On this holiday in honor of Martin Luther King my wish is that however you are burdened or oppressesed you would be delivered from bondage and experience a new level of freedom.
I am from the generation of Martin Luther King and Vatican II. Last June I celebrated with classmates the fiftieth anniversary of my graduation from a Jesuit High School. At the large banquet during the anniversary celebration, I sat with a teacher who opened my mind in the late 1950’s to the evils of segregation. He was a young Jesuit scholastic who taught a course on Shakespeare. I was taking that course because I was having so much difficulty with things like chemistry and physics. I loved this class. I began to grow an appreciation for literature and the humanity that it reflected which carried over to contemporary issues that this teacher raised in his class. At the reunion I reminded him that he opened my mind to the evils of segregation and the movement for civil rights of African Americans. He did not really remember. His wife who was an educational psychologist reminded him of how impressionable people at that age are.
A few years later I was in a novitiate for a religious order. We had a saint for our director. He also talked to us often about the need for social justice and racial equality. I remember very well riding into Cincinnati that fall in the back of a pick up truck to march in a civil rights event in the early 60’s. Our novitiate director also had us reading things like Martin Luther King’s Letter From A Birmingham Jail during our meals. I still recall being one of the readers. Then, as well as now, I recall how those words from King's Letter From A Birmingham Jail resonated in my own heart. Those words touched me and still echo in my life today.
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Then a couple of years later on that April night in 1968 night when Martin Luther King was gunned down in Memphis I was with a group of Quakers at Earlham College in Indiana. It was an ecumenical effort and get together. Those were the days of Vatican II when there were many intitiatives to reach out beyond the confines of the Catholic Ghetto. I remember that night being fearful for our country as some of the major cities in the country began to burn. I also remember a Quaker saying to me that while they did not have Eucharist like we did in the Catholic Church that as we shared our fears and sorrows that evening there was a bond that was indeed Eucharistic.
I am a child of the 60’s and very much a son of Vatican II. Anyone who wants to deny my experience or disparage it would deny the Spirit as she spoke in those days. I had not come out yet. I always knew my sexual orientation. It would be twenty or twenty-five years more before I could finally “come out” and experience the person God created. Civil Rights, Gay Rights, are forever joined for me.
I celebrate today the legacy of Martin Luther King who fought for the rights of his people. I want to continue that fight with him even as I continue to fight in my time for the rights of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered and queer people. I am grateful today as I try in my small way to continue the search for Martin Luther King's dream for a world of peace and justice for all.