SOUL FOOD:

In the days following last week’s inaugural events, I wasn’t surprised by the grumblings I heard around town or read online. Some folks had gotten miffed when Obama asked Saddleback Church’s Pastor Rick Warren to offer the inaugural invocation.

Others were peeved when he asked V. Gene Robinson, the openly gay bishop of the Episcopal Church, to pray at the pre-inaugural “We Are One” concert Jan. 18. Still others got their hackles up when HBO failed to broadcast his prayer.

Then when I heard the Rev. Joseph Lowery conclude his benediction by asking the Lord to help us, “work for that day when black will not be asked to get back, when brown can stick around — when yellow will be mellow — when the red man can get ahead, man — and when white will embrace what is right,” I had my doubts that all of us were up for his sense of humor.

Was the laughter from his audience comfortable or a gracious cover for embarrassment? Some of both?

I wasn’t sure.

Later I decided to ask some local clergy and lay people of faith what they thought about that, what they thought about President Obama’s address and the prayers of Warren and Robinson.

Most stuck with no comment.

In the end, one rabbi, one Baptist pastor, one United Methodist pastor and two members of the Huntington Beach North Stake of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints agreed to share their thoughts.

Marsh Tanner and Roger A. Harvey, as Latter-day Saints who are not in church leadership, made it clear they spoke only for themselves.

And although the others did not expressly say so, I’m sure that goes for the rabbi and pastors I spoke with as well.

They spoke as religious Americans hoping and praying for the best for and from a new president and his administration.

They didn’t speak for their congregations or their denominations.

Stephen J. Einstein, who has been rabbi for Congregation B’nai Tzedek in Fountain Valley since 1976, told me that he thought Obama “delivered in full measure” what Americans needed most from their new president: inspiration and hope.

He was moved to hear Obama speak of strengthening one another in hard times, recalling the president’s declaration that, “there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.”

Beyond that, Einstein wrote to me in an e-mail, “As a leader of a religious minority, I especially appreciated the president’s statement that ‘we are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus — and nonbelievers.’”

Without cataloging the full range of religions with adherents in this country, Einstein saw this statement as an affirmation of the religious freedom our Constitution guarantees.

For Gerald W. Squyres, a pastor for some 60 years, a good many of them at Huntington Beach Baptist Church, Warren’s prayer was by and large just what he expected.

Squyres has known Warren since Warren was a student at California Baptist College (now California Baptist University) in Riverside.

“It’s typical of him,” Squyres said, “to reach out to people of all walks of life and touch their lives for good.”

Einstein appreciated Warren giving a nod to Judaism and Islam by reciting what the rabbi called “the watchword of Judaism,” Deut. 6:4, “Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One” and by calling on “the compassionate and merciful One,” as Muslims often refer to God.

He took exception, however, to the unabashedly Christian form of Warren’s prayer. Warren, he noted, spoke about Jesus changing his life; he invoked the name of Jesus in four languages; he concluded with the prayer Jesus taught his disciples to pray, known to Christians as the Lord’s Prayer.

On the other hand, Einstein found Lowery’s prayer, which he said “implored us ‘to turn to each other and not on each other,’” to be a prayer after which he could “wholeheartedly cry out ‘Amen!’” The prayer captured, “the spirit of unity and solidarity,” wrote the rabbi.

He dismissed the notion that its closing was racist or insensitive.

“I wish,” Einstein wrote, “people would simply allow the message from a good man’s heart to enter our open hearts.”

John McFarland, senior pastor at Fountain Valley United Methodist Church for the last 20 years, saw Warren and Lowery as Christian bookends bracketing Obama’s inauguration.

Lowery stood for those leaning toward the left; Warren stood for those leaning toward the right.

“Lowery prays for swords to be beaten into plowshares,” McFarland wrote in an e-mail. “Warren that the sword of the Spirit would pierce our hearts for salvation.”

In his mind, given the risk and the heat Warren took from evangelical Christians for inviting Obama to speak at Saddleback Church’s 2006 Global Summit on AIDS, it was natural for Obama to invite the pastor to give the inaugural invocation.

He thinks Obama has put the religious community to task, to both challenge his administration and to support it.

Harvey had no quarrel with Obama’s selection of Warren, Lowery or Robinson.

“I have more in common with each of them than I have differences,” he told me.

But that is almost beside the point for him.

“We Mormons are not afraid to speak out for what we believe,” he said. “But know this America, we will die for the right of others to do the same.”

Tanner wasn’t impressed with Obama’s inaugural address as oratory, but he nonetheless thought it laid out the challenges our nation faces. He was pleased with the president’s efforts to make the inauguration as inclusive as possible.

He found nothing objectionable in its prayers.

“I hope we never reach the point where someone cannot, in prayer, say what is in their heart, even in a public setting,” he said.

He was among those who laughed during those controversial last few words of Lowery’s benediction.

Tanner found them genuinely humorous and believes that’s how Lowery intended them.

As for some taking offense, Tanner said he understood how they might. “But,” in the same spirit as Einstein he added, “I think we need to be a little less thinned skinned.”

To that, I’ll just add, Amen. Amen.

MICHÈLE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She can be reached at michele@soulfoodfiles.com.