column on MLK

When I was a boy, for some reason I watched the news. I recall that I thought the two smartest people in the world were Adlai Stevenson and Martin Luther King, since I did not understand them. As I grew older, I knew King was right, even as the folks in our village railed against him. We are approaching 50 years since the assassination of Martin Luther King. For over thirty years, after struggle, President Ronald Reagan signed the bill to honor him on the third Monday in January. In my lifetime we have come so far in human civil rights. We have a smaller list of firsts in the highest positions in our country, most notably a two term president who steps down soon. Look a  a child struggle when they learn of mandatory segregation in our country. We have far to go, but the laws have affected the hearts and minds of americans toward a movement toward equality. Poverty remains unacceptably high. Its brother, violence, afflicts too many communities.

King was a modern day prophet. I want to be clear here. He spoke from a religious frame of reference to the conditions of his life and times. He spoke truth to power. His vision of the future opened a way for present action. He did not speak down to his listeners from  a position of superiority.At the same time, he used the power of rhetoric to move us toward self-reflection and to action. He did not divide us into friends and enemies. Instead he called us to our better angels. He asked us all to transcend our limitations as citizens, as children made in the image and likeness of God. for him prejudice was a denial of that basic religious tenet, “a blatant denial” of it.

We often forget that he was an ordained minister. Until the end of his young life, at 39, he served churches. Granted, they had a pastor with a doctorate in Christian ethics, but his adult life was spent in study and service to the church. Yes, he had serious moral failings, as many of us do, if we are truthful to ourselves.  Before his congregation in 1967, he said, “when I delve into the inner chambers of my own being, I end up saying, Lord, be merciful to me a sinner.”...I want to be a good man, and I want to hear a voice saying I take you in and bless you  because you tried.”

For a while our hideous social violence was on a decline, but lately we all notice an alarming increase in crimes of violence. Following Reinhold Niebuhr (trained at Eden Seminary) and of course Gandhi, he renounced violence and sought non-violent struggle as the means toward the stride toward freedom. “Future generations will be the recipients of a desolate night of bitterness, and our chief legacy to them will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos.” Instead his consistent aim was a “beloved community.” He held firmly to a vision of reconciliation, of integration that would reflect such a community.

I’ve written previously of his deep religious experience in prayer after yet another threat to the lives of him and his family was made. He prayed that he came to the end where he could not face it alone any more. He felt the presence of the Divine as “the quiet assurance of an inner voice.” At the same time, he would heartily concur with the Pope on prayer as mobilization. “Prayer is a marvelous and necessary supplement of our feeble efforts,  but it is a dangerous substitute….that god should do everything leads inevitably to a callous misuse of prayer.” Throughout his foreshortened life, prayer was the impetus to allow him to do the work of a lifetime.