Might the church in the US have a new liturgical season,
beginning with the anniversary of King’s birth and extending to Ash Wednesday?
Processional. “I Want Jesus to Walk With Me.” —Fannie Lou Hamer, renowned civil rights leader from Mississippi, who persevered despite receiving unrelenting threats and endured brutal beatings by police
Invocation. “May God bless you with discomfort . . . so that you may live deep within your heart,” begins “A Franciscan Blessing”
Call to worship. “Who the hell is Diane Nash?” features a brief (2:04) interview with former Assistant Attorney General John Seigenthaler remembering his phone conversation with civil rights leader Diane Nash, trying to talk Black students from Nashville from carrying on the “freedom ride” after the original participants were brutally beaten when their bus arrived in Birmingham, Alabama
§ § §
Providence has a way of narrating the jumble of daily life—with its odd concurrences, apparent coincidences, and seemingly random choices—to create stories where before were only disconnected episodes. Last spring brought an especially significant such day.
The scheduling of my periodic medical check-up was made long before I noticed the date for Easter.
My doctor said “It’s time to do some routine blood work.” OK. “You’ll need to fast for at least seven hours beforehand.”
Well, as it happens, I started a fast today, I said.
“Really?” she said, lifting her gaze from charts on her laptop. “I’m curious about why now, after Easter, and not during Lent?”
I was a bit surprised that I had a doctor (a young one, at that) with liturgical awareness.
Truth is, I hadn’t intentionally thought out the timing of this fast. I do so, typically every year or so, when I face the fact that my eating habits have gotten out of alignment. One of my typical responses to angst is to put something in my mouth to chew on. And in the age of cultural clashes and political boondoggling, there’s a lot of angst in the air.
Needless to say, I wasn’t expecting such a question from my doctor. But I found myself responding with thoughts I don’t remember having before that moment. It was like an epiphany.
I began by saying, yes, I have often fasted during Lent; but that this year I was focused on how resurrection’s assurance was the very thing that made it possible to persevere through difficult seasons. Going without food, for any length of time, is both a physical challenge, an emotional scuffle, and a spiritual shakedown.
If I were to ever write one of the “how my mind has changed over time” essays, it would focus on the increased emphasis I put on the work of grace, over heroic will, in steeling courage in the midst of threat. The work of grace—and its offspring, joy—commences when willful effort is battered into subjugation.
No doubt some of this comes with aging. In any given season of life the disappointments and discouragements and challenges and fears are for the most part manageable. But the cumulative effect takes a toll. Thing hurt where you didn’t know you had things. Over time the heart can fibrillate. Blood vessels clog. Bones can grow brittle and the knees grow feeble. Threats multiply. Lungs flag. Eyes cloud.
Nevertheless, the capacity for grace and the arousal of joy, when grit comes up short, is the prize to which all eyes must arise, no matter the years or the miles.
§ § §
Hymn of intercession. “Come to Me all you weary, and I will give you rest. One more step, one more step, to my love, to my rest.” —“All Who Are Weary,” Psalters (click the “show more” button to see all the lyrics)
§ § §
I think of these things precisely at this moment, on observance of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s January birth anniversary, coupled with anticipation of the anniversary of his 4 April assassination.
Dr. King is remembered too often for his visionary “dream” and too little for the struggles, bruises, failures and weariness he endured. There is much revelry over his assuring cadences and lilting imagery. Yet we have largely ignored the threats he faced and the hazards he navigated. The iconic stature we have bestowed on him has had the unintended consequence of hiding the unfulfilled elements of that dream, along with the regrouped and recuperated opposition that remains.
We forget the fact that the movement he animated was already unraveling during the last three years of his life. Following his Nobel Peace Prize acclaim in December 1964, and the successes of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 followed by the Voting Rights Act of 1965—just when you thought his fame would displace his detractors—the fabric of that movement began to tear.
