For Love's sake...
Photo by LeeAnn Cline on Unsplash
The day set apart to celebrate the life of Martin Luther King Jr. begs the question, is he an idol or an inspiration? Is he a man to celebrate or a movement to perpetuate?
It was 1958. Martin Luther King Jr. was participating in a book signing when a woman approached and violently stabbed him in the chest. As he recovered from surgery to repair life-threatening injuries, King was visited by the Rev. Howard Thurman, his former chaplain from Boston University and spiritual inspiration. With quiet wisdom, Thurman provided King these words to ponder, “take this unexpected, if tragic, opportunity to step out of life briefly, meditate on life and its purposes, and only then move forward. By doing so, he could recover in both body and soul.”
The threat of violence did not stop the purposes of King whose love was too loud to keep silence for the sake of order in the face of injustice that oppresses peace. His love was too big to give into violence and courageous enough to nonviolently demand freedom for the oppressed; freedom that is “never voluntarily given by the oppressor.”*
King went on to be the face and voice of nonviolence for the Civil Rights Movement. He audaciously spoke truth to power and the complacency of moderates; moderates who prefer a false sense of order at the expense of advocating for justice that bears true peace. King continued to expose the tension of injustice that simmered below the surface of silence. Violence took his life in 1968. Celebrating the date of his birth on January 17 is an opportunity to pause from idolizing him in death to meditate on the life sacrificed to inspire a movement. We are in need of recovery in body and soul.
This MLK day may we take this opportunity to ponder on Justice that is not for Just Us.
· Research the innumerable groups and persons integral to the Civil Rights Movement – do you know Bayard Rustin, the testimony of Fannie Lou Hamer, or Bob Moses and Freedom Summer 1964?
· Learn about the Voting Rights Act of 1965 what threatens voting rights today.
· Contemplate what it means to be human with an urgent empathy that makes liberty a mutual concern.
Having taken a day to recover, may well-known words that proclaim a Dream not lay fallow but nurture seeds of action to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God and neighbor. Our living depends on it. For “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”*
Together, may we plumb the depths of our being for what is best in ourselves and respond to the call for action against the degradation of human dignity at the hands of injustice. May we “stand up for what is best in the American dream … bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence.”*
With great hope in the goodness and dignity of all humankind, may we live into the Beloved Community of “we the people.”
In this together…
(*quotes from Letter from Birmingham Jail )