy, hunger or even homelessness.
It’s the loss of hope.
It’s the paralyzing blindness that creeps over people, preventing them from seeing and mobilizing the amazing resources among them.
The truth is, most of a community’s wealth is invisible. It includes our minds, which are enormously powerful and creative generators of ideas; our connections with people, institutions and organizations that we can partner with and lean on; our collective lifetimes of learned skill and experience; things we’d be willing to lend or give to the community’s use; the wisdom of the elderly and the fresh eyes of youth.
None of these resources are affected by mine closures or cattle prices. They just have to be connected in imaginative ways for new economic and social purposes.
The tears I’ve seen in the eyes of those who hear Obama are mostly not admiration for who Obama is. He’s relatively unknown. They’re not for what he’s done.
The tears are for the gift of hope he’s given them – a re-awakening to the possibilities in America’s heritage and its people. When people hope, they are willing to try. There is energy to work together and plan for something new. Some of what they come up with will fail or be ill-advised. But some will succeed and real growth will happen.
Obama’s inauguration ended with a benediction by reverend Joseph Lowery. He connected Obama’s faith in the American people to his own faith in a God who dwells most deeply in the darkest places and who chooses to use the distressed, discouraged and downtrodden to change the world.
It gave me hope for Canada too.
Cam Harder is associate professor of systematic theology at the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Saskatoon.
