Martin Luther King Day

2016,  MLK Day—I’m reading the classic book, Jesus and the Disinherited by the brilliant black theologian Howard Thurman whose work influenced King.  It reminded me of my blog of 11/27/14, ‘Ferguson’s Accomplishment’.  In it I stated the Ferguson event “desecrated the memory of MLK, a true black hero honored by all people regardless of race.  He emerged from a society much more deeply steeped in prejudice, yet he brought non-violent pressure to right the injustice of segregation.”

I stand by my statement that the Ferguson’s riots dishonor his memory.  It was clear that MLK stood on the side of a just cause; blacks were innocent victims of institutional prejudice, yet he led peaceful protests and the million-man-march never resorting to violence and brought about the desired change.  With Ferguson 'the right’ is less clear; there is blame on both sides . . . are the police ‘trigger happy’ when it comes to black youth?  I think it is clear that is true—yet that is not the only consideration . . . the function of a police force is to maintain order in society; their effectiveness requires that society respect and support their authority.  Over the past few decades a ferment of anger, disrespect and hatred grew among black youths against police.  That hatred was echoed in the rap-music of insults and calls to oppose police . . . ‘kill the pigs’.  The police, when their authority is not respected or supported, tighten their reactions against perceived violations.

I thought I understood the duel nature and shared blame for the violence in Ferguson but Thurman helped give me deeper understand of the disinherited people’s anger, he explained the why and how of it—I quote his book:

            Pg. 69:  “Hatred in the mind and spirit of the disinherited, is born out of great bitterness—a bitterness that is made possible by sustained resentment.”

            Pg. 70:  “your hatred gives you a sense of significance which you fling defiantly in the teeth of their estimate of you.”

            Pg. 72: “thus hatred becomes a device of which an individual seeks to protect himself against moral disintegration.” (the devaluation he sees in the eyes of the strong).

            Pg. 74:  “Every expression of intolerance, every attitude of meanness, every statute that limits and degrades, give further justification for life-negation on the part of the weak toward the strong.”

Thurman gives insight to the genesis of the anger and hatred that is found among the disinherited—but sees its true nature beyond the violence it births—

            Pg. 76:  “hatred destroys finally the core of the life of the hater.”

Martin Luther King heard Thurman’s message and understood its truth.  He refused to accept disinheritance and used the strength of truth and justice to wage his fight, winning the ear and respect of all who value justice.

We are still seeking the way to co-exist.  There are two roads to the future;    

--will we choose the way of Ferguson through hatred and violence?

--Or Thurman’s and King’s way through peaceful insistence upon what is right and just?

'Something'

[The author of the Christmas poem in my last blog is Ian Oliver and the poem is in the book, We Ask Your Blessings: 100 Prayers edited by Donald Shockley.  I did not find a way to contact Ian Oliver.]

        __

Today I grab a page from my journal of a few days ago:

                                                                          _ _ _

There is ‘something’ that gave rise to the Universe and Life.  We had come to call it God.  There were many ways to say God’s name, but whatever name was used, people were identifying the Creator of Life and the Universe.

Creator of the Universe?? . . . that is beyond our ability to grasp! . . . so we constructed images and/or ideas of what we thought God might be in order to try to give us understanding—but all our ideas led to false images because God IS beyond our understanding.  For thousands of years we have struggled with the concept of God, nailing him down tighter and tighter while arguing with, or denying, or warring with those whose images and ideas were different from our own.  Since the beginning of conscious thought we humans kept seeking the source of our being—until the modern era when we made such giant strides in Science and leaps in technology that we developed the arrogance to believe Our Intelligence is supreme—so there is no need for a god.  Little by little we eliminated the search for who or what God is and now believe we can do without ‘a god’ (God).  But without a Center to operate from we are gradually destroying the structures we built to guide us to sustainability in a chaotic fragmented understanding (or lack there of) of who and what we are.  We enthroned our selfhood, liberated our inhibitions, took restraint off our aggressions and so are destroying the civilization that was thousands of years in the making . . . instead of working to correct the flaws in our institutions the attitude is to rebel against them with protests loud and long to get what ‘we’ (our little group) wants because we’ve come to feel entitled to have our every need met with no consideration to ‘the All’ (the Greater Good) and the future.

Whoever/whatever ‘a god’ is, we need the values God represents to point the way to how we can live together on this tiny planet in this vast universe.

                                                                                                           

A Christmas Prayer

When I am in Florida in the winters, I attend a weekly group (about 20+) which begins with some Biblical readings, then goes on to discuss thoughts that the reading stimulates.  Our discussions range widely and sometimes become controversial, but we all enjoy them and feel enriched by the varied perspectives.   Last year at the meeting before the Christmas break we had a poem whose author was unknown, the group was awed by it and I now wish to share it.  If anyone recognizes it and can identify the author please let me know, I would love to give him or her credit. 

A Christmas Prayer

On that holy night,

Somehow,

It happened.

Somehow,

God took a handful of humanity:

Proud, petulant, passionate;

And a handful of divinity:

Undivided, inexpressible, incomprehensible:

And enclosed them in one small body.

Somehow, the all too human

Touched the divine,

And was not vaporized.

To be human was never the same,

But forever thereafter,

Carried a hint of its close encounter with the perfect.

And forever thereafter,

God was never the same,

But carried a hint of the passion of the mortal.

If God can lie down in a cattle-trough,

Is any object safe from transformation?

If peasant girls can be mothers to God,

Is any life safe from the invasion of the eternal?

