Exposed

There I was, back on the treadmill of the new year, running as if my life depended upon it, when a colleague invited our team to stop and consider the work of a man that our country has honored with a day. A man that I was of course aware of, yet whose work has sadly not been a part of my lived experience.

I clicked on the link my colleague sent and found a list of Martin Luther King’s most famous quotations. There was so much wisdom there that I was having trouble finding a favorite. Then one of our team invited us to sample this man’s work a little more deeply and I was confronted with Dr. King’s letter from the Birmingham Jail for the first time. Suddenly I am stripped bare of my comfortable blanket of privilege and I am sitting at my desk in awe of the majesty of those words.

For days, I tried to put emotions into words with minimal success. I realized I needed more time for sense making. I wanted to resist the temptation to swaddle myself again in that comfortable blanket and more deeply consider his words and actions.

“We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

His letter is a work of art. For me, it evoked van Gogh’s Starry Night and Mozart’s Don Giovani in the balance of graceful beauty and raw power. I imagine the conditions in that jail and the treatment he received. I imagine how I would have behaved if I had endured the excruciatingly slow and painful progress toward justice. Little injustices make my blood boil. I can confidently say that I would have given myself over to anger.

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

Despair poured in. Guilt. Anger. Realization of how far we are from conquering this mountain. The growing chasm between us in this country. Humanity’s seemingly unquenchable desire to subjugate other human beings instead of rising “from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.”

But what stood out the most in his letter is the hope of love and the faith in perseverance. “There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love.” Holding onto the lesson that hate and despair are dead ends. Nurture hope and persist in moving forward toward brotherhood.

I recently reconnected with someone that is a beacon of hope each time I’ve been around him. He told me about an effort he is involved in to help his community called Talent First (www.talentfirst.net). It seemed to me an ambitious collaboration to crack open the “airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society” and help unify our society.

“The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people, but the silence over that by the good people.”

The task ahead is to learn about these efforts and multiply them. Put despair and frustration aside and persist in positive steps toward a better tomorrow. Use the words and actions of past and present leaders to inspire us to action.