Late Monday night in Chapel Hill, N.C., Barack Obama's long, slow fuse burned to an end. Earlier that day he had thumbed through his BlackBerry, reading accounts of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's explosive comments on race and America. But his remarks to the press had amounted to a shrug of frustration.

Only in this hotel room, confronted with the televised replay of the combustible pastor, did he realize the full import of the remarks, his aides say.

Trinity United Church of Christ via The New York Times (ENLARGE)

The Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. (left), former pastor of Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ, speaks Monday at the National Press Club in Washington. Obama and Wright (above in 2005) were at one time very close. Obama once called the pastor a father figure, but times have changed.

ELECTION 2008 The Road to the White House • Georgia Voter Guide • Guide to 2008 election • Tell us: What do you think of Biden being on Obama ticket? • Photos: Obama, Biden campaign together • Photos: Biden career Latest Headlines: McCain scrappy, Obama calm as race nears end  Jesse Jackson dodges Obama questions  In McCain, Obama, 2 approaches to Wall St.  A debate night of discipline and muted contrasts  Rescue plan seeks $700B to buy bad mortgages  Tennessee legislator's son at center of Palin hacking speculation  Investigator: Palin probe to end before election  • Georgia politics page • Presidential campaign • Conventions coverage

As Obama told close friends after watching the replay, he felt dumbfounded, even betrayed, particularly by Wright's suggestion that Obama privately agreed with him.

The next afternoon, Obama held a news conference and denounced his former pastor's views as "divisive and destructive." And so a tightly knit relationship finally unraveled.

Theirs was a long and painful falling out, marked by a degree of mutual incomprehension, say friends and aides. It began at the moment Obama declared his candidacy, when he abruptly uninvited his pastor from delivering an invocation, injuring the older man's pride.

Obama prides himself on his coolness and singleness of purpose, not to mention his ability to take on an opponent as formidable as Sen. Hillary Clinton. But in Wright he discovered one figure who has confounded him — a man who once was something of a father figure for him.

In recent months, the candidate has tried to distance himself from Wright, even as he felt compelled to explain his former pastor to a larger, predominantly white political world.

As for Wright, he saw a cascade of perceived slights coming from a bright young follower whose political ambitions were tugging him away from Trinity United Church of Christ. He saw the church he had founded coming under pressure, forced to hire security guards and a public relations firm. And he made no secret of whom he blamed: Obama's political adviser, David Axelrod, a white Chicago political operative.

Only a few years ago, the tightness of the bond between Obama and Wright was difficult to overstate. Obama titled his second book, "The Audacity of Hope," after one of Wright's sermons, and his pastor was the first one he thanked when he gained election as a U.S. senator in 2004. In this learned and radical pastor, Obama found a guide who could explain faith in terms intellectual no less than emotional, and who helped a man of mixed racial parentage come to understand himself as an African-American. "Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black," Obama wrote in his autobiography "Dreams of My Father."

At the same time, as Obama's friends and aides now acknowledge, he was aware that, shorn of their inner-city Chicago context, the words and cadences of a left-wing black minister could have a very problematic echo.

Then came Obama's announcement in early 2007 that he would be running for president. Obama had invited Wright to deliver the invocation at the event in Springfield, Ill. But the evening before, Wright answered his cell phone and heard an apologetic, soon-to-be candidate. It turned out that a magazine just had released some controversial quotes that, it claimed, were delivered by Wright.

"You can get kind of rough in the sermons," Wright said Obama told him. "Rather than have you out front, we thought it would be best to not have you do the invocation."

Wright still went to Springfield, praying with the Obama family privately before the event. Weeks later, Wright said the blame belonged not to Obama but to his advisers. He repeatedly mentioned Axelrod, Obama's chief strategist, saying that while he was expert at promoting black candidates with white voters, he did not know much about relating to the black community.

"They're spiriting him away from people in the African-American community," Wright said. "David doesn't know the African-American church scene."

The two men nonetheless remained publicly close. A few weeks after Obama entered the presidential race, he and his wife, Michelle, swept into a private gala in honor of Wright's 35th anniversary at the church. They were, to all eyes, the favorite children returning to honor the pastor who had married them, dedicated their house and baptized their children.

Still, the seed of worry had been planted. Reporters, kept asking questions about Wright's politics. Snippets of his fiery sermons began to appear on cable televisions and in blog posts.

None of this particularly surprised Obama. Trinity was a progressive church, welcoming to gays and lesbians, embracing of AIDS sufferers at a time when many black churches shunned them. The message heard from the pulpit was sometimes unyielding in its radicalism. To be provoked, if not always to agree, was the point. As Obama wrote in "Dreams from My Father": "In his sermons, Mr. Wright spoke of Sharpsville and Hiroshima, the callousness of policy makers in the White House and the State House."

His embrace of Wright and of this church and its congregants formed the climax of his book. It was the moment, in his telling, when he finally pulled every disparate strand of his background together and found his faith.

He had found a truth and a community of people with whom to share the experiences of the day, said Maya Soetoro Ng, Obama's younger half sister, in an interview last year.

But while Obama had, for years, praised the good of the church's social ministry, he paid relatively little heed to the provocative. He would say that he had not heard Wright's statements that the U.S. government may have seeded the black community with HIV and engaged in government-sponsored murder.

By March 2008, Wright's most outrageous sermons were being played on an endless loop on news channels. The two men rarely, if ever, talked anymore, and Obama increasingly found himself asked to explain Wright's most elaborate charges.

Aides say they and the candidate came to feel that they had no control over the pastor, no sense of what he might do or say.

At the church, the presidential campaign had placed a congregation under a microscope. Trinity took up a collection — the Resurrection Fund — to pay for expenses ranging from security guards to public relations. Some reporters began covertly taping services and others took to calling sick and infirm members whose names are listed each week in the church bulletin.

This infuriated the pastor.

"There was a whole environment of intimidation and threats at the church," said Dwight Hopkins, a theologian at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

That same month, Obama gave his speech on race in Philadelphia, struggling to explain Wright to the larger world. "As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me," Obama said.

Wright took a long cruise at about this time; he returned to find his name a term of opprobrium all across the nation. Obama and his advisers decline to say if they attempted a reconciliation. Obama himself has acknowledged talking with Wright after the Philadelphia speech, and people close to both men tried to caution the pastor to remain silent.

Wright, however, wanted only to explain himself. His first steps seemed to go well enough, particularly a relatively temperate interview with Bill Moyers on PBS. But at the National Press Club on Monday, his scholarly mien fell away.

Wright seemed to sense nothing wrong. A friend said he appeared buoyant and relieved afterward. But a couple hundred miles to the south, Obama soon was seething.

The cascade of slights and misunderstandings has halted for now.

But if Obama wins the Democratic nomination, Republicans have signaled, unambiguously, that they intend to resurrect his pastor's most provocative comments.

The question is whether Wright keeps his peace, or raises his voice.

"It's easy to hurt his feelings," said Richard Sewell, a Trinity church deacon.