Martin Luther King

Today is Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday. When we were kids my folks used to take long driving vacations across country. One year we drove to the Lutheran Church in America convention in Atlanta, Georgia. It was the summer of 1968. Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated just a couple of months earlier.

When we arrived in Atlanta, dad drove us to visit Ebenezer Baptist Church. We got out of the car and went into the church office where an elderly gentleman was folding bulletins for the Sunday service. He greeted us and asked how he could help us. My dad told him that we were travelers from California, and we were in town for a church convention. He said that he wanted to bring his children to see the church where Martin Luther King, Jr. had preached. The gentleman smiled and told us he was glad we had stopped. He introduced himself as Martin Luther King, Sr.

When I think of the image of that man folding bulletins, knowing now what I know about what his life must have been like for the previous weeks, I am struck by his serenity. When we spoke with him he was gentle and hospitable. It was an image of grace, motivated, I'm sure, by the love he felt for his son.

Love is a Verb

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
– William Shakespeare, Sonnet 116

Shakespeare observes that love is a verb, an act of devotion. If we read Sonnet 116 in the context of romantic love, we understand Shakespeare to be instructing us to love actively, and with vigorous constancy towards the beloved. But we can dig deeper. "Marriage of true minds" speaks to a kind of intellectual love. Shakespeare avoids cliché by choosing "true minds" over true hearts. Shakespeare advocates feeling with the head, offering a nuanced companion to the human tendency to think with the heart.

Neither is Shakespeare interested in the impetuous fatuity of youth, but a love that's "not Time's fool." Active true love never runs out. Love sustains us by being our guiding star. It's a constant in our lives as long as we understand it as a verb.

Forgive

"The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong."
— Mahatma Gandhi

Forgiveness is the path to happiness. For both the forgiver and the forgiven. I used to connect this kind of forgiveness to faith and religious belief, but there's no binary connection. Forgive someone today and feel the transcendant power. I'd go one step further than Gandhi and say that strength is a product of forgiving.

Conditional Forgiveness

"Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us."
-- The Lord's Prayer

In the Lord's prayer, there is a single conditional phrase, and only one condition for grace. Grace. To be forgiven, it is essential that we forgive.