Last month we commemorated The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday. You may or may not have been around when Dr. King was living, however it’s likely that you have an MLK story. In my case, he was my first invitation to find an off-ramp on the Hatred Highway. He educated, he illustrated, he sang, he led, and he preached his way through hatred and long held beliefs of inequality and racism. He was not a perfect man. He was not the only incredible person on that journey. In fact, there were many incredible people with Dr. King on that journey, many whose names we were never taught and will never know. People who continued his work of Peace and the fight for Civil Rights.
What I first learned about him when I was a child is no longer all I revere about him. His courage in the face of the ugliness of racism and violence will always stay with me. Over many years, his thinking and theology have deepened my own search for meaning and purpose. My Peacemaking is an outgrowth of my thealogy. I spend my life thinking about how to make life easier, healthier, and safer for everyone and everything on this planet — but mostly I consider it how to do it within my communities. I’m an applied thealogian. For me, it’s not just about our values and the ways we think about them, it’s about how we put them to work in the world. The most effective way I’ve found to do that is to work on creating invitations to collaborate on all that makes life more Possible. Peacemaking isn’t the opposite of warmongering, it’s a whole other journey, a deepening of connections, which has a lot more wonderful lunch spots along the way. We can create Possibilities together. They can be Peaceful. Even small Possibilities can be world and life-changing.
In 1959, Dr. King went to India to the Ghandi Center to learn more about nonviolence and its application to civil disobedience. He committed himself to this, but did not have the opportunity to see it in work until the start of the Montgomery bus boycotts. Led by King, millions of Blacks took to the streets in peaceful protest, acts of civil disobedience, and economic boycotts. He and his work have been followed all over the world. There have been a few other successful nonviolent resistances, but not many.
We live in divided times. Because of political beliefs we have either forgotten or stopped working together on community ideas that are important to all of us. Another of King’s gifts to us was bringing forward the possibility of Beloved community. “Beloved Community” refers to a vision of a society where everyone is treated with love, respect, and equality, free from prejudice, poverty, hunger, and discrimination, essentially a community where all people can live together in peace and harmony. It emphasizes the idea of achieving social justice through nonviolent means and building a society based on love and compassion for all people. This vision of Beloved Community is a vision of community from the Hebrew Scripture (Isaiah 11) where hunger, poverty and homelessness are no longer tolerated or considered to be normative.
How do we, you and I, bring this Peacemaking and Nonviolence into our communities. What projects do we undertake to encourage greater participation in the building and strengthening of our Beloved Communities? What skills do each of us bring to the table to contribute to the building of healthy Peaceful community. Because communities where people look out for one another and help each other thrive as communities.
What does your community need? What positive things can you do to encourage your neighbors to collaborate on building Peaceful, Beloved Community? What do you dare to dream that we might do together in Peace. Let’s find out, shall we?
Salaam, Shalom, Peace, Blessed Be.