I'm the first to admit it--I don't know my history nearly as well as I should. When I posted earlier about the
Beyond Iraq service and rally at Riverside Church, I had not yet read the words of the famous sermon by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence!" Now I have--and it's downright chilling. How little things have changed in some ways. Have we let him down? Sorry...guess I'm being both rhetorical and morose.
"Do not abandon yourselves to despair. We are the Easter people and hallelujah is our song." Pope John John Paul II
Apologies to people who have had it up to their eyeballs with Pope talk. But I've actually had those words, or something similar, in my head for over a week now. When I was trying to come up with what to
write after Terri Schiavo's death, I was thinking of those words, but ended up not using them. But I did find out that John Paul II was paraphrasing St. Augustine's words: "We are an Easter people and Alleluia is our song".
Of course, those who are not fond of the Pope in general and his views on sexuality in particular probably wouldn't be too fond of Augustine either. Augustine, well...he had some "issues". Issues? Heck, he had subscriptions! (Credit to my brother for the pun--I can never seem to pass up an opportunity to use it.) But on a less whimsical note, I take this as a reminder that wisdom often comes from some pretty broken vessels. Rather than allowing their human frailties to cause me to discard any wisdom they might have to offer, I try to remind myself that the lesson here is that I should not allow my own human frailties to keep me from speaking when I feel so moved. Even if my voice shakes, as Maggie Kuhn would say.
Well, this babbling brook of a diary started out being about King's speech, and is heading back in that direction now. Click here for "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence!". There is also a link to an MP3 of the speech. It's hard to pick just one part to post, but I will share a few excerpts from the speech and strongly encourage anyone who has not read it before to click the link above and read the rest.
In 1957 when a group of us formed the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: "To save the soul of America." We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself until the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear. In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had written earlier:
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath --
America will be!
Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.
See how easily the word "Iraq" could slip into the place where King spoke about Vietnam? The parallels continue as King explains the effect the war has had on the poor.
There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor -- both black and white -- through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated, as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So, I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.
Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population.
As much as despair is understandable in times like these, I also realize it is a luxury we simply can't afford--not as a way of life, anyway. Individually, we do become exhausted sometimes, and we shouldn't beat ourselves up (or let anyone else beat us up) for needing to take a break from the intense business of trying to save humanity from the forces of evil. Joanna Macy describes these times as The Great Turning, and she has this to say about the issue of burnout:
These holding actions can be exhausting, though. It's good to know that it's OK to step back. Many of us, if we step back when we feel bruised and bent out of shape from being there in point position on issue after issue, feel as if we are abandoning ship. We feel guilty about it. But we need to know that the great turning is vast,
and if we step back, it's like the lead goose dropping back from point position to fly in the windstream of the others. We're not abandoning anything. We don't cease being who we are, and we don't stop being deeply allied with the ongoingness of life.
And we do have reason for hope. Look at the diverse organizations that came together at Riverside Church today. And Martin Luther King's closing words are just as hopeful and inspiring today, so I will close with them:
And if we will only make the right choice, we will be able to transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of peace.
If we will make the right choice, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our world into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.
If we will but make the right choice, we will be able to speed up the day, all over America and all over the world, when justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.