Martin Luther King Jr.: God's Messenger of Love

By Royal E. Alsup, Ph.D.

God is neither hardhearted nor softminded. He is toughminded enough to transcend the world: he is tenderhearted enough to live in it. He does not leave us alone in our agonies and struggles. He seeks us in dark places and suffers with us and for us in our tragic lives. -- Martin Luther King, Jr.

The love that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. brought us was neither hardhearted nor soft-minded. Dr. King often reminded us that in times of darkness there is a cosmic companion at the center of the Universe. When the world seems too tough to handle this cosmic companion helps and guides us. King wrote that "love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to the ultimate reality." God's matchless love and justice have the strength to overcome the injustices of poverty, war, sexism, and racism -- the four major errors of our time.

Martin was like a old Hebrew prophet who emerged out of his community and then became a voice speaking to the world. King added to his goal of ending segregation in America with the call to end the Vietnam War. The aim of Martin's love was to restore community and to create a Beloved Community of peacemakers.

Peacemakers are not simply gentle spirits who somehow manage to change societies without conflict. They are both tenderhearted and tough-minded and are able to passionately feel and courageously reveal community and societal denial of injustice. They work for reconciliation by removing the barriers to Love for the restoration of community. Reconciliation means being open to dialogue, when all voices are heard and conversation is made possible among factions that disagree. AS the Bible says, "Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God."

Sometimes the peacemaker has to be tough-minded when negotiating with a system that perpetuates broken communities through sexism, racism, poverty, and war. These perpetrators against humanity do not give up their wrong actions and wrong thinking without pressure. Dr. King, like the Bodhisattva, was willing to practice compassion in the concrete situation by suffering nonviolently and exposing the errors of the world system. Peacemakers are sometimes called to outrageous actions that reveal the sickness of society and bring conflicts to light. King was well-aware of the goal of the Bodhisattva of Mahayana Buddhism -- to end suffering for all sentient beings. During the Vietnam War we saw on television Buddhist Monks who were willing to sacrifice their lives by setting themselves on fire in protest of the napalm bombing of Vietnam.

King's nonviolent ethic is similar to the Eightfold Path of Buddhism -- right understanding, right thought, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right meditation. Dr. King's stress on not intentionally bringing harm to another living being is right action and right thinking. Thinking and action that come out of the hidden ground of Love bring justice to the world through selfless service. This is not the way of the martyr, but the way of the servant through suffering and love. Right speech is to have a conversation with the oppressor, to have reconciliation, caring, and forgiveness. Through the concrete action of the power of justice the barriers to the healing of broken community are removed. King said, "Power without love is reckless and abusive and ... love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice."

There are lovers of humanity who live into old age, such as the Jewish Prophet Isaiah and, currently, the Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh. Dr. King nominated Thich Nhat Hanh for the Nobel Prize for Peace. This Buddhist monk, like Martin Luther King, Jr., believes that there are no enemies. His position is that only love and compassion through the concrete power of justice can put an end to hatred. I want to make sure that we see these peacemakers in the concrete everyday living of the community and that we do not universalize them. This is so that we can hear the call of Love to act in our own little world by bringing justice and peace to our communities. This means that sometimes we have to suffer, but that we know that God is suffering with us when we try to bring Love in action to overcome hatred.

Right mindfulness and right meditation are not wanting in glory, fame, or fruits of action. Right livelihood and right effort for Dr. King meant to have compassion for others, to stand and suffer with others, and to end suffering for all people. To bring God's message of love by practicing "forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us" was an underlying theme of King's service to humanity. King realized that we all make errors, miss the mark, and cause suffering in other people's lives. He held no hatred in his heart toward any person, even toward the woman who stabbed him when he was at a book signing. King made sure that she was not prosecuted because he said he was more concerned about the system of hatred and violence that formed and shaped her than he was about punishing her. He was willing to forgive her for stabbing him, even when he was near death. This reminds me of the great Hindu, Mahatma Gandhi, who blessed his murderer even as he was falling to his death after being fatally shot. These are acts of great forgiveness. These Bodhisattvas realized that our trespasses, our Karma, have hurt others and have caused them suffering. We have no right to condemn or make judgments about others, but we must try to bless them and forgive them. This is not being a doormat. It is being assertive and having good boundaries, standing your ground, and expressing your uniqueness that the Creator put you here to proclaim. It is allowing the other person their view and accepting them with your whole heart, mind, and soul. This is right livelihood and right effort. It is love in action.

The Hebrew prophets and the Buddhist Bodhisattvas would agree with Martin Luther King Jr. when he said, "Something should remind us once more that the great things in this universe are things that we never see." Martin would say that spirituality reaches beyond us in a concrete, everyday service of love, peace, and justice. He would say that we all stand on the common ground of our humanity. The songs, the speeches, and the music of the civil rights movement were parts of a great drama that demonstrated how millions of people around the global village responded to Martin Luther King, Jr.'s dream of social creativity, the Beloved Community. If our spiritual practices or our religious rituals are not helping us to be in our own unique way a messenger to humanity in love and justice, then all the peacemakers, our role models, have died in vain.

References

Nhat Hanh, T. (1995). Living Buddha, Living Christ. NY: Riverhead Books.

Washington, J. M. (Ed.). (1986). A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr. San Francisco: Harper & Row.