MARTIN’S DREAM & OURS
A Liberal Religious Response to the Horrors of Our Times
James Ishmael Ford
17 January 2016
Pacific Unitarian Church
Rancho Palos Verdes, California
The Reverend Rosemary Bray McNatt is president of Starr King School, our seminary in Berkeley, California. However, a million years before that she was a writer. In fact she took writing gigs as a way to pay the bills right through seminary. And it was while in seminary that her agent called with quite the proposal. Would she be willing to be in the pool being considered as co-author for Coretta Scott King’s autobiography?
While Rosemary didn’t get the gig, she did meet with Dr King’s widow, and during a wide-ranging conversation Rosemary mentioned how she was preparing to become a Unitarian Universalist minister. Mrs King was delighted. “I went to Unitarian churches for years, even before I met Martin,” she told Rosemary. Adding “And Martin and I went to Unitarian churches when we were in Boston.”
In her account Rosemary adds, “What surprised and saddened me most was what she said next. Though I am paraphrasing, the gist of it was this: ‘We gave a lot of thought to becoming Unitarian at one time, but Martin and I realized we could never build a mass movement of black people if we were Unitarian.’”
Let’s consider this sort of the text for today’s reflection.
I understand when Dr King was assassinated, after the police and FBI arrived, during all the confusion, people running around, agents trying to get a handle on what had happened, one agent informed his superior on a walkie-talkie how he just heard Coretta Scott King say that Martin’s dream would never die. There was, I gather, a pause. Then the agent’s superior instructed him “Go find out what that dream was.” I suggest this is the question. What was that dream? And what might it mean for us? You know, you, me, perhaps us as Unitarian Universalists, or, us as members of this church up here on the hill?
I have a pervasive concern about the poisoning of our planet. And I worry about hunger and homelessness, and wild economic disparity. Although these days I find myself most immediately haunted by images of war and its ravages. I think of bombings and assassinations, and public executions. I think of shifting populations, and fleeing refugees. And I think of the hateful rhetoric of many of our politicians and the receptive ears of so many people, too many people. We see much of the current political conversation is little more than jingoism and barely veiled racism, all of it drenched in that pervasive poison, fear of the other.
I find I burn with urgency. We need to listen closer. No doubt there is a great human longing for meaning, for purpose, for direction. We hear it a constant beat just beneath the rage of emotions around our current race for President. So, what about us, you and me? And, again, what about us, a people gathered on this hill? What response do we have to all the turmoil? How can we be useful in such hard and harsh, pressing, and urgent times?
Well, I find myself thinking of Dr Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream. I believe that dream lives here. Honestly, I do. But also I believe we haven’t all thought and felt our way to what it might fully mean. We do some good work, here. I’m really impressed with our Green Sanctuary group. We have some important connections through Harbor Interfaith. And I know we do a lot more as individuals. In the past I know this church has been more involved in the hurts beyond our walls. And, I know in time we will be again.
Right now, however, we’re mostly in a time of consolidation, and I hope reflection. This is potentially rich, for us, and for others. We live in a world that often seems random, violent and meaningless. And there is a great longing within human hearts for meaning, for a healing of the hurt, for something to cling to in the storm that rages. And, I suggest, out of my own search, out of the experiences of my heart, I do not doubt there is a healing dream, a way of reconciliation with our selves, with each other and with this world. I also suggest this dream is the deep dreaming that calls us into this hall, among each other in an open and engaged quest. We are a people of the dream. Or, we can be. We need to be.
Today I want to explore just a little of what that might look like for us within our liberal faith, with no creed, no absolute answers proclaimed; but simply pointing to where it often arises for us out of an experience of opening of our hearts and minds. In this way we find a wise heart, the possibility of knowing our connections and along with that finding a map that guides us through the unknown territory.
When my colleague Rosemary McNatt wrote those words I cited at the beginning of this reflection, she was exploring what it was within our Unitarian Universalism that Martin and Coretta King saw that kept them from crossing over to make their lives and work with us. Of course the reasons are complex. Whether we would have been a good base for a mass movement as a part of why the Kings did not end up UU opens deep, complex, and important questions for us to consider.
Apparently as young Martin entered college he had become very skeptical. He admitted to being embarrassed by the emotionalism of his father’s sermons and the experiences he had at his childhood church. At Morehouse, according to his autobiography and summarized by Robert Scofield in his enormously helpful essay King’s God: The Unknown Faith of Dr Martin Luther King Jr, “(U)nder the guidance of President Benjamin E. Mays and professor George D. Kelsey, he began to believe that religion could be both ‘intellectually respectable and emotionally satisfying.’ Mays’s weekly talks on the social gospel enchanted King, while Kelsey’s Bible course taught him to see the Bible metaphorically, leading him to conclude the Bible has ‘many profound truths…’”
By the time he goes through seminary and then to his doctoral work at Boston University, we find King has arrived at an essentially classic Unitarian theology. Throughout his writings Dr King takes the classic liberal view that Jesus is a human, and what is extraordinary about Jesus is that he shows us what we might be. When he speaks of Jesus entering our hearts, he is calling us not to some unlikely historical event, but to a deeper possibility of a full life, of a turning of the heart. It very much looks as if for Martin Luther King, Jesus is the name for that part of our human hearts that have opened wide, have not turned from the hurt or the joy.
