Happy Birthday- Dr. King-(revised 1/20/20)

I believe that Martin Luther King provided Americans with our last great call to conscience.

At the very young age of 28, Matin Luther King, Jr. formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and declared his mission in its motto: to save the soul of America.

He showed us the injustice that was flourishing in our country something that is rarely seen or talked about today.

King used his creativity and imagination to take us to the… “place of elsewhere.” He held a vision of the future that actually shook up most of America! That is what visionaries and prophets do!!

Prophets always have a way of showing us a place that does not yet exist and before he was killed Martin Luther King, Jr. was moving the civil rights movement, he is now known for, toward a new vision for all of America.

He awakened America. He brought us face to face, and allowed us to have an encounter with ourselves (the looks with-in place)…. many did not like what they saw….but they looked into their own shadow… and many were transformed.

His words are a remarkable example of “a wisdom that disturbs”… sorely missing in the world today.

He disturbed the status quo with his words and his deeds…. And put a mirror up to America so we could look at ourselves.

It was not pleasant. In many ways…too many ways…. it still is not very pleasant.

He used marches and protests and demonstrations to bring America’s shadow to the surface where she could no longer deny its existence, and then, rather than leaving her wallowing in guilt and shame, he offered her specific redemptive measures she could take toward healing and wholeness, which would ultimately lead toward the manifestation of what King called…

The Beloved Community, his term for the individuated culture.

King knew that transforming the world would be the work of “nonconformists”… It always is.

He called upon people to become MALADJUSTED !

Listen to his words:

“ Modern psychology has a word that is probably used more than any other word. It is the word maladjusted. Now we should all seek to live a well-adjusted life in order to avoid neurotic and schizophrenic personalities.

But there are something’s within our social order to which I am proud to be maladjusted and which I call on you to be maladjusted. I never intend to adjust myself to segregation and discrimination. I never intend to adjust myself to mob rule. I never intend to adjust myself to the tragic effects of the methods of physical violence and to tragic militarism. I call upon you to be maladjusted to such things.” ( King, 1958 )

Martin Luther King Jrs. Riverside Church Speech, delivered in 1967 spoke of where he was taking us.

With the Riverside Church speech, the civil rights leader moved beyond concerns of racial injustice. But the speech is more than just an outcry against the war.

When King spoke of “the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism,” he went at the very core of the American character; when he said we need to shift from a “thing-oriented” to a “person-oriented society,”.

The Triple Evils of POVERTY, RACISM and MILITARISM are forms of violence that exist in a vicious cycle. They are interrelated, all-inclusive, and stand as barriers to our living in the Beloved Community. When we work to remedy one evil, we affect all evils.

The Beloved Community- (https://www.thekingcenter.org/king-philosophy)

For Dr. King, The Beloved Community was not a lofty Utopian goal to be confused with the rapturous image of the Peaceable Kingdom, in which lions and lambs coexist in idyllic harmony. Rather,

The Beloved Community was for him a realistic, achievable goal that could be attained by a critical mass of people committed to and trained in the philosophy and methods of nonviolence.

Dr. King’s Beloved Community is a global vision, in which all people can share in the wealth of the earth.

In the Beloved Community, poverty, hunger and homelessness will not be tolerated because international standards of human decency will not allow it. Racism and all forms of discrimination, bigotry and prejudice will be replaced by an all-inclusive spirit of sisterhood and brotherhood. In the Beloved Community, international disputes will be resolved by peaceful conflict-resolution and reconciliation of adversaries, instead of military power. Love and trust will triumph over fear and hatred. Peace with justice will prevail over war and military conflict.

Dr. King’s Beloved Community was not devoid of interpersonal, group or international conflict. Instead he recognized that conflict was an inevitable part of human experience. But he believed that conflicts could be resolved peacefully and adversaries could be reconciled through a mutual, determined commitment to nonviolence. No conflict, he believed, need erupt in violence. And all conflicts in The Beloved Community should end with reconciliation of adversaries cooperating together in a spirit of friendship and goodwill.

There is a curious plaque outside the Lorraine Motel where King was assassinated.

It reads, in part,

“They said one to another, Behold, here cometh the dreamer. Let us slay him, and we shall see what will become of his dreams.”

As we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. we will rarely hear much about his vision of the Beloved Community. We will see clips of his “I have a Dream” speech as if his dream has been realized in America.

For me, this is the wrong focus.

We might consider his vision in a deeper way.

How well have we in America done on Kings Triple Evil Threats of….

 POVERTY, RACISM and MILITARISM??

King, like Jesus, like Gandhi, like the other prophets and saviors and lovers before him, gave us enough wisdom to live by for centuries.

We most certainly will not all agree as we discuss and dialog about what Kings words and messages mean… however… I would suggest that it is way past time to begin to use this holiday to begin the discussion of what do we want America to mean and to be?

 Behind King’s conception of the Beloved Community lay his assumption that human existence is social in nature.

"The solidarity of the human family" is a phrase he frequently used to express this idea.

 "We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality,"

Happy Birthday Dr. King!!!