What we learn from MLK about Conversations
When I heard that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. carried the book with him almost everywhere, I was stunned. In fact, the word is that on April 4, 1968, when King was assassinated, the book was in his room at the Lorraine Motel. What was it about a tiny work – no more than 125 pages – that could compel a man like King to read and re-read it until it was frayed? What was it that obliged many in the Civil Rights Movement who called themselves radical Christians—John Lewis, Ralph Abernathy and others-- to look to it as a guide? What sane thing did they think the book could help them do in the face of deafening insanity? What was it that inspired them to be bold enough to have conversations across lines of division? I wanted to know so I read it.
Jesus and The Disinheritedby Howard Thurman, written in 1949--twenty years before King’s death, raises questions we still today try to answer:
Why should I call myself a Christian when there are so many contradictions in the religion … when people who share the faith have been guilty of abominable atrocities?
What does the religion of Jesus have to say to people “with their backs against the wall”?
Is the way Christianity generally practiced –with all of its shortcomings --an indication of the weakness of the religion or is it a betrayal of the genius of Jesus?
How should people facing near annihilation respond to unmitigated power?
How should those wielding such power respond to those without it?
How should people talk to each other across borders and separations? … across faith traditions, across stone walls, across hate crimes and disenfranchisement?
How can we have ethical conversations leading to ethical actions?
A Word about Conversations
There is something to be said for studying the recommendations of Thurman --a man who talked to trees and storms; who claimed among his teachers his formerly enslaved grandmother and his Morehouse mentors John Hope and Benjamin Mays; who broke theological ground as Dean of Chapel at two diverse universities; who pastored an intercultural, interracial, interfaith church for a decade, even as he built upon time spent in India with Mahatma Ghandi.
Howard Thurman’s book (that Martin King carried everywhere) teaches how to speak across divides, to confront privilege with truth, and to take a scalpel to our own fears, deceptions and hatreds so we can even want to talk. It insists that we shake the traps that lock us up and keep us from loving. It points to the psychology of a child of God sent to fulfill a promise and change what’s around us. It pushes readers to turn a watchful eye toward more than what others do to us. It teaches us to examine what we do to others and what we do to ourselves. It’s a start.
It’s important to do research to find meaningful resources for conversations; to find those resources that are empowering; to sift out those messages that are harmful, uninformed, destructive, as well as those messages that marginalize and oppress. It’s important! In a world where there seem to be fewer answers than questions, where truth is harder than a lie, where keys to how we engage with people can be found in books that beg us to read them, where challenges to the status quo demand revolutionary action and powerful stories, where civil conversations with those who are different from us require more than courage…In that kind of world, we have to connect, we have to begin. It’s the least we can do. The world is expecting no less.
What keeps you from the conversation?