MLK Day

One of the truly great elements of living in the U.S. is that we have the custom of celebrating a diverse range of heroes. Many of these heroes are not people who simply went along with the way things were, business as usual. Rather, many of the great American leaders were people who challenged the status quo. Who dared America to be who she claimed to be. Who prompted America to a larger vision. Who woke up America's imagination from the inevitable slumbers of greed, military thirst, and materialism (which is what we are in the midst of right now . . . does it strike you as odd that we are being told that the way to come out of the crisis of greed is to start spending more . . . the very thing that got us in this mess in the first place?) Clara Barton. Dorothy Day. Abraham Lincoln. Ralph Abernathy. Harriet Beecher Stowe. America's full of people worth celebrating. People who dared America to be more. More just. More hopeful. More inclusive. More opportunistic.

Today, we pause and celebrate Dr. King.

I constantly consume these words he spoke over four decades ago.

Death comes to every individual. There is an amazing democracy about death. It is not aristocracy for some of the people, but a democracy for all of the people. Kings die and beggars die; rich men and poor men die; old people die and young people die. Death comes to the innocent and it comes to the guilty. Death is the irreducible common denominator of all men.

I hope you can find some consolation from Christianity's affirmation that death is not the end. Death is not a period that ends the great sentence of life, but a comma that punctuates it to more lofty significance. Death is not a blind alley that leads the human race into a state of nothingness, but an open door which leads man into life eternal. Let this daring faith, this great invincible surmise, be your sustaining power during these trying days.

. . . Life is hard, at times as hard as crucible steel. It has its bleak and difficult moments. Like the ever-flowing waters of the river, life has its moments of drought and its moments of flood. Like the ever-changing cycle of the seasons, life has the soothing warmth of its summers and the piercing chill of its winters. And if one will hold on, he will discover that God walks with him, and that God is able to lift you from the fatigue of despair to the buoyancy of hope, and transform dark and desolate valleys into sunlit paths of inner peace.



(From "Eulogy of the Martyred Children"--1963)