Soul's Code

Barack Obama's memoir and manifesto, The Audacity of Hope, has echoes of The Cloud of Unknowing

BY PAUL KAIHLA — That’s the headline for the excerpt from Obama’s new memoir, which is featured on the cover of Time magazine. An accompanying news story by Joe Klein, the journalist who wrote Primary Colors, compares the junior senator from Illinois to an earlier political messiah, Bobby Kennedy.

Obama was raised by a single mother but not an overtly religious one. “She saw mysteries everywhere and took joy in the sheer strangeness of life,” he writes.

Obama is driven by an intense intellectual curiosity – what else would you expect from a Harvard-trained lawyer? And he’s so comfortable with ambiguities and uncertainties that it calls to mind the 14th-century classic of English mysticism, The Cloud of Unknowing. That text's key message is that the dust-storm of thoughts in each of our heads is the very things that blocks access to the blissfulness of being, a quality which lies precisely beyond words.

Here is a stunning statistical passage on American faith from The Audacity of Hope:

Each day, it seems, thousands of Americans are going about their daily rounds – dropping off the kids at school, driving to the office, flying to a business meetings, shopping at the mall, trying to stay on their diets – and coming to the realization that something is missing. They are deciding that their work, their possessions, their diversions, their sheer busyness are not enough…

According to the most recent surveys, 95% of Americans believe in God, more than two-thirds belong to a church, 37% call themselves committed Christians, and substantially more people believe in angels than believe in evolution.

We at Soul's Code are naturally down with angels of all shapes and sizes