The Fierce Urgency of Now

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MelanieDay 32 of our Lenten Journey through Dr. King’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech.

We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood—it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, “Too late.” There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. Omar Khayyam is right: “The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on.”

By Melanie Morrison (photo above), Director at Allies For Change

Fifty years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. declared in the pulpit at Riverside Church that the war in Vietnam was “a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit.” Dr. King warned that America would continue to be a dangerous purveyor of oppressive, counterrevolutionary violence in distant lands if it failed to acknowledge the systemic racism that lay — as an unhealed wound — at the heart of our nation. He decried the egregious irony that young black men were being sent eight thousand miles away “to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.” Continue reading “The Fierce Urgency of Now” →

The First Hope in our Inventory

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SNGDay 31 of our Lenten Journey through Dr. King’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech.

We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says: “Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word.”

From Rev. Solveig Nilsen-Goodin (photo above, with family), Wilderness Way Community (Portland, OR)

I turn my headlamp off. A faint pulse of fear shoots through me in that split second of complete darkness before my eyes adjust. Wind whips. Salty water sprays off the crashing waves. The ocean roars. I mean, roars.

This is not a habit of mine — venturing alone to the beach at night in gale force winds. But I cannot find my place in the camaraderie and singing around the campfire. Tonight, I am overwhelmed. Overwhelmed by the turbulent oceans and ever-rising tides of hate manifesting in our country. Overwhelmed by the tidal wave of climate change already literally crashing in on our shores. Internally I flail and gasp for air, inundated by the torrential consequences of greed and corruption, sexism and homophobia, racism and classism, colonialism and violence — everywhere it seems, violence — economic and ecological, sexual and physical, psychological and spiritual. The deluge just. doesn’t. stop. Continue reading “The First Hope in our Inventory” →

The Key That Unlocks the Door

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NicolasDay 30 of our Lenten journey through Dr. King’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech.

This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all mankind. This oft misunderstood, this oft misinterpreted concept, so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force, has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I’m not speaking of that force which is just emotional bosh. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John: “Let us love one another (Yes), for love is God. (Yes) And every one that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love. . . . If we love one another, God dwelleth in us and his love is perfected in us.” Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day.

By Elizabeth Nicolas, a Workers’ Rights Attorney at the Empire Justice Center (Rochester, NY)

In the weeks leading up to the 2016 presidential election, flyers were distributed in neighborhoods near my home in Rochester, NY that stated “Make Rochester Great Again.” The flyers directed residents to a website that promoted white supremacy. On the night of the presidential election, the home of a black family was vandalized: their windows were broken and a racial slur was spray painted across their house. The next day, two rainbow pride flags were set on fire while still attached to people’s homes. Continue reading “The Key That Unlocks the Door” →

Wild Lectionary: Dry earth, Dry bones

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IMG_3439.jpegFifth Sunday in Lent
Ezekiel 37:1-14

By Carmen Retzlaff

The hand of the Lord came upon Ezekiel, who was in exile from his homeland. “The prophet very rarely speaks of God’s face: he feels his hand,” says Abraham Heschel in The Prophets (Harper, 1962). In his vision, Ezekiel feels the hand of the Lord upon him, bringing him out and setting him in the middle of a dry valley, filled with bones. Continue reading “Wild Lectionary: Dry earth, Dry bones” →

A Revolutionary Spirit

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JPerkDay 29 of our Lenten Journey through Dr. King’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech.

These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wounds of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light. We in the West must support these revolutions.

It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch antirevolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has a revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions that we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores, and thereby speed the day when “every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain.”

A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.

“Beyond Vietnam; Before Apocalypse” by Dr. James Parkinson (photo above), Ecumenical Theological Seminary (Detroit, MI)

Fifty years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech marked a moment of decision for King and the movement he led. Speaking out to link the dropping of bombs on brown skin in Asian rice paddies with the refusal to enact policy addressing the real needs of black people in inner city America laid bare the depths of US violence. It was not enough to address civil rights alone; profound concern for the civil sphere enjoined profound concern for the military, the economy and society at large. King went to the bone with his knife, cut open putrid flesh long festering, joined the right to sit at lunch counters with whites to the question of the right to eat at all. Like Malcolm and so many others before him, once insisting the ugly triplets (militarism, materialism, and “melanism”) were in fact features of each other, King did not have long to live. And the movements he anchored or provoked—Civil Rights and Black Power alike—faced draconian repression and damnable cooptation. Fast forward. Continue reading “A Revolutionary Spirit” →

This Revolution of Values

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Obery

Day 28 of our Lenten Journey through Dr. King’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech.

A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.

