Commentary: Quiet at 4 a.m.

by Rev. Gordon Stewart

Friday morning's newspapers carry a photograph of President Obama saluting a fallen soldier from Afghanistan as the sergeant's remains are carried across the tarmac at Dover Air Force Base. "For all the talk of his potential troop increases -- maybe 40,000, maybe some other larger figure -- Obama got a grim reminder of the number that counts: one," wrote Ben Feller of Associated Press, one of a handful of reporters who stole away with the President to Dover in the dark, lonely hour of 4:00 A.M.

According to those who accompanied him on the way back to the White House, the President was quiet.

There are those who argue that it was a publicity stunt. But, as a pastor, I saw something different. Some things can't be faked. Some people drink from deeper wells. When they do, their composure and the relaxed contours of their faces manifest a special quality rarely seen or understood when we are running helter-skelter here and there.

Prayer is more about listening than about speaking. It's also about surrendering one's illusions about one's own authority and power, a kind of submission of will and consciousness to the depth and breadth of the Eternal.

As the President stood on the tarmac saluting the remains of Sgt. Dale R. Griffin of Terre Haute, Indiana, a fallen soldier in a war that begs for answers, it was the man of prayer that I saw -- a President whose quiet listening has brought him to the edge of decision about war in Afghanistan. How does a president make such a decision in the light of the Eternal into whose arms the remains of Sgt. Griffen have been gathered?

For too long now American domestic, military, and foreign policies have been shaped by the criteria of short-term gain and fearful thinking in which even instant gratification seems too slow. The consequences require a President and the rest of us to go out onto the tarmac to ask the vexing questions that novelist Chaim Potok called "the four-o'clock-in-the morning-questions."

When the four-in-the-morning questions waken a President in war time, he can pull the covers over his head and try to escape them, or he can arrange to leave the White House for a dash to an air force base to put his real feet on the real ground to face the real remains of a real soldier from a real war in a real country far, far away, where real soldiers and real Afghani villagers wonder whether a president awarded the Nobel Peace Prize will hear something different in the quiet of the night.

--Rev. Gordon Stewart is a commentator on All Things Considered and pastor of Shepherd of the Hill Presbyterian Church in Chaska.