You don’t know me, and until yesterday afternoon, I didn’t know you. I was tired, cranky, discouraged about a host of burdens weighing on my heart. Between meetings at church, I signed onto Facebook to check on family and friends, and found a link to you, from someone who said that watching you would dispel all cynicism. Right, I said cynically, and figured I’d be better off eating lunch. Still, something in the clip I saw—your honest, earnest face, perhaps—made me click on the image in YouTube.

It didn’t take me long to get mad at the way people were talking to you, after you made your way onto the stage of “Britain’s Got Talent,” that condescending tone they used as though talking to a stupid child. These shows already have such a reputation for victimizing vulnerable people with delusions of stardom. I was angry for you, protective of you. What right did people have to make fun of you because you dreamed of singing? Did it really matter how bad you would be? Why should they let you humiliate yourself in front of all the world, just for ratings?

I’m almost ashamed to write this, dear Susan, because I had imagined they had found you in an audition room: unemployed and lonely, plain and off-key. I saw the clip as the camera panned the audience, filled mostly with young, pretty, grimacing women and girls. I half-closed my eyes and prepared to wince as the music rose, as I waited for the errant notes to come.

What came instead were my tears. I listened to you sing and I found myself remembering everything about my own life, when people thought they knew what was inside my heart because of what they saw outside—my dark skin; my nappy hair; my short, dumpy, ill-dressed body; my naïve and open smile, my wild desire to be something, to say something, to have someone know that I was in this world. You made me remember everything, Susan, and I sat in my office and cried while you sang as though God had sent you Herself.

I have been listening to you all day long; I have played that clip for everyone I know, and you have been in my prayers today, in gratitude that you have never given up the dream of standing in the light. When we who minister try to explain something of the nature of the Holy, its arrival in unexpected places, its wild and crazy blessings, some of what we mean is you, and your extraordinary gift, biding its time until revelation.

So forgive me for being just another person, like so many others, who saw you but never really saw you. Accept my gratitude for reminding me that we all come into life with songs to sing, with stories to tell, with steps to dance and with gifts to give. I give thanks, too, that the song that has made you famous is not yet true, that life has not yet killed the dream you’re dreaming.  Please let me root for you—as millions of others do who have heard you give voice to your dream. I know I’ll be watching—not just for your sake, but for my own, too. Many blessings, Susan Boyle.  Knock ‘em dead, girl!

Faithfully,

Rosemary

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I have haunted the television for the scenes outside her mother’s home, watching the shots of the makeshift memorial constructed against the chain link fence, and the faces of her neighbors, at once shocked and compelled to bear witness.  I don’t know any of these people I have seen, but I recognize them.  They are the men and women, the boys and girls that populated the first 18 years of my life, the working-class, “round the way” folks I’ve been looking at all my life.

Like Jennifer Hudson, like Michelle Obama, I’m a South Side Girl. Watching the Skycam shots of Yale Ave., I found myself lonely for the six-story buildings that line the streets in neighborhoods like Englewood, and Kenwood-Oakland, where I grew up.  All my life I have loved those streets; those buildings; those loud, earnest, hard-working, aimless, church-going, hilarious and loving people who hang out with each other, take care of each other, hurt each other.   I am not romantic about where I come from. Much as I loved the South Side, I knew I had to go, a long time ago.  But just because you leave home doesn’t mean home leaves you.

Many of us leave behind people we love.  Sometimes, we leave the people we have to leave behind; it’s either us or them.  Here in New York, a long way from my childhood life, I heard someone on the street wondering how someone like Jennifer Hudson could even know “people like that” –meaning, I presume, the estranged brother in law who is being investigated for the triple murder.  Plenty of us from humble beginnings know “people like that.” I don’t know anybody black who doesn’t know somebody who hasn’t been to jail–usually a relative.  (That is a fact that often says more about the criminal justice system than it does about our relatives.)  But it also speaks to the complex loyalties of black family life, the unwillingness to disown someone unless you really must, and the paradoxical desire to both separate yourself from and belong to the people who make you who you are.  It is really nothing new; I have felt it periodically for decades. Rarely, though, have I felt it so intensely as these last few days, when the divergent stories of two South Side Girls–Michelle Obama and Jennifer Hudson–are everywhere.

