A Day In the Life: "Only When it is Dark Enough, Can You See The Stars"

This title is a piece of a quote from Martin Luther King Junior.

It is from his speech I've Been To The Mountaintop. It resonated with me this morning.
The fuller quote is:

As you know, if I were standing at the beginning of time, with the possibility of general and panoramic view of the whole human history up to now, and the Almighty said to me, "Martin Luther King, which age would you like to live in?" — I would take my mental flight by Egypt through, or rather across the Red Sea, through the wilderness on toward the promised land. And in spite of its magnificence, I wouldn't stop there. I would move on by Greece, and take my mind to Mount Olympus. And I would see Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Euripides and Aristophanes assembled around the Parthenon as they discussed the great and eternal issues of reality.
But I wouldn't stop there. I would go on, even to the great heyday of the Roman Empire. And I would see developments around there, through various emperors and leaders. But I wouldn't stop there. I would even come up to the day of the Renaissance, and get a quick picture of all that the Renaissance did for the cultural and esthetic life of man. But I wouldn't stop there. I would even go by the way that the man for whom I'm named had his habitat. And I would watch Martin Luther as he tacked his ninety-five theses on the door at the church in Wittenberg.
But I wouldn't stop there. I would come on up even to 1863, and watch a vacillating president by the name of Abraham Lincoln finally come to the conclusion that he had to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. But I wouldn't stop there. I would even come up the early thirties, and see a man grappling with the problems of the bankruptcy of his nation. And come with an eloquent cry that we have nothing to fear but fear itself.
But I wouldn't stop there. Strangely enough, I would turn to the Almighty, and say, "If you allow me to live just a few years in the second half of the twentieth century, I will be happy." Now that's a strange statement to make, because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land. Confusion all around. That's a strange statement. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars. And I see God working in this period of the twentieth century in a way that men, in some strange way, are responding — something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya: Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee — the cry is always the same — "We want to be free."

(I took it from this page, I recommend perhaps you go there to read MLK quotes today. )

This year we saw, and still see, massive amounts of folks rising up in our world. Brave, facing incredible violence, undaunted. Some in peaceful protest, many in waves we never anticipated. Or so I've heard our national leadership say, as they reacted to changes that seemed unprecedented. Facing death in other counties, overthrowing dictators--it was a year that brought us to the streets. Even facing off against moneylenders here. For me the Biblical proportions and the words of MLK really resonated throughout my watching the year progress. As we start a new century I have wondered what he might think of all this. I wondered that as well over 25 years ago teaching in South Central LA in the midst of gang violence and what seemed insurmountable poverty, shame and hopelessness. Today on his day in our nation I sense many of us might find MLK a challenge to hear, to make a better world along the lines his lifetime delineated, that would be a fine thing.

There are certain things in our nation and in the world which I am proud to be maladjusted and which I hope all men of good-will will be maladjusted until the good societies realize — I say very honestly that I never intend to become adjusted to — segregation and discrimination. I never intend to become adjusted to religious bigotry. I never intend to adjust myself to economic conditions that will take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few. I never intend to adjust myself to the madness of militarism, to self-defeating effects of physical violence. But in a day when sputniks and explorers are dashing through outer space and guided ballistic missiles are carving highways of death through the stratosphere, no nation can win a war. It is no longer the choice between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence…
- "Social Justice and the Emerging New Age" address at the Herman W. Read Fieldhouse, Western Michigan University, (18 December 1963)

So the man that chose his time as the time to be alive, as the time to be called to action, I find this inspiring-- having seen the work of his days I am better for him. As I sit thinking this morning about how to best serve this day, I decided to write.

Something else is a part of this day.
It is very personal, a piece of my family history, important too in my heart. Almost unutterable.
It may not coincide, as it has today on January 16th again for awhile with Dr. King's day, but on this day of remembrance of Dr. King I am called to remember a cousin. Maria Ellen Rice's passing from our world. She died a year ago.
She died before her time, and her death is tragic.
But it is a lesson to me that we are here but a blink.