Like marchers in Montgomery (and elsewhere), Lent forces us to ask “Were we suckers to believe in such a dream? Did not hate collapse hopes for the Beloved Community? Did not Trump eviscerate Obama’s humane legacy? And then rise against from the depths of infamy again last fall? Are we not wearied to the bone? Is it a fantasy, after all, about a balm hovering in Gilead?
§ § §
Confessional hymn. “Come Ye Disconsolate.” —Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway
§ § §
There were a variety of factors that led to a faltering of the (modern) civil rights movement and Dr. King’s declining popularity. For years the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the National Security Agency, and even the US Army Intelligence unit, had been illegally wiretapping Dr. King and some of his close associates. One FBI memo referred to King as “the most dangerous negro” in America.
In 1966 Dr. King consciously chose to organize around fair housing in Chicago, his first major venture out of the South, named The Chicago Freedom Movement. His marches were met with violent counter-protesters, and Dr. King remarked that he had never seen this level of vitriolic hatred even in Mississippi and Alabama. White Northerners who had previously supported integration and voter registration efforts in the South recoiled when the target switched to fair housing and labor markets in their neighborhoods.
About this same time, younger, more militant civil rights leaders in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Congress on Racial Equality had grown impatient with the nonviolent strategies and gravitated to the rhetoric of Black Power and militancy of self-defense.
The summers of 1966 and 1967 brought violent demonstrations in hundreds of US cities.
Fractures opened within King’s own Southern Christian Leadership Conference over whether to stick with legal issues of segregation and voting rights, or expand to matters pertaining to larger questions of economic injustice and of US foreign policy.
The major blow to the movement’s unity came in the aftermath of King’s historic address at The Riverside Church in New York City, on 4 April 1967, exactly one year to the day before his assassination in Memphis. In this speech (variously named “Beyond Vietnam,” “Time to Break the Silence,” or “Declaration of Independence from the War in Vietnam”), King explicitly and passionately denounced the war. This time it was not the political right that denounced him but his more liberal allies as well.
Life magazine called the sermon “a demagogic slander that sounded like a script for radio Hanoi.” The Washington Post said, “Many who have listened to [King] with respect will never again accord him with the same confidence. He has diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country and his people.” The New York Times ran an editorial, “Dr. King’s Error,” chiding him for linking foreign policy with domestic policy: “This is a fusion of two public programs that are distinct and separate. By drawing them together, Dr. King has done a disservice to both. The moral issues in Vietnam are less clear-cut than he suggests; the political strategy of uniting the peace movement could very well be disastrous for both causes.”
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People described the address as “a serious tactical error.” The Pittsburgh Courier, a leading black newspaper in the country, said King was “tragically misleading” black Americans. And President Lyndon B. Johnson, King’s ally in pushing for the Civil Rights and Voter Registration Acts, referred to King as “that god****ed n****r preacher.”
In 1966, 63 percent of Americans held a negative view of the civil rights leader, while just 32 percent held a positive one. This was a marked reversal from five years earlier, when 41 percent of Americans gave King a positive rating and 37 percent a negative one.
§ § §
Hymn of absolution. “There’s a rainbow ’round my shoulder / And a sky of blue above / How the sun shines bright / The world’s all right / Cause I’m in love.” —“Rainbow ‘Round My Shoulder” (traditional chain gang song), One Voice Mixed Chorus in remembrance of Bayard Rustin, considered the “least-known most-important” leader of the civil rights movement
§ § §
If I had the authority, I would institute a new liturgical season for us in the US—beginning with Dr. King’s birthday, extending to Ash Wednesday—in preparation devoted to the gift of discomfort in spiritual formation.
It also provides a more visceral connection to the Lenten drama: the breathtaking breakthrough of hope, seemingly out of nowhere, for the prospect of a major advance of justice and human dignity (not unlike the disciples’ and other followers of Jesus experienced), followed by a cruel backlash and crackdown against the same (like the narrative of Jesus’ final days). Then prepping our attention to Jesus’ resurrection stories by attending Dr. King’s parting exhortation: I’ve been to the mountaintop. I may not get to the promised land with you; but we as a people will get there!
