Today is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Today I invite you to a Lectio Divina style study of a moment in Rev Dr King’s life. This story is from The Cross and the Lynching Tree by Dr James Cone, pg 77-79.
As we do in Lectio:
Read through the story.
Spend 5-10 minutes in quiet contemplation allowing a word or phrase or image to arise within you.
Read through the story a second time.
Pray for a deepening of the word, phrase, or image in your heart.
Read through the story a third time.
Listen to how God is inviting you to take that word, phrase, or image out into the world.
Thank God for this time together.
The excerpt:
Openly to fight white supremacy in the deep South during the 1950s and 60s was unthinkably perilous. When King agreed to act as the most visible leader in the civil rights movement, he recognized what was at stake. In taking up the cross of black leadership, he was nearly overwhelmed with fear. This fear reached a climax on a particular night, January 27, 1956, in the early weeks of the Montgomery bus boycott, when he received a midnight telephone call threatening to blow up his house if he did not leave Montgomery in three days. Later he told how that call created a “spiritual midnight,” as he thought about what could happen to him, his wife, and newly born baby girl.
Later recalling this incident, King told how fear drove him from bed to the kitchen where he prayed, “out loud,” pleading, “Lord, I’m down here trying to do what’s right…But Lord, I must confess that I’m weak now, I’m faulting, I’m losing my courage.” Yet then, King said he heard a voice: “Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth. And lo I will be with you, even to the end of the world.”
Three nights after the threatening call, while he was at a boycott meeting, King’s house was bombed. Fortunately, his wife and daughter and a family friend escaped harm, having moved to the back of the house when they heard something land on the porch. When told at the meeting that his house had been bombed, King calmly asked about the safety of his family and then went home to comfort them.
“Strangely enough,” he said later, “I accepted the word of the bombing calmly. My religious experience a few nights before had given me the strength to face it.” When an angry crowd of blacks gathered with guns ready for revenge, King raised his hand and calmed them, saying, “We cannot solve this problem through retaliatory violence. We must meet violence with non-violence…We must love our white brothers no matter what they do to us. We must make them know that we love them.”
When you have finished your Lecito time, what happened for you? How does this passage, this deep faith of Dr. King invite you to work for racial justice today and into the future?
Does it spark inner courage in you to stand against the principalities and powers?
Does it spark a deeper desire to ground your work in prayer?
Let us this day honor Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Allow his life of deep faith to speak to you and teach you something about this Sacred Force in the Universe that is bent toward justice.
