On June 26th, President Obama, gave a eulogy for State Senator Rev. Clementa Pinckney, who was killed in his own church building, along with eight other African Americans, by a white man who had just finished worshiping with them in a bible study group. Of the Black Church, the President said, “Over the course of centuries, black churches served as “hush harbors” where slaves could worship in safety; praise houses where their free descendants could gather and shout hallelujah rest stops for the weary along the Underground Railroad; bunkers for the foot soldiers of the Civil Rights Movement. They have been, and continue to be, community centers where we organize for jobs and justice; places of scholarship and network; places where children are loved and fed and kept out of harm’s way, and told that they are beautiful and smart and taught that they matter. That’s what happens in church. That’s what the black church means. Our beating heart. The place where our dignity as a people is inviolate.”
Of the killer, the President said, “We do not know whether the killer of Reverend Pinckney and eight others knew all of this history. But he surely sensed the meaning of his violent act. It was an act that drew on a long history of bombs and arson and shots fired at churches, not random, but as a means of control, a way to terrorize and oppress. An act that he imagined would incite fear and recrimination; violence and suspicion. An act that he presumed would deepen divisions that trace back to our nation’s original sin.”
But of those who were killed and the families they left behind, the President said, “The alleged killer could have never anticipated the way the families of the fallen would respond when they saw him in court in the midst of unspeakable grief, with words of forgiveness.” The President observed, that only through God’s grace can forgiveness come. “We may not have earned this grace” he observed, “with our rancor and complacency and short-sightedness and fear of each other, but we got it all the same. He gave it to us anyway. He’s once more given us grace.”
“According to the Christian tradition” the President correctly stated, “grace is not earned. Grace is not merited. It’s not something we deserve. Rather, grace is the free and benevolent favor of God. . . . God has visited grace upon us for he has allowed us to see where we’ve been blind.”
The President said that God’s grace has provided the nation with the opportunity to see its wrongs and engage its inability to control gun violence, to perceive racial injustice and acknowledge historical wrongs.
But acknowledgement of historical wrongs is complicated, as the flying of confederate flags on state capitals in the south shows. On the controversy of the flag, “Removing the flag from this state’s capitol would not be an act of political correctness; it would not be an insult to the valor of Confederate soldiers. It would simply be an acknowledgment that the cause for which they fought — the cause of slavery — was wrong.” On the meaning of American history, he cited Reverend Pinckney, who said, “Across the south, we have a deep appreciation of history. We haven’t always had a deep appreciation of each other’s history.” History, American history, the President said, “can’t be a sword to justify injustice or a shield against progress. It must be a manual for how to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, how to break the cycle, a roadway toward a better world.” The President explained “What is true in the south is true for America” that, “justice grows out of recognition of ourselves in each other; that my liberty depends on you being free, too.”
Politics, in a democracy, is a battle for who gets what, when, how, and why. This is a truth that will not change with an astute speech that America is better than just the truth of politics. The sad reality is it will take another tragedy before we remember we are better than the result of politics.
But the President hoped against this reality when he prayed, that we don’t, “once the eulogies have been delivered, once the TV cameras move on, go back to business as usual. That’s what we so often do to avoid uncomfortable truths about the prejudice that still infects our society. To settle for symbolic gestures without following up with the hard work of more lasting change, that’s how we lose our way again. It would be a refutation of the forgiveness expressed by those families if we merely slipped into old habits whereby those who disagree with us are not merely wrong, but bad; where we shout instead of listen; where we barricade ourselves behind preconceived notions or well-practiced cynicism.”
The President said the way out of this cynicism is paved from a “reservoir of goodness.”
Reflecting on that reservoir of goodness and the faith held by those who were killed, the President concluded with a simple prayer, “through the example of their lives, they’ve now passed [that grace] onto us. May we find ourselves worthy of that precious and extraordinary gift as long as our lives endure. May grace now lead them home. May God continue to shed His Grace on the United States of America.” Amen.
Dr. Arthur Garrison is an assistant professor of criminal justice at Kutztown University. This piece is the work of Dr. Garrison and does not reflect the opinions of Kutztown University or its faculty, staff, students or alumni.
