When my mother and I were visiting my father in the CCU in the final couple of days of his extended illness, I turned around and was startled by a tall man standing in the doorway. With the light from the hallway behind him, he looked like an angel. And turned out to be one.
He had been watching us for some time, I guess, and didn't want to intrude.
It was Mama's preacher. He had already been to St. Louis to be with the family of a congregant who was having a transplant of some sort, but he spent the night in the hospital with us in Memphis (120 miles from his home and family), then went the next morning to see someone who was having heart surgery across town, but was back in the evening.
And he was there when Daddy died later that night. To offer compassion, comfort and counsel.
The preacher's political and social views line up with Rick Warren's, but that did not stop me from valuing his presence and support, even though I'm a middle-aged openly-gay man who's unabashedly liberal.
That’s why this whole brouhaha about a conservative preacher delivering a prayer at the inauguration of the century baffles me. He did, after all, host a forum for the two candidates to talk about what they believed.
People are more than their political views. And many on the left make the mistake of not seeing beyond those political differences to see the value of a person.
2 days after we buried my father, I took my mother to church and saw her preacher in action. And he’s good: charismatic in the pulpit, preaching a message of hope, rather than the hell-fire-and-brimstone sermons I heard growing up.
For a small town in West Tennessee, it's grown into a mega-church. And I can see why. People always will take hope when it’s offered. While I didn't agree with everything he said that Sunday, I agreed with most of it.
He's a good man, an intelligent man. We don't see eye to eye on everything, but I'm sure we could many interesting conversations about our differences.
Jesus told us repeatedly to love those that would persecute us, the ones we don't agree with who might have power over us, as did Mohamed, Buddha, Krishna and, most lately, Dr. King. Only then is peace possible. Both within ourselves and within the larger social context.
That's the context the Warren controversy might best be seen in.
For a New York Times op-ed piece, go here.
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