§ § §
Word. Listen to this brief (2:37) excerpt from King’s “I Have Been to the Mountaintop” speech delivered in Memphis on the night before his assassination.
§ § §
The original blessing of God’s delight in Creation echoes through this blessing given by Isaac to his son: “May God give you of the dew of heaven and of the fatness of the earth, and plenty of grain and wine” (Genesis 27:28). But a fraud is perpetuated by Jacob, who disguised himself as his brother Esau. The subsequent history of human racketeering is recorded in this complaint of the Psalmist: “[P]ride is the necklace [of the wicked]; violence covers them as a garment. Their eyes swell out with fatness, their hearts overflow with follies. They scoff and speak with malice; loftily they threaten oppression. They set their mouths against the heavens, and their tongue struts through the earth” (73:6-9).
The function of Lent’s penitential posture is to halt the momentum of this mugging and restore the bountiful, flourishing intention of Creation’s promise. It is not, as theological sadists would have us believe, a season for self-flogging and disgust over our frailties. But it does entail disquiet as we recognize and confess the ways our hearts have been kidnapped by frivolous pursuits and perilous habits.
Such work involves, as Jesus noted, a kind of dying. But its purpose is not punishment or retribution, but an invitation to a new life of flourishing instead of rivalry, of freedom shorn of the impulse to dominate, socially expressive of the kind of compassion, justice, and mercy which we ourselves have encountered in a compassionate and merciful God.
The peace of Christ entails the unraveling of the “peace” of bloody-handed potentates who enforce an order requiring the cheap labor of the many for the wealth of the few. Their reign, of course, requires the collaboration of a cast willing to do the dirty work in exchange for leftover luxury.
§ § §
Altar call. “Keep your lamps trimmed and burning . . . / the day is drawing nigh. / Darker midnight lies before us . . . / the day is drawing nigh. / For the morning soon is breaking . . . / the day is drawing nigh. / Children, don’t get weary / till your work is done.” —“Keep Your Lamps,” arr. André Thomas, combined choirs of Florida State University
§ § §
In words uncommon for tourism journalists, popular travel reporter Rick Steves testified that travel creates “a creeping discomfort about my confidence in the way I’ve always viewed the world.” This is what Lenten practices are designed to do. Think: detoxification. The rough work of being separated from illusion. The dismemberment of assumptions of privilege. The forfeiture of innocence. Calling into question the obsession with personal security needs extended out to questioning our bloated national security state.
All of these, and more, are among the polytheistic pantheon of idols. And if you refuse to bow, you may be judged impious, unpatriotic, or treasonous.
Since January 2021 in the US, 42 states have passed legislation limiting what school teachers can say about race (among other forms of structural injustice). A number of these bills include language prohibiting teachers from introducing subjects that might make students feel “discomfort, guilt or anguish” or are otherwise “divisive.”
There is a kind of discomfort that leads us to the precipice of godly grief (cf. 2 Corinthians 7:10), and thereby to the portal of repentance, which inclines to clarity, to communion, to intimacy with the Beloved, for the Beloved, in the Beloved . . . and with, for and in all the Beloved’s creation.
The world as it stands labors under the weight of much sadness, grief, and despair. But also displays much generosity, holiness and joy. Go to the mountaintop with Dr. King, to the desert with Jesus. Hitch your faith to the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen (Hebrews 11:1).
§ § §
Benediction. “Amen, Alleluia” —Sergei Rachmaninov, performed by the Russian State Symphony Cappella
Recessional. “Now the war is not over, victory isn’t won / And we’ll fight on to the finish, then when it’s all done / We’ll cry glory, oh glory (Glory, glory).” —John Legend and Common, “Glory,” theme song for the 2014 film “Selma” which portrays the historic 1965 Selma to Montgomery civil rights march
# # #