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So let’s add one more reason to the pile: his stunning speech on race in America. I couldn’t see it live, and spent most of yesterday trying to find a site that hadn’t crashed from all the traffic. But I finally got to see it last night; what a brave, brilliant moment. It was a speech of such courage and compassion, such honesty and respect. I felt he articulated on my behalf the wound of slavery in a way no contemporary public person has in a generation. And in articulating it so clearly, and in its full context, he invited me and other African-Americans, to risk putting aside its memory for the sake of something more important: the future of my country. The brilliance of his speech was that he did not simply do the same old thing and ask black people to get over it. He asked us to own the truth of our experiences, to acknowledge the truth of the experiences of whites, and to recognize that some of what troubles us is our collective ignorance about race , about history and about one another. I know that he will have disappointed some Latino/Latina and Asian people by seeming to focus on the black/white aspect of the racial divide. But I believe that such focus is entirely appropriate, because I believe slavery and its legacy in the United States is our country’s primary, deepest festering wound.

To me, the least interesting thing about the speech was the ostensible reason for giving it: an opportunity for Obama to reject/denounce/decry the words of his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Watching the news coverage of Rev. Wright over the past several days has been a textbook example of religious illiteracy in the American media. It would be hilarious if it weren’t so sad. It’s perfectly obvious that most reporters and commentators don’t go to church/synagogue/mosque, so they don’t have any idea of what a relationship with your pastor/rabbi/iman can be like. It’s just as obvious that none of them have a clue about the black church in general or black theology in particular. Mad props to Chris Walton for his brilliant Philocrites post of a few days ago on this very subject; you go, Chris!

Most telling of all, for me anyway, is the complete lack of cultural understanding about this “rejecting/denouncing” business that seems to have such currency in the public arena. At the risk of making too broad a statement about African-American values, and with the full knowledge that I don’t speak for all black people, let me say that we don’t do the “rejecting/denouncing” things with family. We just don’t do it. Nearly every black person I know has family members and close friends who have said and done all kinds of uncool things, even criminal things. Every one of us that I know of have been clear about disapproving of the offending party’s behavior. But all those folks are still part of our respective circles, even amid all their imperfections and failures.

When I was growing up, I was taught that you don’t turn your back on family, no matter what they’ve done. (Sociologists have long documented the incorporation of good friends and mentors into the structures of black family life. In studies, such people are referred to as “fictive kin.” When I was growing up, we just called such people our “play sisters/brothers/cousins/uncles/aunts.”) So when Obama talked about Wright being like an uncle to him, it made complete sense to me, especially considering that Wright performed the Obamas’ wedding and baptized their children. You don’t stop going to your family’s house for Thanksgiving because your family members start acting out, do you? (In my house, the only question on Thanksgiving is: who’s turn is it to act out this year?) Your people are your people. Period. You can hate what they say and do, but at their core, you belong to them and they belong to you. This posture is, among other things, Universalist theology 101.

As always, nobody wanted to talk about anything else but that speech today. The only trouble is, today is the fifth anniversary of the start of the Iraq war, and so many of us seemed resigned to it. I like to think it’s because we are waiting for November to remedy this tragedy. It would be nice to think that Americans could carry on more than one serious national debate at a time, wouldn’t it?

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But I digress. The studios in Secaucus housed a host of different NBC programming, and other stars from the GE firmament were almost always in orbit around the place. Some of them, like John Gibson, were fixtures; others were just passing through, like Brian Williams, who was working for “big NBC” at the time ( and thought for some reason that the studio ought to be 60 degrees!!!) Still others were off my radar screen, in part because they were working on things I had no interest in whatsoever–like sports. Keith Olbermann was one of those sports people I used to see all the time in the studios. He liked (ick!) football, so I never paid him any mind at all. Besides, I was trying to figure out how not to choke Ann Coulter while we were on the air together….

