Nate Knows Nada

It’s probably trite to write about this today, but I thought I might
note that today’s the “heavenly birthday” of (St.) MLK.  He’s
being played all day on the Harvard radio station, WHRB-FM,
and the sermons are fascinating.  MLK is often discussed as the
more acceptable of the civil rights leaders of the 1960s (as opposed to
the less acceptable Malcolm X).  But if you listen to these
sermons and speeches, much of what he says is clearly radical, not in
its call for violence of anything like that, but by the very fact that
his steeping in the fullness of the Christian tradition and especially
the black American tradition.  Every phrase rings with Biblical
allusion, with the cries of the agony Psalms, the prophets, and the
Gospel, and with the radical upending of social power, complacency,
various kinds of violence, and death.

The man is a saint and a martyr (we include him in my church’s calendar
of commemorations, essentially a modern-day calendar of saints). 
But since we are so close to him, and we can remember him, we often use
him to our own purposes, using him (like the Bible or other highly
revered texts) to support whatever we happen to advocating.  As
Body and Soul points out, George Bush just did it. 
But W. is not the only offender, nor is the Right the only piece of the
political spectrum who has tried to twist this saint and martyr to
their own expediency.

Anyway, join in the listening, or listen to some of his sermons
somewhere else, or just read one of them.  Or even listen to the
U2 song, “MLK”

Sleep, sleep tonight
And may your dream be realized
If the thundercloud passes rain,
So let it rain, rain on me.

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This entry was posted on Monday, 19 January 2004 at 1:56 pm and is filed under Politicks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.