I wish we would allow President Obama to join a black church again, where at least on Sundays he could be surround by "black noise" to balance against the "white noise" he hears on every other day in the White House, and from Congress, Wall Street, talking heads on television, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Afghanistan and Iraq .
I mean white noise in somewhat the same way as Don DeLillo meant it in his novel entitled White Noise. White noise, as I use the term here, comes from the mind. Black noise, in the church the President attended in Chicago, comes from the spirit. White noise, of the kind that surrounds the president each day, is analytical and important. Black noise, as I use the term here, is mystical, and has an importance not always evident to the intellect or always reachable by cognition.
Because of a failure to understand black noise we chased candidate Obama out of his church. His preacher, Reverend Wright, said "God Damn America," and we narrowed our understanding enough to claim, and perhaps to really believe, that Reverend Wright hated America.
I have said "God Damn George" (my son) when he left his bike in the driveway. And I love that boy with all my heart and soul. I've said "Damn Pamela" (my daughter) when she wanted me to do something I was not going to do; but I would take a bullet for either of my children, just as Reverend Wright, as an ex-marine, had proven he would take a bullet for America. Would Rush Limbaugh, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Glenn Beck do as much for the country they would claim a superior love for?
Now that the mainstream of America has broadened, there ought to be more ways for our entire nation to take advantage of the unique power of the black church. Transpersonal psychology comes as close as any academic discipline to explaining the messianic aspirations that fill the kind of church from which we forced the President to resign.
Reverend Martin Luther King is about the only person in my lifetime to make full use of that aspiration to make the world a better place. There is actually nothing like it, and it is one of our greatest national resources. It puts the "soul" in the voices of our singers who fill the world with American music.
The tap root of that music is anchored in the black church. A tap root, says an online dictionary "is a somewhat straight tapering root that grows vertically downward. It forms a center from which other roots sprout laterally," other roots like Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, and before them Elvis, Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, and, yes, now the likes of Jay Z and Mariah Carey.
One symbol of the American spirit (or soul) is the "The Bald Eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) . . . a bird of prey found in North America that is most recognizable as the national bird and symbol of the United States of America," says Wikipedia. A competing symbol is our music.
The President seems to try to gain access to the power of the black church by calling in African American preachers like Kirbyjon Caldwell (who George W. Bush also called upon) and T.D. Jakes. But the greatest power is not in the preacher. The greatest power is transpersonal. Its source is not any individual and must be evoked by a congregation. The congregation brings the spirit alive and binds one human being to all others.
"The imprisoned self seems to slip outside its boundaries and . . . one becomes an indistinguishable part of a single rhythm, a single pulse. . . One enters through a single door of suffering into the misery of the whole human race with no margin left to mark the place which was one's own," says Dr. Howard Thurman in "The Binding Unity."
There are many sources of compassion in our culture. There are many desirable spiritual experiences,and many places to get these experiences. But there is one spiritual experience that our President should have, for at least an hour or two each week. The experience is available only in a place where: "Pain, sorrow, grief, are seen as joy ‘becoming' and life gives a vote of confidence to itself, defining its meaning with a sureness that shatters every doubt concerning the broad free purpose of its goodness," Thurman continued.
I wish, for the nation's sake, for the world's sake, President Obama could join a black church again, even while I know many of the reasons why it would not be prudent for him to do so.