Fast forward what seems like a thousand years, to the advent of “Countdown.” When I first saw that Keith Olbermann was anchoring this little show, I chose to watch it because I couldn’t imagine how or why “a jock like him” would be doing prime-time news. God really does have a wicked sense of humor, though, because what began as a point of curiosity in our home has become a ritual, as well as a bittersweet reminder that people think they know a lot more about folks than they actually do. Children doing homework in our house at 8 p.m. have to leave the living room if they need quiet time, because at 8 pm, Keith is on–no exceptions. And even my 11 year old can do a perfect imitation of Olbermann’s faux-eerie voice announcing “Today’s Worst Person in the World!”

My admiration for Keith, though, is less an issue of entertainment than the refreshing sound of honest and heartfelt feelings, combined with actual news and genuine facts. (The only person on television even remotely like him was the underappreciated CNN cult figure Aaron Brown, who eventually had to make way for society journalist Anderson Cooper. I resented Cooper for a long time as the person who contributed to Brown’s departure from CNN, but that was unfair. Besides, the post-Katrina interview Cooper conducted with Sen. Mary Landrieu earned him mad props in the McNatt household; Bob and I were sitting in front of the TV when boyfriend went *off!*)

Okay, I digressed again. So: once upon a time, our elected political leaders acted as the appropriate outlet for moral outrage, but that time is gone. Thank heaven for Keith, who is smart and snarky, relentless and refreshingly patriotic in all the ways you might expect, and some you might not. In my house, we live for the “Special Comment,” a minutes-long monologue, rife with historical references and thinly veiled contempt for our country’s leadership in times of crisis. Last night, for example, Keith tore Hillary a new one over her racist pandering and support of Geraldine Ferarro. In all that he reports and comments upon, Keith Olbermann represents the single, bright, shining light in an otherwise shadowy morass of news coverage that amounts to pandering and bull@(^.

One night, after he had gone all the way off, (but in a good way!!!!!!) I remarked to my husband that Keith Olbermann had the smarts, skepticism and love for America that singled him out as a first-class candidate for Unitarian Universalism. “But he probably wouldn’t know us if he fell over us,” I sighed, remembering my halcyon days as an intern in the Montclair church when the class-act actor Andre Braugher and his family, fresh from many seasons of Homicide, joined the congregation even as Bob was debuting as director of the children’s holiday pageant.

So imagine my feelings as I Googled Olbermann one night for an unrelated reason and found the words, “Unitarian Universalism.”

Oooh, Lord, have mercy.

I can’t find out how true this speculation is. The closest I have come to definite information are a couple of blogs that assert that KO was raised UU, but has no current affiliation. Guess who doesn’t care?

Message to Keith: if you are heir to our liberal religious tradition, come on home, dear one. You have been living our faith and fighting the good fight, and you will need to renew yourself for all that lies ahead. If you are not part of our free faith, let me introduce you: www.4thu.org. Either way, we hope to see you soon. And thank you for all that you have done, and continue to do, to keep faith and hope alive.

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Yes, I’m back in Kenya longing mode. There isn’t a day now that I don’t check on what’s happening in Kenya, not a day when I don’t recall my new friends, or wonder about what happened when Parliament convened yesterday. I think a lot about the Unitarian Universalist congregations in Kisii, in Tena, outside of Nairobi, about the posho mill

owned by the congregation meant to grind maize and other grains, transported from Kisii to Kitengela for protection and now in storage there with no maize to grind, at least for now.

