Amherst Community Church

            I’m still a big fan of President Obama, but boy, for a guy assuming the mantle of Great Communicator, he sure has a knack for jumping into shark-infested waters without his waders on.

            You’d think he’d have learned his lesson from the New Haven arrest controversy (resolved, a little awkwardly, by the famous Beer Summit), but nooooo. As soon as he opened his mouth about the controversy around a proposed mosque and Islamic cultural center near ground zero in Manhattan, you knew there was going to be trouble. (And, of course, it’s August, not a lot of real news going on, and the media machine must be fed.)

            What the president said is indisputably true: The First Amendment guarantees freedom of religious expression, and the developers of this project have every legal and moral right, as Americans, to build.

            What he didn’t do, at least until the next day when he added a little waffling, was acknowledge fully the emotions involved, especially among the families of 9/11 victims, and the question not of rights but of grace.

            I’ve griddled up a few waffles myself on this issue. Initially I thought that tolerance and freedom were the overriding considerations: that, as the wonderful Leonard Pitts has written, the real test of freedom comes when its exercise hurts. In my own life experience, the most extraordinary instance of this came when I was in college and went, out of curiosity, to watch a demonstration by the American Nazi Party in a public park in heavily Jewish Skokie, Ill. A cordon of riot police formed a shield around half a dozen idiots wearing swastikas, and a rowdy crowd of protesters drowned out the Nazis’ bullhorns. It was a scene. Those cops were doing what President Obama was doing: defending a freedom. It must have been distasteful to them, but it was important.

            So even though people are going nuclear over the Manhattan project, I thought it was entirely an issue of defending freedoms. That’s still true – we have to defend the First Amendment. But upon further review, I’m wondering whether we might see an outbreak of grace.

            That grace could come from the families of the 9/11 victims. They could say: The presence of this mosque would hurt us like crazy, but our sons and daughters, husbands and wives died in an attack on freedom, and we’re going to suck it up and accept that religious liberty is precious and worth suffering for.

            Or that grace could come from the developers of the project, a group from whom we haven’t heard much. (Indeed, I don’t even know who they are: a congregation? An Islamic society of some sort?) If their goal, as stated, is to build bridges between Muslims and other Americans, seems to me it’s a good idea tactically, if nothing else, not to antagonize the bridgees. As well, one of the great principles of Islam is the idea of compassion toward those who are suffering. I wouldn’t be surprised if a moment of grace rises out of that well of compassion, and the organizers cancel or relocate the project out of respect for the deep pain that still swirls around lower Manhattan.

            If that happens, my hope is that the pundits and the shrillest of the protesters won’t claim “victory.” I hope they’ll recognize that change in plans for what it surely is: an inbreaking of the Holy Spirit, which the Bible calls the Comforter, in a place and a situation that still needs all the comforting it can get.