Rev. Wright speaks at Starr King Seminary, which is awarding him an honorary doctorate tonight

I was privileged Tuesday to attend a seminar at Starr King, the Unitarian Universalist seminary, addressed by Rev. Wright, Obama’s famous or, in the eyes of the media, notorious pastor. Wright entertained the seminarians with tales of how he took a church in Chicago that was dying because it was a white church in blackface that had no appeal to the nearby projects, and turned it into a black church that brought people in by the thousands. Much of his talk centered on music: how the German Lieder and Negro Spirituals (which he dissed as black music made fit for European audiences so it was no longer black music) were replaced with gospel, blues, and jazz, which his first choir director dismissed as folk music. Clearly he is a churchman of great accomplishment and courage, and one who is more than willing to admit faults. He described his early homophobia frankly, and the pay off for people’s lives once he came around and congregants came out of the closet.

At question time we got around to Obama and the media. Wright had no compunction in laying out the truth as he had experienced it, that a man he thought of almost like one of his children had had to disown him in order to achieve the presidency. He laid the blame first on the media, for distorting his record and opinions, and using selectively cut clips of his sermons that tboroughly distorted his views. Obama dismissed one sermon as lacking hope, and later apologised in private that he had done so before reading the sermon. Wright asked him why he was apologising in private for something he did in public. But he also said he was on record in 2007 as saying that Obama would have to disown him. The forthrightness of a man who had laid bare the racism and homophobia of his own church came out in an equally blunt assessment of the prostitution involved in political success. No one in the room dissented. It appeared too obviously true.

I asked if he believed politics without prostitution was possible. He said it was harder for politicians to be truthful than pastors, but he still could not understand what a politician must feel when he or she performs some necessary compromise and sells their supporters down the river. This was the greater sadness of Jeremiah Wright to me, beyond the personal hell he and his family have been put through. It is the sadness of all of us.

Unless, that is, a time could come when politicians can indeed be honest with us. Michael Lerner has been arguing that Obama could tell us now that he believes that Bush and co broke the law over torture, or that single payer healthcare is best, but for this and this pragmatic reason he is not going to prosecute the Bush team nor go for single payer: that would be honest. I agree. It would be a much better way.

But in the election campaign, could Obama have said “Rev. Wright is being misrepresented by the media but for these pragmatic reasons I am leaving his church and cutting off contact so that the election becomes about me and not him?” Given the media circus, that might not have been enough. Sometimes honesty may still lead to political defeat.

An Obama administration, for all its faults, is so much better than a McCain one would have been, are we then to be thankful that the man did what he had to be elected? Yes, we are. But still the prophets, the Wrights and Lerners, are right to tell the truth and raise our expectations. Rev. Wright admitted his difficulty in forgiving Obama (despite, he said, his wife giving a sermon recently on forgiveness–I found this another very attractive aspect of the man, that he admitted he was having difficulty with what is, after all, often considered a Christian obligation), but perhaps one day he will be able to do so. I am not one of those people who thinks forgiveness is always a decision, something one can decide to do and ought to do, because in my experience it is more of a grace, something one is given if one is fortunate. But I hope Rev. Wright receives this grace, not just for his own sake but because it might enable him to start offering a vision to the president of ways he could redeem himself, ways he could be honest in public about the compromises he is making. Vision is a different prophetic function than blame. I didn’t see any of it as regards our political life in Wright’s seminary talk. Perhaps Obama was right that he lacked hope about politics. But perhaps he has good reason to lack hope, and like all of us needs some extra grace, some oomph from some mysterious and unreasonable source, in order to hope.