"My Favorite Time" by Rev. Thomas Schade

Tue Jan 8 13:17:19 EST 2008

M I N I S T E R’ S   M E M O

“My Favorite Time”

Forgive me if I seem a little distracted, but this is my favorite time of
all.

Once every four years, the country elects a President, and for a short
while, it¹s a fun process. And that time is right now, during the early
primaries. There are lots of candidates, often several in each party, and
the outcome is not yet settled. The candidates are focused on the voters and
are doing their very best to win them over. I can watch all sorts of town
hall meetings and house parties on C-Span and hear the candidates sound off
on issues, large and small. There is still room for the wild-eyed idealist,
and the wise old Washington hand, and the one-issue ideologue, the goofy and
the rabid and the underestimated. Someday, we will look back and see an
inevitability in the results, but right now, there is suspense and
unpredictability.

It is a necessary stage of the intellectual development of children to
stretch their minds by acquiring a truly massive amount of detailed
information about some subject or another. Some kids have every statistical
measurement of their favorite baseball players at their fingertips. For
others, it is different sports, it, or maybe popular music, or television.
But for me, it was politics. I never did learn how to calculate a hitter¹s
“slugging percentage.” But it was many years before I finally forgot how
each state divided its delegates between Humphrey and Kennedy at the 1960
Los Angeles Democratic convention. You could say that I was learning the
habits of being an informed and involved citizen back then, but I was
becoming a fan of a particular game. I was in seventh grade.

Rev. Merritt asked me the other day what book changed my life, and the first
one that came to mind was Theodore White’s “The Making of the President,
1960.” Deep, huh?

So, I am enjoying this season of the year. And the fact that I don¹t have to
actually make a decision myself makes it all the more enjoyable. Our
political system asks the good citizens of Iowa and New Hampshire to do all
that heavy lifting, all that, you know, “deciding.” The rest of us just get
to ride along.

One of the reasons why I like this time, this stage of the process, is that
the basic play of the game is the stump speech. Later on, as we move toward
the general election, the fundamental play is the 30-second TV ad. But right
now, the candidates show up at town halls, and school gyms, and senior
citizens center and give their speech. Of course, they give the same speech
over and over again, but they are interesting the first time through.

Speeches can have extraordinary power, because public words can create new
realities. A speech, (or a sermon for that matter) is not just the person
speaking. It is more than the content of what is being said and even more
than the rhetorical techniques brought to the speech. The speaker also
subtly identifies who is in the room, saying, “Who am I? To whom am I
speaking?” The speaker also identifies who is not in the room: “Who are the
‘they’ who is out there? Are they friends or enemies?”

In this, the most wonderful time of the political cycle, the candidates
often are able to stand before groups of the voters and create a circle of
fellow and concerned citizens, looking together at our country¹s challenges
and problems. They create a “we, the people” with their speaking. And the
very best of them, create a sense that those who are outside the room all
the rest of us are part of that circle of citizenship, neither rivals not
enemies.

Think of one of the greatest speeches of 20th Century: Rev. King¹s “I have a
Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial at the 1963 March on Washington. He
spoke for himself, and he spoke for the crowd that had gathered, not to hear
him, but to protest segregation, and he invoked a much larger nation that
was moving toward the Civil Rights Bill. He inhabited the historic role of a
single black man speaking to all of history, and his words called into being
the great progressive coalition. Of course, in a literal sense, no words
have the power to call something so large and concrete into being. His words
were like flashlight beams playing in a darkened cathedral, exposing for the
moment just how large the room was in which he was standing.

Every four years, there are speeches that approach such grandeur, and they
come in this stage of the process. Later on, the electoral process becomes
much less fun. The sense of conflict gets more intense, the choices are
reduced down, and battle is fought with harsh TV ads. Frankly, it makes me
much more anxious and nervous. It feels like playing football rather than
playing baseball.

So, let us enjoy this time. It’s all unfolding into time, as it will. It is
easy to become impatient with it, and infuriated at the shallowness of so
much of what is said in endless commentary. It is easy to be cynical about
the obvious pandering and opportunism that is recurring. But let us listen
beyond all that to hear some words that will lift us up anew.

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