MLK: Next Right Thing

MLK: Next Right Thing

 “Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.”—Martin Luther King, Jr.

Mural Please Touch Children’s Museum Philadelphia

Today, my husband and I remember the 57th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s death in Memphis on April 4, 1968, and the events leading up to it and afterward. We were both senior medical students in Memphis during those troubled times when the world seemed to be falling apart. King left us so many legacies.

 I am thinking most about how he started in the civil rights movement, becoming a leader in the Montgomery, Alabama, 385-day bus boycott, which began in December 1955 after Rosa Parks was arrested for sitting in the front of a bus. King was 26, the new pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, the capital of Alabama.

He was supposedly selected by the African American community to lead the bus boycott because he was new and had not been intimidated by the white community, nor had he aligned himself with the various factions in the black community. During the boycott, King was arrested, and his home was bombed. However, King’s articulate and nonviolent leadership brought him into national prominence.

In his book Stride Toward Freedom, King also wrote about a spiritual experience as he sat at midnight at his kitchen table after another bomb threat. He felt a divine inner presence that took away his fears and uncertainty as he was ready to give up. This experience prepared him to face whatever came, and that courage sustained him for the rest of his life. I think this is one of the experiences he considers when he refers to “going to the mountain and hearing the truth.”

King did not decide to go to Montgomery to lead a bus boycott or become the civil rights movement leader. Instead, he probably went to be a good minister and start a family, as his father did. But a situation arose; he was chosen, and he stepped in. Indeed, his family background of three generations of ministers and his training as a pastor allowed him to be that leader; however, being a civil rights leader had not been his goal. 

I see this as a message to all of us that we may be trained to be one thing but then be called to do something else we never realized we had been trained to do all along. Each of us, like Martin, will be called at some time to speak our truth. We most probably will not think we are prepared. We may be given a job because we are young, old, inexperienced, or no one else wants the job. Every biblical story of leadership speaks to this kind of call.

Tonight, I also remember the young high school students who led a fight for gun control after an attack at their school.

My experience is that this is one of the ways God works. The lives of King, Moses, Abraham, the disciples, David, Mary, Joseph, Paul, Esther, St. Benedict, St. Francis, St. Ignatius, Bill Wilson, Dr. Bob, and these students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida all exemplify it.

During this coronavirus pandemic and time of unrest, we were called to a new task that we unknowingly have been preparing to do all our lives.  

Joanna  joannaseibert.com

Window on the World

Windows

“A Window covered with raindrops interests me more than a photograph of a famous person.”—Saul Leiter, artist and photographer.

 “View From My Window” is a social media group that calls me out of bed each morning as I long to refocus my life from more than the world outside my window. Stunning photography from all over the globe enlarges my connection to universal beauty from Europe, Africa, South America, Australia, Canada, and other parts of North America.

amber elkover. california sunset

Flowers of every possible species, forests, elephants, bobcats, oceans, tidal pools, mountain ranges, snow in Austin, Texas, and northern lights in Iceland and Alaska wake me daily to beauty beyond my normal vision.

Being in or seeing nature is one of my best ways to connect to God. Each morning, I take a visual journey into the presence of creation in all its splendor beyond the bounds of my own home to someone else’s view that I will probably never meet.

Each morning, I see a part of the beauty of the outdoors that I would have never seen in my lifetime. Occasionally, I share the view outside my window of woodpeckers and cardinals, Carolina chickadees, and blue jays, who visit the feeder beyond my floor-to-ceiling window, which takes up almost a whole wall in my home office.

zoe

Still, my favorite view is when my granddaughter or grandson comes by to wave and say hello with a dog they walk or when my daughter leaves a colorful hand-drawn “I love you” message with lots of hearts taped outside my window. Another favorite view is my husband braving all kinds of weather to put out bird food, allowing me to enjoy my avian neighbors every morning.

turner

I rarely left my house during the two years of our long pandemic. The view from my window, where I spent most of the day, was my connection to the outside world. I am so fortunate that my view encompasses much of nature, where Parker Palmer tells us that the plants photosynthesize our nervous energy into peace, passing all understanding.

Now, I connect to the views from people’s windows all over the world. Consequently, I can begin my day with a broader worldview.

Joanna https://www.joannaseibert.com/

Kidd: Forgiveness

Kidd: Forgiveness

“People, in general, would rather die than forgive. It’s that hard.”—
 Sue Monk Kidd in The Secret Life of Bees.

nelson mandela forgave those who were his guards in prison doe 27 years

If someone has harmed us, we think about them all the time and what we would like to do to them: expose them. They live rent-free in our heads and, in essence, become our higher power, our God.

We do not want this person to be our God, our higher power. That brings us back to start the work of forgiveness. Yes, for me, it is backbreaking work. Forgiveness is not forgetting.

There are things we should never forget: the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide, slavery, abuse, 9/ 11, Hurricanes Camille, Frederic, Ivan, Katrina, this war in Ukraine, and now more than we can name.

Walter Brueggemann1 writes about forgiveness, especially from what we learn in the Old Testament. He notes that forgiveness is impossible in a system of deeds- consequences when deeds have an unbreakable, tight, predictable connection to consequences with no way out. This is the law, and if you break it, this is what will happen to you. Amen. This is the basis of much religious preaching of “hell, fire, and damnation,” trying to frighten people into a moral life.

Brueggemann believes forgiveness is only possible when we realize the astonishing readiness of God continually to reach beyond deeds and consequences to offer us unlimited restoration and extravagant forgiveness.
 There is nothing, nothing we can do for which God does not forgive us, and God calls us to do the same.

When we start to lead a life of pardoning and newness, we begin to see the world not through our grievances but through gratitude.

It is a new life, a different life. We saw it in Nelson Mandela, who forgives his guards for his 27 years of imprisonment as he walks out of prison.

He tells others who harbor resentments and grievances, “If I do not forgive them, I am still in prison.”

Buddhists call it the Great Compassion.

1Walter Brueggemann, “The Impossible Possibility of Forgiveness,” Journal of Preachers, Pentecost 2015, pp. 8-17.

Joanna https://www.joannaseibert.com/