This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who shout war and, through their misguided passions, urge the United States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations. These are days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not engage in a negative anticommunism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity, and injustice, which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops.
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Excerpting Obey Hendricks (photo above) in “Why Martin Luther King had to Die” (April 4, 2014):

The indictments King offered of capitalism and the class inequality that bedeviled American society during his travels were considered extremely inflammatory by members of the power elite. To one audience he said, “We’re dealing in a sense with class issues, we’re dealing with the problem between the haves and the have-nots.” He told a New York Times reporter, “In a sense, you could say that we’re involved in a class struggle.” Elsewhere he declared, “we can’t solve our problem now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power.” King was now no longer talking about civil rights; he was talking systemic change, even structural revolution: “I think we must see the great distinction here between a reform movement and a revolutionary movement.” He made it clear that what he advocated was a revolutionary movement and revolutionary action that would “raise certain basic questions about the whole society…. [T]his means a revolution of values” that for him went beyond issues of race. To King that meant, as he said more than once, that “the whole structure of American life must be changed.” Continue reading “This Revolution of Values” →

A True Revolution of Values

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ChedDay 27 of our Lenten Journey through Dr. King’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see than an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

 A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.
—————–
By Ched Myers (photo above), Bartimaeus Cooperative Ministries

I am grateful that this blog is, through the Lenten season, joining the widespread campaign this year among faith-rooted peace and justice circles to both commemorate and “workshop” King’s most important—and consequential—address. As many commentators in this series have pointed out in refrain, King’s analysis remains disturbingly resonant today. Continue reading “A True Revolution of Values” →

The Right Side of the World Revolution

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mlkDay 26 of our Lenten Journey through Dr. King’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech.

In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which has now justified the presence of U.S. military advisors in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counterrevolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Cambodia and why American napalm and Green Beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru.

It is with such activity that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on to the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin, we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
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On this day, exactly 51 years ago from the Oshkosh Daily Northwestern (Oshkosh, Wisconsin), March 26, 1966.  A timely word:

Headline: King Berates Medical Care Given Negroes [sic]

CHICAGO (AP) – Massive direct-action is needed to “raise the conscience of the nation” to the segregated and inferior medical care received by Negroes, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said Friday night.

Calling for court suits to force doctors and hospitals to comply with the Civil Rights Act, King and officers of the Medical Committee for Human Rights accused the American Medical Association of a “conspiracy of inaction” in civil rights.
At a press conference before his speech to the committee’s annual meeting. King said: “We are concerned about the constant use of federal funds to support this most notorious expression of segregation. Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health is the most shocking and the most inhuman because it often results in physical death.

“I see no alternative to direct action and creative nonviolence to raise the conscience of the nation.”

Dr. John L. S. Holloman, a New York City physician who heads the interracial committee, told reporters: “There is scarcely a hospital North or South that does not overtly or covertly discriminate against Negroes. County medical societies, especially in the South, have discriminated in admitting qualified Negro doctors.” he said. “We put the blame right on their (the AMA’s) doorstep.”

The AMA had no immediate comment.

A Significant and Profound Change

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Leah BurgessDay 25 of our Lenten Journey through Dr. King’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech.

The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality, and if we ignore this sobering reality, we will find ourselves organizing “clergy and laymen concerned” committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy. So such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God.
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“Precious Lord,” by Leah Burgess, Co-Founder/Owner at Salt, Life, and Love

A prayer of resistance for 2017

Abba Father, by the looks, sounds, and feels, it appears that we are losing. Lord, we are still marching, resisting, and speaking truth to power. We are still organizing for some of the same reasons your son – our elder brother Dr. King was organizing. We are tired and worn but not in the same ways as those that have come before us. We’ve built privileged and sophisticated technology but how can we use it to build a system that shares with everyone? Lord our eyes need washing as we win more battles on earth! Continue reading “A Significant and Profound Change” →

Every Creative Method of Protest Possible

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RicDay 24 of our Lenten Journey through Dr. King’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech.

Part of our ongoing commitment might well express itself in an offer to grant asylum to any Vietnamese who fears for his life under a new regime which included the Liberation Front. Then we must make what reparations we can for the damage we have done. We must provide the medical aid that is badly needed, making it available in this country if necessary. Meanwhile, meanwhile, we in the churches and synagogues have a continuing task while we urge our government to disengage itself from a disgraceful commitment. We must continue to raise our voices and our lives if our nation persists in its perverse ways in Vietnam. We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking out every creative method of protest possible.

As we counsel young men concerning military service, we must clarify for them our nation’s role in Vietnam and challenge them with the alternative of conscientious objection. I am pleased to say that this is a path now chosen by more than seventy students at my own alma mater, Morehouse College, and I recommend it to all who find the American course in Vietnam a dishonorable and unjust one. Moreover, I would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up their ministerial exemptions and seek status as conscientious objectors. These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.

Now there is something seductively tempting about stopping there and sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade against the war in Vietnam. I say we must enter that struggle, but I wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing.
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From Ric Hudgens, pastor at North Suburban Mennonite Church in Lake County, Illinois:

In April 1967 at the time of Dr King’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech the number of US troops in Vietnam was peaking at half a million with over a thousand casualties per month. Simultaneously the anti-war movement was also reaching its apex. In New York City 300,000 marched against the war. 50,000 marched at the Pentagon with hundreds arrested and jailed. Yet in 1967 the majority of churches, white AND black, remained silent. Continue reading “Every Creative Method of Protest Possible” →