Someone I know, for reasons I do not understand, felt it was important to me to convey that in the end, all is meaningless. That reverberated with me too this day and in the last few years.

We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Martin Luther King Jr.

After a blow like her death, and the realization that depression was a battle within her, one that consumed her, this took a toll within me this year. An invisible enemy like this, it is truly a horrible, frightening, lonely and terrorizing thing for my family to face. Perhaps this made even more real to me, and less able to be ignored, because along side this loss I held the stories of students in my work who lost lives, faced violence, became violent, live in prison, had few choices, lost jobs, cannot afford colleges, saw families lose homes, faced foreclosures, had parents unable to find work, were hungry, homeless, battling cancer, saw opportunity affected by race--yes, and generally saw times become harsher amid the greatest greed and opulence I can imagine in our country, as a very few hardened hearts to construct the impossible--their wealth as a god. As their wealth became what they serve foremost. Their prophet.

Perhaps because after a 30 year career teaching I couldn't make sense out of the violence in the student lives, it took a year of feeling great pain calmly taking a day as it came. Perhaps the echoes of losses for my two daughters in six different suicides with students and faculty in their lives--this echoed to me through the loss of my kin as well. The loss to our world of these good people. It was also this year my husband lost a dear friend to his taking his life, apparently he too was weighed by depression and the ravages of mental health issues, and economic stress-- that in no way could contain the truths of his wonderful life one in which he set himself to live in caring for others. The year returned again and again to talk to me of personal loss, and the struggle of those I care the most about. And death. Defeat.

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. Martin Luther King Jr.

I recall when she was born, our Maria.
I recall visiting my Aunt as she was bed fast awaiting her birth, as she considered her name, while family thought if her carrying this baby might terribly hurt my Aunt's health and worried. I recall of course the utter joy her life brought to my Aunt all her life, and the time before her death with the serious concern that she was slipping. I shared a very long call through a night with my cousin where we caught up our lives, just a year or so before her death. My blindness in not understanding more, what wasn't said, I will hold onto as something I failed. It may well have been a kind of goodbye.

It seemed to me last year I had to look at the reasons we have our lives.
Why we are brief stars in the darkest night.

This faith can give us courage to face the uncertainties of the future. It will give our tired feet new strength as we continue our forward stride toward the city of freedom. When our days become dreary with low-hovering clouds and our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, we will know that we are living in the creative turmoil of a genuine civilization struggling to be born. Martin Luther King Jr.

I recently heard a report on the lives estimated to be lost in the struggles for freedom this year. It particularly centered on the children. Without making a judgment about the fact children were tools in these struggles of protest, it talked about the numbers of children that gave lives turning over countries to different days. It would seem from what I heard that we live within a world that compromises many things-turned sideways. Please listen to this HERE. And it would seem I held onto this, in this year as I struggled with the loss of my cousin. Sometimes we are not choosers of the touchstones in our life. But they do cause us reverberations.Her life will be that for me.

The argument for the senseless grows.
Things I cannot understand, reconcile, seem so logical to others. War is just. A must.
The suffering in our world blamed upon the sufferers.
This last year was a struggle within myself, a depression, a kind of slowing down. If anything just looking at unfathomable things with a kind of defeat.
How can a person feel so sad that they give up living? And how can we comfort what may well be a chemical disturbance over which the suffer has no control? These were the things within my days, the fleeting thoughts. I arrived at the door of looking at mental illness and how we respond in a greedy world, where medical care is a "commodity."

At one time we mourned the dead among us in shades of black worn for a year, two, three. Now we quickly move into the colors and fads. But my year as were so many others, was engulfed in real mourning and grief. It seemed to me to grieve my cousin, and to speak of my student's lives and losses-- at least a year of silent grieving was necessary.
And still I am unsure what my voice can say.

