Our Unfinished Society: A Prayer
Recited
at the Berkeley City Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration, 2015
©
Rabbi Menachem Creditor
Dear Lord,
Your servant Dr. Martin Luther King might not have been happy to see us
sitting here this morning having this very nice breakfast. He might have led us
outside this fine establishment, back into Your fragile world, O God, marching
our feet to the rhythmic beat of the
deep rumblings of discontent (“Loving
Your Enemies”, 1957), back into our streets. And so we pray this very
morning to not enjoy so much of the wonderful bounty before us that we forsake the
hungry, that we forget our own calamity, just yards away, and miles away, and
counties and states away. But really, we know they’re right here in this room.
We haven’t set them down, not even for a moment, Lord. We know, as Dr. King
taught us, that “our lives begin to end when we become silent about things that
matter.”
Dr. King would have called us to know the number of children
going hungry in Alameda this very minute. To know their names and
seek their welfare. He would have called us to know the number of dead, thanks
to guided missiles and misguided people, woefully-ignored gun violence, and
woefully-unequal systems of legislation and enforcement and incarceration in
our country. He would have pointed to the immorality of unequal sentencing and the
widespread use of solitary confinement. He would have had a thing or two to
say about that.
Dr. King, your servant, would speak truth about the astounding
costs
of financial corruption, of ongoing institutionalized inequality; he
would have forced us to see the costs of "free trade": 27 million
people today still cursed to live in slavery.
He would have seen beyond the numbers, to the faces of people.
He would be preaching with the “urgency of now”
a determined, measured, poetic, prophetic outrage.
He would be teaching by example
our civic duty of compassion,
the obligations of citizenship,
the nobility of non-violent protest,
the grave danger of cynicism.
When he gave his life for peoplesʼ rights
of speech, and assembly, and the vote,
it was for people who had no money to pay for speech.
They knew speech as an unalienable right,
and their wealth of spirit sufficed.
Dr. King had faith in a few great things:
one was our essential American dream.
Not a middle-class American dream,
or an upper-class, a working-poor,
or an impoverished-class American dream.
But the defining American dream
which lifts up those who are bowed down.
The abiding American dream
of liberty and justice for all.
Dr. King asked of God in 1964:
... grant
that we will always reach out
for that
which is high,
realizing
that we are made for the stars,
created
for the everlasting,
born for
eternity.
And he taught us in 1967:
…Power at its best is
love
implementing the demands of
justice,
and justice at its
best is power
correcting everything
that stands against love.
Dr. King's story is not to be appropriated as a tool for easy
comfort and self-satisfaction by the established, by the well-off, by those who
worry life will be inconvenienced by pointing out that Black lives seem to
still matter less in our unfinished society. His words were honed sharp by the
depth of righteous rage at society's inequalities. And those dreams he dreamed
are, and forever will be, dreams worth dreaming. We lost our
teacher so many years ago, at the tender age of 39. But we have not lost his
challenge to not search for consensus but to mold consensus by the power of our
convictions.
We gather this morning to remind each other how to dream and how
to act in Dr. King's spirit. For as he taught us, the way to uproot the
persistent inequalities from within our society
"…is
to [act] on the principle of love. …this is the only way as our eyes
look to the future.” Dr. King called to us, so many years ago, to “look out
across the years and across the generations, let us develop and move right
here. We must discover the power of love, the power, the redemptive power of
love. And when we discover that we will be able to make of this old world a new
world. We will be able to make [people] better…" (“Loving Your Enemies”, 1957)
Dear God, we know we have to do much better than we’re doing, that
we have to be so much better to each other, better to our world if we are to
share our prophet’s vision of a beloved community. We've got so much to do, and
the good news is that we’ve got Your love waiting to pour out of us and into
the world. We promise, Dear Lord – that, in memory of your prophet Dr. King, we’re
going to rediscover Love, this greatest of all powers. Armed with this Divine Love,
we know we are stronger than the accursed weapons on our streets. We know that
the beauty we channel as Your children can defeat the rampant cynicism in our
country. We know that within this sacred gathering there is more than enough
power with which to see this great task done.
And so we pray:
- May we learn, Dear God, to reach again for that which is high.
- May we be blessed to pursue justice for all, to see when pieties
and niceties fall short and protest is truly called for.
- May we remember, as Dr. King taught us, that “life’s most
persistent and urgent question is: ‘what are you doing for others?’”
- May we remember the power of our convictions to change the
world.
- May we pause to recognize the divine image in every human being,
deeper than our uniforms, deeper than our skins, as deep as deep gets.
- May we be blessed to stand together - now and for eternity -
with overflowing, unconditional light and love, for as Dr. King taught us: "Darkness
cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate:
only love can do that." (“I’ve been to the mountaintop, 1968)
- May we be worthy of the work ahead, and dare to see ourselves as
carriers of this sacred prophetic work.
Amen.
