At Prayer Breakfast, Obama Issues Call for Humility

Doug Mills/The New York Times President Obama and Michelle Obama attended the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington on Thursday morning, where they prayed with Senator Jeff Sessions.

President Obama delivered a contemplative call for humility, driven by faith and abiding respect for those who disagree, at a national prayer gathering Thursday morning in Washington.

Amid fierce political debates often marked by partisan rigidity, the president usedthe National Prayer Breakfast to call for a more humble approach.

“While God may reveal his plan to us in portions, the expanse of his plan is for God and God alone to understand,” Mr. Obama said.

Americans’ task as citizens, Mr. Obama said, “is to spend our days with open hearts and open minds, to seek out the truth that exists in an opposing view, and find the common ground that exist for us to take meaningful action.”

But Mr. Obama’s remarks at the event, now in its 61st year and attended by each president since Dwight D. Eisenhower, were marked more by personal reflection: on the challenges of leadership and the need for individual humility.

He spoke of meditations on the inner lives of Abraham Lincoln and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whose Bibles he used during his second inauguration less than three weeks ago.

“I was reminded that, yes, Dr. King was a man of audacious hope and a man of relentless optimism, but he was also a man brought to his knees in fear and doubt and hopelessness,” Mr. Obama said. Such moments surely called for retreat to a quiet place and solace in Scripture, he said.

Referring briefly to debates over taxes and debt “less pronounced” than those faced by Lincoln and King, Mr. Obama said, “We must keep that same humility that Dr. King and Lincoln and Washington and all our great leaders understood is at the core of true leadrship.”

Mr. Obama’s speech to the bipartisan gathering of political and community leaders at the Washington Hilton was less overtly political than it was last year, toward the beginning of his re-election campaign, when he tied Jesus’s teachings to his call for higher taxes on the wealthy. But in the past - Thursday’s speech was his fifth appearance as president at the breakfast - he has used the gathering more as an opportunity to discuss his faith.

The rarity of such a cordial gathering of members of different parties was noted by the other public officials who spoke. Mr. Obama added, “I do worry sometimes that as soon as we leave the prayer breakfast, everything we’ve been talking about at the prayer breakfast seems to be forgotten.”

He said, “We’d like to think the shelf life wasn’t so short. I go back to the Oval Office and start w! atching c! able news networks, and it’s like we didn’t pray.”

According to a pool report, Mr. Obama did return to the White House after the breakfast, but he was scheduled to go to Leesburg, Va., later in the morning to speak to the House Democratic Issues Conference.

Mr. Obama made only passing references to his debt and tax negotiations with Congress, and he did not respond to criticism by the previous speaker, Dr. Benjamin Carson, the Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon famous for separating conjoined twins, of Democrats’ approach to tax policy and health care. Mr. Obama also did not address gay marriage, drones or any of the other current debates in Washington.

Michelle Obama, the first lady, joined him at the breakfast, which was hosted by Senators Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama, and Mark Pryor, Democrat of Arkansas. The breakfast also featured a performance by Andrea Bocelli; a Cesar Chavez prayer read by Ken Salazar, the departing interior secretary; a closing prayer by Gabrielle Douglas, the Olympic gymnast; and other speakers from Capitol Hill.