http://spidercreative.co.uk/wp-cron.php?doing_wp_cron=1692129802.7759931087493896484375 The lives of powerful men generally conform to the hero-pattern, and the American presidential candidates for the year 2008 were no exception. John McCain’s life story of spending five years in a cell – in the underworld, in the wasteland, in the belly of the beast, in hell, however you wish to represent it – to emerge triumphant again is a clear example. But Barack Obama is unusual in that he has come to power not, as McCain did, but building a long track record of experience, but instead by igniting an unusual passion and fervor in a core group of supporters. What is the secret of his charisma? His life exemplifies many of the key teachings of male spirituality. He has learned to rule himself first; and the knowledge he brings from this battle is what gives him the authority to rule others. Life appears to have properly initiated Mr. Obama.
He has been wounded and publicly acknowledges his wounds.
Obama’s first book explicitly acknowledges, and explores in great depth, the vacuum in his life created by the absence of his father. His second book begins with the name he inherited from his father, which political strategists tell him disqualifies him from elected office (the Obama/Osama problem). He also describes, very bluntly and in detail, the pain of losing a political race for Congress and trying to be an ambitious politician while trying to be a husband and father. In each instance, his public confession appears to have helped him transcend the difficulties.
Despite his wounds, he is not a victim.
This is one of the most immediately striking things about him. He is not a victim. He has never functioned as a “racial spokesman” who can represent to the public, like a lawyer, a victimized racial minority. When he narrates the conversation with his political strategist about the name Obama, he does not vituperate against the superficiality of American politics. Throughout his campaign for the presidency he talked without flinching of his “funny name” and how he “doesn’t look like all those other presidents.” He appears to own his own wounds, and not run away from them.
He holds and transforms pain, rather than transmitting it.
For us men one of the great fears is transmitting to our children the pain and vices we received from our fathers. We know the same traits are in us, waiting to overwhelm our lives as they overwhelmed our fathers. Obama had an absent father. And yes, that trait is there in him: it cannot be an accident that he ended up in a job where he was in Springfield first and then Washington for much of the time while his family was in Chicago. But he has maintained his marriage and been a father to his children – a marvellous and moving success and an inspiring example to all of us who want so desperately not to transmit this inherited suffering to our children. And now he will be bringing his family together once again, in the White House.
He believes in, and lives on the level of, communal salvation.
Time and again during the presidential campaign, he declared that we were “our brothers’ keeper,” and to quote from The Audacity of Hope,“what’s needed is a broad majority of Americans… who see their own self-interest as inextricably linked to the interests of others.” He takes an interest in values that “move them [people] beyond their isolation.” Empathy – the sense that others’ suffering is our own as well – is one of the hallmarks of his books and his stated political principles. At times this becomes an almost corporate understanding of “the United States of America.” During his speech on election night he said “we as a people will get there.”
He knows it’s not about him.
Another refrain of his political campaign was how relatively unimportant he was. “You’re the wave,” he said during a rally, “I’m just riding it.” This is good spirituality, and politically, of course, it is also true. He cast the election in terms of the nation’s historical narrative, not merely in terms of a good ending to his own personal biography.
He is not offended or ruffled.
The little ego is often offended, but when you are in touch with something deep, you are not easily offended. After all that time in the public eye, was there one time in the past two years when Obama reacted as one who had been offended? When it seemed like he had to defend his little ego from deflation? He has been cool and calm in a sea of turmoil and in two years of ceaseless activity, and in the face of demonization and adulation.
He holds the contradictions together.
The little ego and the dualistic mind cannot deal with contradictions: you must choose, one or the other. If you can judge from Obama’s writing, he is obsessed with antitheses: he casts everything in terms of two balancing forces seeking some kind of media via synthesis. He is permanently seeking to understand and hold together contradiction. And of course, the paramount example of this is Obama’s race. He is not merely the first African-American president. He transcends the categories entirely, and is, in himself, the contradiction of black and white. Anyone who has worked on their own small contradictions can see how much spiritual work this must have cost him, to be truly at home in both “black” social contexts and “white” social contexts. When you survey the segregation that still persists culturally in this nation, the achievement of Obama in this regard is astonishing. This is probably the main reason why he is such a hypnotic figure to such a large number of Americans.
In some sense, of course, he had no choice. This is who he was born as. This was the cross – the coming together of opposites – which he was given to bear. And by carrying it he reconfirms what we know from the Gospel is the path to true power.
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