We all think we know how difficult life is for the rest of the world, but we really don’t have any idea unless we see it for ourselves. There is no substitute for being in the midst of amazing poverty and amazing endurance and amazing faith, as I was for three weeks, and experiencing what life is like on the other side of the globe. One of the challenges of these recent trips is how I might translate what I have seen and heard and felt about Kenya, about our sisters and brothers in faith there, about the incredible discrepancies in resources that I experienced while I was there. The recent troubles there have compounded their challenges by tripling costs for everything from fuel to food to clothing; all this in a country where 70 percent of the people live on less than one US dollar a day. I keep trying to wrap my head around that–living on what I spend for a cup of coffee (at least when I don’t go to Starbucks!)

One of the unintended consequences of my visit was to return to my life in New York City with new and critical eyes. I took a look around our apartment and realized that our family has entirely too much of nearly everything–clothes we don’t wear anymore; books we don’t read anymore; videos we don’t watch anymore. I keep thinking about what my friends J. and C. and their three little boys would think. They all live in a room the size of my bedroom, with no running water and no bathroom. And yet they care for the few things they have in a way that my children never think of, and that I rarely think of myself. It is astonishing to me that all of us around the world have gotten used to the idea that people live the way J. and C. do, and don’t think much of it. How did we get so cold, so jaded and unaware that it seems ok for people to live in a way that we would find offensive if animals were being treated that way?

This is the spiritual practice that so many of us need to embrace–thinking about Kenya and its slums, about Brazil and its favelas, about the thousands of cities and towns in the world where people are barely surviving and whose very resilience is a rebuke, not to our lives, but to the heedlessness we have about our lives.

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Obama may have been raised in Hawaii, but he has spent his entire political life in my hometown of Chicago, where people vote early and often, and cutthroat politics is the name of this game. I don’t want to see Obama forget what it is we love and respect about him–his high ideals and inclusive vision. But there are times when people who want to lead have to fight, and it’s time for him to start fighting for the presidency he wants and our country needs. I’m not persuaded by Clinton’s experience argument; she has faced exactly the same number of foreign policy crises as Obama–none. I am persuaded by the judgment argument; Clinton has been wrong–and unapologetic–about invading Iraq, the biggest single decision our Congress has faced in the last decade. I can’t help but ask how many other times will she follow along with others–her long-time friends in the Senate, for example, rather than make the tough decisions in the lonely job that is President of the United States.

I believe Obama can make those tough choices, but only if he starts making tough choices now–about how to sharpen the distinctions between himself and Clinton, and about how to turn the conversation toward the things he wants to talk about, not the things she wants to talk about. I hate to say it, but the speech he gave in Texas struck the wrong note–it was his version of the valedictory Clinton gave after the debate. And as a former journalist, I have to say Obama didn’t help himself by complaining about media coverage during the last news cycle. It’s not the media’s fault that his people weren’t ready for Clinton to do what she did, especially about the NAFTA meeting between one of his advisers and the Canadian government.

But it will be just as complex for Obama to go after Clinton, and if he does not have a set of deft and nimble writers at his disposal, it will be trouble. Why? Because he is a black man, and for all of our desire to live in a time in which we have both acknowledged and transcended race, part of Obama’s success can be attributed to his “non-threatening” presence and demeanor. He is calm, he is unflappable, he is not the kind of black man who is liable to go ballistic and emotional and scare white people, many of whom are still trying to wrap their minds around an actual black person who is comfortable in his/her own skin. The more aggressive he is with Hilary Clinton, the more likely he is to evoke all those images of threatened white womanhood that remain embedded in the American consciousness despite all our progress. And don’t think the Clintons don’t know that. They are probably counting on it, especially in Pennsylvania– famously described by Democratic strategist James Carville as a state with Pittsburgh at one end, Philadelphia at the other, and Alabama in between. (I know that’s right; in all the many years of family car trips since our children were born, the only place we have ever been denied the use of a bathroom was when we stopped at a diner in the middle of Pennsylvania. Yes, this happened in modern times!)

