[Dialogue] With Thanksgiving

[Margaret Helen Aiseayew]

I first met Barack Obama in Bethlehem, Palestinian Territories.

You heard me correctly.  This was on the trip to Israel with my dad that I have already told you all about.  We had just gone through four rings of security to meet a Palesinian Christian guide in the plaza outside the Church of the Nativity.  The guide had just explained that the walls were between ten and fourteen feet thick as they had been rebuilt by the Christians with each crusade and by the Muslims with each interval.

Suddenly five black, bullet-proofed vehicles came racing into the square and screeched to a halt just a few feet away.  Our guide was in a panic.  He kept saying that this must be a very important person and was trying to get us to melt into the wall he had just said was fourteen feet thick.  I naturally watched as people jumped out of the first and last vehicles (Mossad and CIA) and only noticed by following their glances the sharp shooters on the surrounding roofs.  More people jumped out of the second and fourth vehicles (FBI and Palestinian security).  Finally a woman was allowed out of the second vehicle to go open the door of the middle one and out stepped Barack Obama.  He was walking (relaxed, he has a rather delightful lope that you could catch glimpses of during campaign events as he ran up stairs) toward the church encircled by all these machine gun toting guarding types.

I just walked into their circle and said, "Barack Obama, I would like to shake your hand."
He came over and visited with the group and as we ran into him around Jerusalem the next couple of days he referred to us as his "Iowa friends."  No one else in the group had known who he was.  They were fascinated that I recognized a junior Senator from another state.  When they asked me who he was I simply said that he was going to be the first black President of the United States.

He went into the church ahead of us.  The lintel is solid stone about five feet wide and the door was not quite five feet high.  You had to step in the middle of the stone to get across at the same time you were bending down.  I watched him make that move ahead of me in the midst of the security with such humility and grace I knew I had not spoken falsely to the group.  Only later in Jerusalem trying to explain all this to our Jewish guide who had not been able to travel into Palestine with us did she mention that entrance is often referred to as the eye of the needle (as in, it would be easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than. . .).  It seemed appropriate.  

Although I have told the story of meeting him there many times, I have hoarded until now the image of the eye of the needle.  I have prayed over it intensely.  It allowed me all forms of permission knocking on doors, making phone calls, advertising from my yard and being abused for it.  I am probably laying myself open to accusations of magical thinking, but there is curse and a gift in knowing what you know.  When he won the Iowa caucuses there was a certainty that settled on me about both the difficulty (instigating repetitive doubt) and the result.  Now it is our turn to follow through --rather like a national rebirthing process,  I pray we won't lose courage.
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