When a Favorite Son Disowns His Spiritual Family

I wish I knew. Perhaps my "not knowing" betrays the scent of cynicism that has come to smother all my objectivity with the political process and mind. Over the weekend it was announced that Presidential candidate Barack Obama had severed his ties with the faith community of which he has been a member for 20 years in the wake of ongoing pulpit "embarrassments." First it was the pastor who has stood in that pulpit all these years. More recently it was a guest preacher who faux pas-ed his way into public dismay. If the former became a political embarrassment, the latter was a political offense. And so, according to the news reports, Obama broke away.

Of course there are several things I wish I knew about the events. I wish I knew how accurately the reasons have been reported. Initially there was some hint that Obama's decision was intended to help protect the church from further distraction. I wish I knew whether the action was respecting the church or himself.

But assuming the latter, I wish I knew if the church and its preachers had become a theological adversary, espousing a viewpoint he could no longer support or want his name associated with, or merely a political liability, a hassle strategically and summarily dispatched. I don't really know what difference the answer would make to me. Leaving, after all, is leaving and generally carries some measure of grief. I would simply like to know where the grief falls -- grief over the loss of church that has philosophically deserted him for a path down which he simply can't follow, or grief over the loss of a church that, for reasons of expedience, he must himself desert.

I admit to a total lack of objectivity on this subject. From a preacher's point of view the loss of a member is always an occasion of grief. A person's relationship with a church is something similar to a marriage, and divorce is never trivial or painless. Never. Heap on top of that the need most preachers have for validation, and "vote against" represented by every such departure.

I'll never likely know the details. Perhaps, then, it is enough to simply grieve along with those most principally involved -- a person and his family suddenly deprived of the faith community that has been the spiritual water in which they have swam, and the congregation that must suddenly feel like an amputee...or worse, like a crestfallen spouse who has just heard the wounding declaration, "I just don't love you anymore."

Grief, indeed, for them all.