So Obama has his work cut out for him in the next six weeks, which is forever in news cycles! Though he’s right that it’s a numbers game, (he’s still got more delegates) he’d be foolish not to send some pretty clear signals that Clinton’s free ride, courtesy of his campaign, is over. On behalf of those of us who believe Barack Obama is our last best hope for a dignified, inspirational and effective presidency, I say: Senator, please, get fired up and ready to go!

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I’m going to try emailing my friends today to get their take on what’s happened, and how much faith they have in the process. But it’s time to give mad props to Kofi Annan and his team, including President Kikwete of Tanzania, head of the African Union. Inquiring minds want to know: what did they have to do to get those two hardheaded guys to close the deal? My friend W. probably has some insight, if I can find her. But she and her family and friends might very well be out tonight, engaged in a bit of tentative celebration. With any luck at all, Kenya could be on the mend in the coming days and weeks. I am unabashedly selfish in my regard–I want Kenya to flourish so that my friends are happy and well, so that the emerging UU congregations there will find space and voice in the public dialogue. Now that I have a second home, I want to keep it.

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Didn’t I wake up then? Oooh, baby, baby!

It’s the same in Amsterdam as it is in Nairobi–I walk into a duty-free shop to buy something, I show my boarding pass to New York, and the clerk asks me: “Do you think he can do it? Does Obama have a chance?”

I am so touched by these questions, and by the hope in the eyes of those who ask. The global Obama Love Fest is bigger than Kenya’s obsession with “Senator” Keg Lager, or with the Japanese town named Obama that has been marketing their unlikely connection, or the supporters in countries that cannot even vote for him, including a group in Tanzania. We who live in the United States rarely think of what the world thinks of us, probably because we are often so embarrassed by our leadership that we don’t really want to know. But just in this brief trip, I have found that people really admire the United States, and expect a great deal from us. Lately, they have been just as disappointed as many of us at home have been. What they share with the Obama supporters in the US is a sense of hope for America, the hope that we can return to the vision and energy of all the great promises we have made, and all the great ideals we have ever struggled to achieve. Just as Obama makes us believe, he also makes our neighbors in other countries believe.

The Dutch man who served me coffee and a roll this morning watched the primary results with me on CNN International, and we talked about Obama. “I’ve been watching him. He would be good for America,” he said. I told him I agreed with him, and would be doing my part to make it happen. When I left, he wished “us” good luck. He meant, I knew, not just me, but himself as well. The world is so much smaller than we think it is, and so much more interdependent. It seems to me that a big part of the world is rooting for America right now, cheering us on in our choice of leaders, hoping–for their sake as well as ours–that we get it right this time.

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On the radio, Classic 105 (“Nairobi’s Number One for Soul”) is playing an R and B tune I’ve never heard: “Just a little bit longer, baby….”  It’s an apt description of how I’m feeling right now.  I’m on my way home, and yet feel that I’m leaving home again, too.  A dear friend, F. , warned me that it might be this way.  His long-standing love of Africa dates back to his 20′s, and the people of this continent have been a part of his life ever since.  But I was a late bloomer when it came to Africa, and wasn’t really sure that I would feel all that attached to Kenya after one visit (or in my case, two back-to-back visits.)

But that was before I came to know some of the people, before I was embraced with a sense of both hospitality and homecoming by just about everyone I met.  It was before I had a chance to see grace under pressure, as Kenyans have gone about their daily lives with vigor and enthusiasm, as well as a healthy dose of contempt for all their elected leaders, and an impatience for a political settlement that allows them to look ahead. 

I’ll do more reflections as this blog continues, since there is so much swirling in my head and heart about my time here.  I haven’t even begun to talk about the many future leaders of Kenya I have met, the hilarious mimicry of all things hip-hop, and ugali–my new favorite comfort food!  Let’s just say that my friend F. was exquisitely right: I’ll never be the same, now that I’ve been to Kenya.  My love affair with a country and a people has only just begun….

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