But, the next question is, of course, it is a turning of the heart to what? Well, for Martin Luther King, Jr., that’s God. Although as we dig into it, it becomes obvious his God is love. For a crowd like us, who use that motto “love over belief,” I suggest it might be helpful to pursue this a bit deeper. Dr King’s God that is love isn’t a vague, misty thing, a will o the wisp, ungraspable. Rather, he tells us in his own words that this God that is love “is not a process projected somewhere in the lofty blue. God is not a divine hermit hiding himself in a cosmic cave. …God is forever present with us.” Me, I find something important here. So, a little more digging.
I find that love we commonly hold up within our congregations is our direct knowing that we are not alone, isolated beings defined by our skin. Love is that knowing of our connections down to our bones and marrow. And here’s where Dr King is particularly helpful. His God, his love is not just a head knowing, but a body knowing, a heart knowing, a knowing that permeates the very fiber of his being. And this is a call to us to feel our lives. It is this sustaining experience that allows us to continue the endless work of feeding the hungry, of seeking compassion and justice for all, for trying to help transform our own lives and the life of this country, indeed the life of our world in an ever more generous, open hearted direction.
Intimate. Intimate.
A couple of years ago on a drive from Providence to Boston I drove by a terrible accident. My friend with whom I was going and I were tangled in traffic for maybe an hour. When we finally began to pass the site of the accident, what was left were the remains of a pickup truck now resting on a great flatbed. It was mangled, but the most jarring image was how the roof had been, it looked, torn open, perhaps by something like the Jaws of Life. The cab of that car looking much like an empty tuna can with a partially opened lid dangling over one side. Here’s the important moment. I felt an involuntary prayer slip from my lips. Me, for all practical purposes an atheist, certainly no believer in something outside the universe that can interfere with the workings of cause and effect, me, and a prayer, brief, but genuinely a wish for the passengers and all involved.
I think of the Seventh Principle, regarding our radical interdependence. And, me, like for Dr King, apparently very much like for Dr King, I have no problem calling that web of life as I experience it, love. Or, God. That god which is all and everything but with no need for anything beyond worked for Spinoza. And it works for me. And I don’t even find a problem with throwing my heart’s longing into that great mystery, prayers, if you will; even if I don’t think there’s a person there to listen in a person-like way. This is about being intimate.
And what I know is on that freeway it was right.
As someone who has walked our liberal way with a serious commitment to understanding what it can be for a long time, I’ve seen while this web is the most intimate of experiences, it may be encountered as personal or impersonal. It has something to do with how we experience the world. For many of us here it is going to be impersonal, we’re not going to be comfortable with metaphors like a “loving parent.” That’s why many of us, me for one, prefer interdependent web as the metaphor for our understanding, both intellectual and visceral of our most intimate connection.
But, for Dr King it was personal, deeply, profoundly personal. He experienced it in a way that is like a loving parent. And, what I’m seeing is that this approach is in fact more common than the other. More important in recent years I’ve noticed most of those who feel called into our free community find that more personal language, God language if you will, for this deepest appreciation, most useful.
What’s important here is that our way as UUs allows us full freedom of how we chose to express our deepest experiences. The sad truth is we don’t always allow that full range. I can imagine the young doctoral candidate attending a UU church, expressing his metaphorical understanding of the divine, and being told that’s not UU. And, sadly, Martin Luther King, Jr., who saw so much in common here, maybe a home here, rejected by us, left. The sadness here is that he did belong among us. That broadness is our heritage, for all who walk the way of the clear mind and the open heart, who are willing to throw them selves, our selves wide, this is the way of intimacy. It is feeling. It is thinking. It is a way of knowing the larger. That’s the important thing. What we bring to the table, what makes us useful in the urgency of the moment, is our very broadness.
When we open ourselves to that larger place, to what our friends following the twelve steps call that higher power, and for many among us, God, and for many of us the interdependent web, the words are helpful but incomplete. Always incomplete. All our images fall short. That’s the point of something larger. The important thing is that being open, wide open, heart and mind open. We do this, and we encounter what can sustain us as we face the great work, the endless work in front of us.
Mass movement? Well, enough of us caught the fire of Martin Luther King’s words, the experience that Dr King was pointing to, and the work for justice that experience calls one to, that more of our ministers joined him in the day, as I understand it, than clergy of any other faith tradition. And that’s just a marker for how his call was in fact our call. As a religious tradition we saw something in what he preached that touched our hearts and took us to Birmingham, to Selma, to the depths of our own possibility.
April is Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday. If my math is right this coming April he would have been eighty-seven years old. But, of course, an assassin cut him down forty-eight years ago. But that dream? The dream that FBI agent was instructed to find? The dream we all quest for? A bullet couldn’t kill it. It is larger than any one person. It is the sum of our knowing our connections, each of us to the other, and all of us to this precious, hurt, world.
It is the call of love, real love. Love beyond belief. It is the call to work, real work. It is the help of the weak. It is the strength that runs through us like electricity, bringing life and possibility to all we do.
It is a revealing of the face of God.
Nothing less.
And, if we can open our hearts to it full, not just the way one or two of us need to see it, but including all of us, well, who knows, it might be the stuff of a mass movement.
Most important is that it can change what this little church on the hill is. We can change our own hearts. We can open our hearts. And in so doing we can become the beacon on the hill that truly proclaims a way in these dark times, a useful way, a transformative way, a way of healing and of hope.
That’s a dream that can be.
So be it. Blessed be. And, amen.
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