Longing for Martin Luther King

Last spring when the board of the Association for Death Education & Counseling met just before our

annual conference in Atlanta, my friend and colleague Louis Gamino, ADEC president last year had arranged for our board to visit the King Center. It was a moving, poignant afternoon.

Having grown up in the deeply divided and segregated south of the 1960s, the visit to the King Center rekindled some emotions long buried. Some of us stood in the rain in front of Dr. & Mrs. King's tomb. One stirring moment for many of us came as we sat together in the old Ebenezer Baptist Church where over the PA system, docents regularly replay the audiotape of the last sermon Martin Luther King preached in that church just weeks before his death. It was the same sermon--one in which he retold how he hoped he would be remembered, almost as if foretelling his death just weeks away--that Mrs. King had replayed at his

Palm Sunday with friends

funeral. The following Sunday morning, a few of us from all over the world joined the congregation at Ebenezer for worship on that Palm Sunday morning.

So in this week of deep unrest across our nation and world, I am remembering and wishing for a statesman like Martin Luther King again. While at the King Center, I picked up a copy of an anthology of Dr. King's words edited by James Washington entitled I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches that Changed the World (HarperOne, 1986). His 1967 message to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the second-to-last passage in the book offer words that seem poignantly connected to our own times. In this message he entitled, "Where Do We Go from Here?" Dr. King challenged those on both sides of the political spectrum who said the 1965 riots in Watts and other cities were effective civil rights action. "At best," he thundered, "the riots have produced a little additional antipoverty money allotted by frightened government officials, and a few water-sprinklers to cool down the children of the ghettos. It is something like improving the food in the prison while the people remain securely incarcerated behind bars" (p. 174).

This week, I have checked in on the news headlines once each day and spend only a few minutes hearing the media's rendition of the events. It is important that we all keep abreast of what is happening in the world around us. But I have chosen--like I have from the beginning of the COVID crisis almost three months ago--to spend much more of my time reading scripture and other enduring literature. Along with the Hebrew Bible's wonderful story of God interacting with his people in the book of Joshua, Dr. King's anthology has been that for me this week.

Some would say history has no place at such a time as this. I beg to differ. History gives us perspective, it reminds us that we are not the center of the universe, and it reminds us that there have been others who have faced seemingly insurmountable mountains and found strategies that inspire us to do better and be better than we are.

My challenge to you is to join me in living out the faith of Joshua and of Martin Luther King by the actions we take each day. Join me in reaching out to a friend or colleague who is of a different race or ethnicity than yours in tell them thank you for being my friend in spite of the difference in the color of our skin. And let us pray for a better day tomorrow.