by Rev. Kathleen McTigue, January 18, 2004
It seems an amazing trick of time that we could now find ourselves forty years removed from the most famous public speech made by Rev. Martin Luther King, his "I have a Dream" speech in Washington, DC. But it really was forty years ago, in 1963. For some of you, especially those who were alive and active during the civil rights struggle, those forty years will seem like a blink of an eye. For others, especially for those not yet born when he spoke it, that speech and everything around it seem like old history.
But regardless of how personally connected we feel to that era, we hold it up and remember it together. We remember the struggles, the danger and the courage, the yearning, the victories and disappointments, and we know all of it is important. But sometimes I think we lose sight of why it's important. Our celebrations around Martin Luther King's birthday, in particular, tend to focus on King and on the other leaders, the heroes and the heroines, because they stand out so clearly against the background of struggle. We think of them in the pivotal moments, like the huge march on Washington in 1963. It's only much more dimly, like a backdrop behind them, that we see the years and years of hard work that lifted them up, the enormous, relentless labor before the little cracks started to show up in the culture and then to widen into clear and powerful lines of change.
It's not a bad thing to remember the heroes, but we remember them falsely if we forget that they were part of a whole flowing current of effort. Any real change that has ever happened in our society has involved thousands and thousands of ordinary people who made their choices and took their risks not in a few electric moments but again and again, over the course of years.
The novelist Milan Kundera has said, "The struggle of humanity against power is the struggle of remembering against forgetting". If we should forget the way in which real change is made in our world, then we also forget the way to confront power in our own time. If we allow ourselves to feel nostalgic and forlorn because we see no one who has the stature of a Martin Luther King when we look around us today, then we undermine our own vision, our own courage and determination.
We have it backwards. As King himself knew very well, he didn't create or empower the movement he helped to lead. He knew, as he said in the excerpt I used for a reading, that like everyone else he lived "in the red", in debt to all those who came before. For a short time, King was the point where a movement's energy could coalesce and take shape in a powerful visionary and leader. But that energy depended on invisible and unknown people who came before and on ordinary, courageous, unnamed men and women who sustained King and all the other leaders because of their daily willingness to take heart and do the right thing.
So -- forty years after King raised his voice in Washington, DC to proclaim a dream of racial equality, who are we now, who remember and honor his voice every year? We still have our dreams for justice and mercy, dreams that aren't too different from the large ones King himself was articulating at the end of his life. They are dreams not only of racial justice but of a world that tilts more readily toward balance between the rich and poor, and a world that leans hard against the wind of war and toward the imperatives of peace. King saw that those three struggles are linked together -- racial equality, economic justice and peace. In our own time we've come to see that they are also linked to a fourth area of struggle, which is to slow or stop human mistreatment of the planet itself.
Because they are linked together, and because even alone each area of struggle is so huge, even before we begin in some direction for change we feel so dwarfed by what we're up against that it's absurd. We feel almost paralyzed, because of our own smallness and limitations. Who are we, after all, to think that anything we do could make any difference? World peace; ecological balance; economic justice; racial equality -- they all seem so far away from us right now that we can think of them as dreams in the cynical sense, like the derisive voice we sometimes hear from our teenagers, saying, "In your dreams!"
But they are still there, in our dreams. We can't help it. As King put it, "The universe is so structured that things go awry if people are not diligent in their cultivation of the other-regarding dimension." When we are open to the other, to how it is with our sisters and our brothers, then we cannot keep ourselves from trying to right the imbalances we see in the world. It's what we're called into, by whatever moment of history is ours. So it seems to me that the only true way to honor our heroes from the past, like Dr. King, is not so much by simply remembering what they did or what they said. It's to figure out the ways in which their dreams and how they worked for their dreams give us a launching pad for our own work.
The history of social change doesn't end until the story of the human race comes to an end, whenever that might be. Each one of us has a choice to make, about where and how we step into that story, and how long we'll help to write it. And when we remember the chapters that have been written before, we can see that most of it was written not by the heroes, but by people just like us.
They were people whose names were only known in little circles, to their families and friends, not in the history books. They were people who didn't think that what they did was all that big a deal; people who were often filled with doubt, often discouraged, often tempted by despair; people who saw clearly where things had gone wrong and only very dimly what the way might be to make them right. They were not experts, they were not perfect, they made mistakes and they sometimes went to their graves without seeing the fruits of their labor. But it was only because they kept on doing that labor -- kept on pushing with whatever small strength they found in themselves -- that the walls of some forms of injustice actually did come tumbling down.
One of those walls was the one that kept women from voting. It seems like such a long time ago, but my grandmother, who only died last spring, was shaped by that world. Around her as she grew up, she found older women who had never imagined they could one day have a say in their own governance. But she found others, including her older sister, who spoke out the vision that it should be so, that it must be so. My grandmother was fifteen when women finally won the right to vote, and all her life she remembered seeing her sister, seven years older, proudly join the very first ranks of voting women. That moment, passed on to me by someone I loved, arose only because unknown thousands of women, along with some men, poured years of their lives into the struggle, many of them without ever seeing a sign that history was finally turning their way. Susan B. Anthony, one of our Unitarian ancestors, lived and fought for that one a long, long time and died at the age of eighty-six, fourteen years before women could finally vote.
