It's my most wonderful time of the year!  As I wake up in the first days of Nobel Announcement Week, I hear names I have never heard before attached to scientific accomplishments I don't understand.  But that's all right, because the trajectory of the week is toward the really interesting announcements.    About a third of the time, I recognize the name of the Prize Winner for Literature.  A UU ministerial colleague of mine has set himself the discipline of reading the usually obscure Nobel Laureate writer each year, and I've been trying to follow that pattern in recent years.  Stay tuned for pithy quotes from Herta Muller this year.

But of course the best day is when the name of the Peace Prize winner breaks through into my drowsy morning awareness.  And it certainly broke through this morning.  I join the world in asking --  what has our President already done to win this award?  I admired what he did in the UN a few weeks ago:  it felt good really to be represented in that body again.  But has he done enough to win the award right now?

There is a tradition of presenting the Peace Prize as an award for potential or aspiration.  Nelson Mandela and F. W. de Klerk won in 1993, before the transition was complete to the new South African government.   Martin Luther King won the Peace Prize a year before what I think was his signature achievement for non-violence, the Selma March.  Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres, and Yitzhak Rabin won the prize for their efforts to bring peace to the Middle East in 1994.  How's that going?

I hope we can come to terms with the idea that President Obama deserves to receive this for his aspirations.  The world is hungry for a bit of hope, and apparently they see that in his message and election.

But maybe what the committee really wanted to do was to present this award to the American people for electing a president who can be a new symbol for a world of diversity, trying to solve its problems through negotion.  Because we actually did that   Nobel Committee, I gratefully accept.