If all this could happen, O God,

What places of darkness on our earth

Are pregnant with light waiting to be born this night?

If all this could happen, O God,

Then you could be, and are, anywhere, everywhere,

Waiting to be born this night in the most

Unbelievable places,

Perhaps even in our own hearts.

Amen

A New Millennium

In the 20th Century we stopped believing in what we mistakenly call God

      --our Santa Clause in the sky.

We had manufactured our own image of a fabricated deity

      --then, tiring of it, discarded the essence with the fantasy.

We became the existentialists who proclaimed

      defiant strength to embrace our aloneness.

With Nietzsche we tried to shape superman

      to march out and conquer the void,

            Armed with

                  Machiavelli’s politics

                  Adam Smith’s wealth

                  Ann Rand’s selfishness

                  and Hollywood’s morals

            We set out to build a brave new world

                  ...and got lost along the way.

Is God?

The question cannot be answered!

Yet whether or not there exists a cogent being of Spirit,

The God-concept embodies all goodness and truth

      which we need to make life worth living.

When we stopped believing in God

      we turned away from

      values, purpose, meaning –

      all that we most need

      to become fully human.

In this new millennium, where is modern man to look

to avoid constructing another illusionary god?

A  bigger god, God of the Universe

Can we learn to embrace Mystery and not demand an image?

                             --I AM, Life IS--

The Wisdom literature of all peoples contain words that search the dark
     ‘In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God’.

Today's Thoughts

Following a long and anguished night wherein the thoughts of the chaos in our world and the horrors of the jihadist’s movement robbed me of sleep, midway through this day I felt the need to write in my prayer journal.  Without thought or planning, these words spilled across the pages:

I’ve said “God doesn’t need us, but we need God” . . . what I mean by that is that we NEED God at the most basic level—to exist at all; the breath we need every second in order to continue to live is there, supplied for us and we need do nothing but breath the oxygen our body requires.  Who or what is God?  We can’t know, the Creator of the Universe is so beyond knowing to our limited human intelligence . . . but life IS, we experience it, and all that is needed for life’s continuance is there . . . we did nothing to have it be, yet its reality is undeniable.   I choose to say it is God’s gift to us—being is a gift of God!  Who or what is God?  I don’t, I can’t know—but I can know I have life and it is sustained minute by minute by all that surrounds me; and that IS God because no human action gave nor gives it being . . . the Mystery that is, is my God that gives life and all that is needed for its continuation.  Mystery God choses to share that with me and invites me to be part of it and even to contribute to it if I so choose.  What I choose is what I have the opportunity to offer . . . God doesn’t NEED my offering, but I can add to God’s being by giving of myself in the effort to further the good—for the good IS God.

Part of a Greater Whole

I want to expand on a comment made to the 7^th of my Teilhard series (10-1-15).  It reads:  “Yes, we are co-creators with God.  Not many people grasp that.  We create our own reality, which gives us the opportunity to create something different if we don’t like what we did the first time.”

As stated, that seems to be addressing our individuality, but beyond that Teilhard is asking us to realize we are also creating as part of a greater whole.  Our world is one interdependent, interacting system which functions for better or worse by the choices we collectively make.  Here too we can choose something different if we don’t like what we are faced with.  Human choices determine the direction of the world’s progress.  Our exploration in space has shown us what is hard to grasp from our individual perspectives—we are one whole interacting system and when one part is injured or harmed the whole suffers from the damage.  Until we realize that, we close our eyes to the damage that occurs beyond the circle of our own interests.

During the early part of WWII, history tells us that initially, as Hitler invaded one European country after another, we in America adopted a policy of non-involvement . . . until Pearl Harbor was bombed, then the entire nation rallied to a total involvement as never seen before.  Men women and children were committed to fighting the ‘scourge’ of Nazism—men joined the services, women went to work in defense plants and school children sold defense stamps and war bonds while pulling wagons from house to house to collect useful things for the war effort.  When America united with allied forces that common cause led to victory—the scourge was defeated and annihilated.  That historical event demonstrates what is possible from united effort.

There is another scourge now threatening the very core of civilized society!  The jihad movement has thrown the Middle East into turmoil; millions of people are fleeing the destruction, many drowning at sea trying to escape in unsafe boats after paying their life-savings to human traffickers.  The hordes of refugees that make it to safety are met with anger and resistance because their huge numbers strain the resources of the countries to which they flee.

This is not a local problem, not a nation’s problem, not a regional problem, this is a global problem and the world must address it as such!

Our world is faced with a multi-headed monster . . . a rogue culture that has as its goal, the annihilation of civilization; a culture which delights in sheer destruction and seeks to eliminate freely chosen self-government so as to install its form of enslavement.  The many-headed monster shows itself under different names but its body is jihad—reveling in terrorism and malhuman acts.  TV has shown us their treatment of dissenters: from flying passenger planes into the twin towers, to deaths by stoning, beheading and mass executions.  Girls are forbidden education and hundreds have been abducted and sold as ‘wives’ into sexual slavery.  Boys are narrowly educated by rote memorization of religious treatises.  Jihadists carry out killing of whole villages of noncombatants.  The looting of artistic treasures helps support their activities and they gleefully destroy irreplaceable ancient cultural

artifacts simply to show distain for other cultures and values.  All their actions defy humanitarian values.  Jihad is a cancer on this planet; the civilized world must unite against all forms of its expression.  In this scourge, pure evil is once again threatening civilization.  It is critical that we see our planet as one whole interacting system and give support to the beleaguered parts of this greater whole that is our home.  The sum or our choices will determine the shape of our future.