So I think we have to hold onto our heroes and heroines in two ways that reach beyond what they might have said or done as individuals. We've got to remember that none of them ever acted alone, but were supported at every moment by the unknown, ordinary people who laid the groundwork for them and continued on after them. And we've got to remember that however much those heroes and heroines look like guiding stars to us now, in their own moment and in the flow of their own lives, they often had to wade through as much doubt and confusion as we face. Like us, they made their choices by guess and by faith as often as they did out of certainty.
Paul Loeb, a scholar of social movements, writes in one of his books of a particular Martin Luther King Day some years ago when he and Rosa Parks were both being interviewed by CNN. The interviewer welcomed Rosa Parks by recounting her refusal to move to the back of the bus. He said, "That set in motion the year-long bus boycott in Montgomery. It earned Rosa Parks the title of 'mother of the civil rights movement.'"
Loeb was excited to hear Rosa Parks' voice and pleased to be on the roster with her. But he reflected later that by introducing her in this way, by holding to that particular "great moment" or "great leader" version of the story, a lot of the real power of the Montgomery movement was stripped away. Because before the day she refused to give up her seat, Rosa Parks had spent, not a few months but twelve years helping to lead the local chapter of the NAACP, along with dozens and dozens of other determined people. The summer before, she had attended a ten-day training session at the Highlander Center in Tennessee, where she'd met an older generation of civil rights activists and learned from their stories.
During the years before her action, Parks had studied other challenges to segregation: another Montgomery bus boycott fifty years earlier, and one in Baton Rouge two years before Parks was arrested. In other words, the image we all hold of Rosa Parks sitting there, calm and courageous and alone, is only the punch-line of a much longer story. Her action was part of a continuous motion grounded in generations, a current of change made up of thousands of people. Any one of those others might have been the one to act, the one we remember, if a ripple in the flow had come just a little differently.
Seeing this in no way diminishes the clarity and power of Rosa Parks' action. But it's important to remember that her pivotal moment might never have arisen without, in Loeb's words, "an immense amount of humble and frustrating work that she and others did earlier on."
Loeb writes, "The stories that might remind us of our potential impact and strength are too often forgotten, caricatured or ignored altogether. …Most of us know next to nothing of the many battles ordinary men and women have fought to preserve freedom, expand the sphere of democracy, and create a more just society….Who these days can describe the union movements that ended eighty-hour work weeks at near-starvation wages? Who knows about the citizen efforts that first pushed through Social Security? How did the women's suffrage movement spread to hundreds of communities, and gather enough strength to prevail?…[Our own] identity dissolves in the absence of memory."
If we forget our history and forget the context in which our heroes were anchored, we cut ourselves off from our own sustaining roots. And how can we move forward in our own world, our own little piece of history, without that sustenance? In every direction we turn the problems are enormous. If we open our eyes with clarity, the depth of suffering is profound, and it's very tempting to shut our eyes again in order to shield ourselves from the pain in the world and the sense of helplessness and despair it can evoke.
But we're not facing a skewed order dictated by God or by nature. The distorted and unjust world we see around us is one that was shaped by human choices. It's a human choice -- for instance -- to gut the tax base, tilt it heavily toward the rich, create an enormous deficit and then start talking about putting men on the moon and on Mars. It's a human choice to put the profits of multinationals ahead of clean drinking water. It's a human choice to allow millions of people to stagger their way through this richest nation without health care. It's a human choice to turn a blind eye to climate change, to make policies toward more pollution instead of less. It's a human choice to greet violence with violence, to go to war, to pour our wealth into more and better weapons.
All of the immense problems that face us were born in large measure from human choices. So those of us on whom the light of life now shines have to see that by sheer virtue of being alive, we have some choices to make too. Especially those of us who are smart, educated, more or less sane and trained in the virtues of democracy: we have some choices to make, about where we throw our little weight. As Marion Wright Edelman once said, "Social involvement is the rent we pay for being alive." So how do we pay that rent with courage, with joy, with perseverance over the long haul?
There's a story about an old Zen master who was begged by one of his students to say how the student could know that some sort of progress was being made by all the rigors of meditation. The old master smiled, headed out the door and said, 'Come with me. Let's fill the well with snow.' Like most Zen teachings this one is a bit of a riddle. On the surface, filling the well with snow is absurd. It's a hopeless task: the snow melts; the process is endless.
But on a deeper level the point is clear: whether we're trying for spiritual enlightenment or for a world of justice and compassion, it will feel like trying to fill the well with snow. We will hardly ever get the proof we want and we will never get quick results. We take action -- for self-transformation, for world transformation -- not because we'll see our victories, but because it needs to be done.
Danilo Dolci was a great Italian pacifist who challenged the Mafia in Sicily and helped empower poor peasant communities. Like King, like Gandhi, like Rosa Parks, like all the other heroes and heroines we treasure, Dolci knew about filling the well with snow. He wrote, "There are moments when things go well and one feels encouraged. There are difficult moments and one feels overwhelmed. But it's senseless to speak of optimism or pessimism. The only important thing is to know that if one works well in a potato field, the potatoes will grow. If one works well among [people], they will grow -- that's reality. The rest is smoke."
And so may we take heart, and work well, and grow the small part of large changes that will ripen -- maybe not in our time, but they will ripen -- into the world we hold in our dreams. AMEN.