I watched a very interesting movie tonight, Gandhi, My Father. It is the tragic story of Harilal Gandhi who could not please his father and died a beggar, a drunk, a widower who left his children. No matter how much we might elevate M.K. Gandhi, he was just a man whose vision operated within the confines of his exquisite lens. Harilal wanted everything his father had and had the luxury to renounce. Bapu, the Father of India, was strict, unforgiving and could not let his son drink deeply from life to make his own decisions on what to embrace or renounce. It was as if Gandiji expected his son to merely adopt his hard-earned lessons; rather than learn them himself. He seemed to think that since he learned something, Harilal could/should just accept the outcome without learning it himself.

But make no mistake, Harilal wanted father-love, mother-love, wife-love, child-love ~ family. He wanted family. I wonder if children of famous people might really find this story maddening ~ not comforting at all. In the light of the news today I cannot help but make layered parallels with that of the gay son or daughter wanting father-love, mother-love, a lover, children ~ family. Isn't that really what all of the prop 8, Rick Warren, gay issue is about?

There is a group of people who want to just be welcome at the table of humanity. They want to have a partner, children, dinner, a productive life (could I be so deliberate as to say a "purpose driven life"?). And there is push back from people whose tables have no room for difference. Gandhi named the unwanted Indians, the lowest caste, the harijan ~ the children of god. He inversed their fate of being born as an untouchable, not welcome at any table but their own, by naming them god's favored.

Rick Warren's Saddleback Church is that table which wants no harijan. Homosexuals may not join. Does he really think that his god will not invite homosexuals to the heavenly banquet? If Rick does have some inside line on that, I am certain that lots of people would not want to be at that table by their own choice.

My own seeking soul has traveled the world through a library card; searched religions, faiths, beliefs, for years and years. If Barack had asked me, or YOU had asked me, who would be a great choice to offer the invocation at this historic inauguration, I would have answered to chose someone whose table is wide, magnetic, inviting, universal and, most importantly, excludes no one.

The Tao Te Ching states that beginnings set the pace for all that unfolds in its wake. Please do not give up asking that Rick Warren be replaced as the international bell ringing in the Obama years. It could not be more important.