When President Obama eulogized a slain pastor in Charleston last week, his words were far more than a tribute to a man tragically murdered in his church.
He voiced a message so strong it could redefine his presidency. It isn't that what he said was all that new. He's said some of the same things before.
It was how he said what he did and how ready people may have been to hear it.
The message was certainly directed well beyond the thousands gathered on that sad day.
They were there for the memorial service for the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, the pastor of the historic Emanuel African Episcopal Church in Charleston, S. Carolina, "Mother Emanuel" to its parishioners and site of the recent explosion of hate that left Pinckney and eight others dead.
Their murderer joined their Bible study, sat with these people, then shot them dead, leaving a witness to tell the world what he'd done in the misguided name of racism.
The killer, as Obama would say, "surely sensed the meaning of his violent act." It drew on a long history of bombs and arson and shots fired at churches, and the killer might have imagined an outcome further deepening divisions in the country.
"Oh, but God works in mysterious ways," the president said, suggesting that this killer, "blinded by hate," didn't know he was being used by God.
"The alleged killer could have never anticipated the way the families of the fallen would respond when they saw him in court in the midst of unspeakable grief, with words of forgiveness. He couldn't imagine that."
Nor could the killer imagine how the city of Charleston, the state of South Carolina and the nation would respond, the president said, as he eased into reflections on the power of grace.
Some will only remember the unexpected moment when the president concluded his eulogy, singing "Amazing Grace" from the pulpit.
But it was his words defining grace and its application to the divided culture in this country that resonated.
Through tragedy, "God has visited grace upon us for he has allowed us to see where we've been blind," the president said, parroting the message in the 236-year-old hymn's lyric.
"He's given us the chance where we've been lost to find our best selves. We may not have earned this grace with our rancor and complacency and short-sightedness and fear of each other, but we got it all the same ...
"It is up to us now to make the most of it."
He spoke of the fact that, for too long, Americans were "blind" to the pain the Confederate flag stirred in many citizens.
But people from all walks of life, he said, now acknowledge the flag has always represented more than just ancestral pride.
"For many, black and white, that flag was a reminder of systemic oppression and racial subjugation. We see that now."
Taking down the Confederate banner from the grounds of South Carolina's Capitol grounds, he said, would be a "modest but meaningful balm for so many unhealed wounds."
But, added the president, "I don't think God wants us to stop there."
He cited injustices that allow children to languish in poverty, attend dilapidated schools or grow up without prospects for a job or for a career.
"Maybe we now realize the way a racial bias can infect us even when we don't realize it so that we're guarding against not just racial slurs but we're also guarding against the subtle impulse to call Johnny back for a job interview but not Jamal."
The president spoke, too, of the "unique mayhem that gun violence inflicts upon this nation" and said the vast majority of Americans and the majority of gun owners "want to do something about this."
His was a message a lot of people don't want to hear, and the president acknowledged there will be no overnight transformation in race relations. Nor, he said, should anyone believe that a few gun safety measures will prevent every tragedy.
"Whatever solutions we find will necessarily be incomplete. But it would be a betrayal of everything Reverend Pinckney stood for, I believe, if we allow ourselves to slip into a comfortable silence again."
Those two words, "comfortable silence," well define how so many Americans react to racial injustice. It's too easy to be silent, too comfortable to avoid making what Obama called "the moral choice to change."
President Obama said he had felt, in the wake of the tragedy and the presence of the victims' families' amazing grace, "an open heart" in America, a reservoir of goodness.
"If we can find that grace, anything is possible. If we can tap that grace, everything can change."
Resigning the Rebel flag to history may be a symbolic gesture, but it is a small step toward ending that comfortable silence and perhaps finding the grace the president describes.
Commentary on 07/01/2015