I wonder how to talk about my hope and, to be frank, relief at the upcoming inauguration of Barack Obama? Hope because against long odds we have elected someone who was outside many of the existing power systems — and yet firmly ensconced within enough of them to be not only a viable candidate, but an effective leader. So I have hope that we can continue to make changes that matter.

Relief because in some very simple ways already -- like Eric Holder's clear condemnation of waterboarding as torture -- we are entering a place where there seems to be more congruence between reality and rhetoric. We are finally coming out from under eight years of George W. Bush.

But I have friends who believe the opposite. And how do I talk with them? I am so excited to be taking our kids to DC for next week, to be in the midst of the crowds and the celebration of this moment -- which to me is a celebration of small d democracy. But for some of my friends, that is not what they see at all. Instead they see a dangerous anointing of a false messiah.

The contrast between what I see and they see is sharp. We read different publications, we grant authority to different voices, we have different convictions. Does that mean we are condemned to forever live in conflicting realities?

Here's a video a friend of mine from long ago posted up at Facebook:

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I don't even know how to engage this piece with my old friend, because I have no idea what his life is like now, or if there are any realities we share that could make a real conversation possible. I just know that where a video like this communicates fear, my experience of the Obama campaign locally has been one of energized, shared, collaborative endeavor.

This same friend also posted a short snatch of a T.S. Eliot poem -- the Journey of the Magi. That poem evokes in some ways a similar kind of uneasiness, a not-knowing, that matches the concerns my friends here at home keep sharing with me about Obama. I don't know how to set their minds at ease. Indeed, I'm not sure I want to! I think that democracy demands of all of us that we stay awake and attentive, that we face what comes with eyes as wide open and minds as critically attuned as we can.

One of the central claims of Christianity is that we are sinful human beings, lost in the brokenness of our pain, redeemed only by the overwhelming love of a God who became human to enter into our history, to break open our sinfulness, to overcome it through God's creative action. I'm not waiting for Obama to overcome that sinfulness. I know he is not the Messiah. So a video that worries about a new religion doesn't touch me.

But I am touched by the challenges I've met in having conversations with friends here in town who deeply respect our current president, and fear our soon-to-be new president. What makes real conversation possible? Can we move beyond the stark divides of the recent past? Or am I just hopelessly naive and blind to new divides, optimistic about the future because I'm excited by what we've accomplished with Obama already?