My Aunt, Maria's dear mother, just wrote to me, her pain and her hurt palpable. Yet she is not hopeless or defeated by this death, not in the way I might think. I find in her words love, comfort, caring, ultimately the hope that she will assist me. She celebrates the life, love, meaning of the relationship with her daughter, knows her value, and the fact that her daughter, my dear cousin means many wonderful things in the lives of many--often those she has yet to come in contact with. She understands a lifetime ripples out much like the theory I so like of Kurt Lewin in fields, affecting the whole, a quiet beauty of vibration. That to go on requires us all to look to the meanings of such a good person trying to cope in a harsh reality, or just trying to cope with her reality. My Aunt just states plainly that the darkness enveloped her. That she tried valiantly to deal with things internal, but was ultimately defeated. It meant a great deal to me to read her words because in her caring for me, I knew that my cousin had had such a caring, wise and thoughtful mother.
That she lives on in us.

It seems to me that one of the things the arc of living has taught me, through these dark days of loss is that we can, indeed, be driven by the fear of death. Consumed really in despair. By the fact we are mortal, that we are flawed, that our minds and hearts are difficult and capable of things like hatred, greed, discrimination, anger, lust, and actions that in combination with other actions bind and hold us in pain and layers of struggle. When I then look at a Dr. King writing the process of freeing himself from these fetters and addressing the work of truth, it's a daunting and amazing thing.
To read him is to see someone revealing a mental and spiritual journey towards freedom from despair and death. He triumphs when he lifts us off the page today from a window box in time that was my yesterday. A prophet, yes.

Each of us lives in two realms, the "within" and the "without." The within of our lives is somehow found in the realm of ends, the without in the realm of means. The within of our [lives], the bottom -- that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion for which at best we live. The without of our lives is that realm of instrumentalities, techniques, mechanisms by which we live. Now the great temptation of life and the great tragedy of life is that so often we allow the without of our lives to absorb the within of our lives. The great tragedy of life is that too often we allow the means by which we live to outdistance the ends for which we live.

I find this utterly remarkable. And I cannot believe anything other than the reason he spoke, through all of us, would be because that work is to be done by our age, to fail it would be to lay down our mantle. What I read when I review Dr. King's quotes deals with the equity and equality of humanity, and yet speaking ever louder to me is the necessity that wars must end.
It is hard to ignore.
And, in that war is something we have in our nation, I wonder what might Dr. King think of us. Say to us. I can read his words.

We’ve been in the mountain of war. We’ve been in the mountain of violence. We’ve been in the mountain of hatred long enough. It is necessary to move on now, but only by moving out of this mountain can we move to the promised land of justice and brotherhood and the Kingdom of God. It all boils down to the fact that we must never allow ourselves to become satisfied with unattained goals. We must always maintain a kind of divine discontent. Martin Luther King Jr.

So I go from the very small life of one student, one cousin, my own life teaching, this morning into the realm of a holiday, to thoughts of struggles in our world-protest-fights for freedom, to our actions in war, and to the words of those that have inspired us on a day marking loss for me and hope for me.
A day Dr. King's followers called a Day of Service.

It is a strangely personal mix.

Somewhere within the last months I realized that love and hope are forces, that these were the tools Dr. King called upon in his work. Somehow as I read of medicines and treatments and began to face depression in my daughter and in self, family, I began to think about how in our world that the hope for better days, for opportunities, for jobs, meaning making, improvement, for opportunities to make this world better, to be better-- do, in fact help us. That the medicine of possibility, of truth, of care, of unconditional love propel us forward. My sister today wrote to me talking of moving forward. How great it is to have an awareness that love, compassion, care are the force of that movement. We CAN improve our lives.
Hope is something we must cherish and allow for all of us.
It may seem a small point, but keeping hope alive, it is something we tend.

When I work with students, despite the many obstacles that seem to be imposed by self, system, so on, I do have to operate within the tenets of hope. For this will inform my actions. That said, one hopeful act we can do is to speak to one another of the difficult things, we can celebrate the lives and lessons we learn from each other, we can speak to one another, reach out, we can care. we must be there for each other.
We can use the active lexicon of love, despite the fact we are flawed, failing, often very immature beings.

Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness. One day a man came to Jesus; and he wanted to raise some questions about some vital matters in life. At points, he wanted to trick Jesus, and show him that he knew a little more than Jesus knew, and through this, throw him off base. Now that question could have easily ended up in a philosophical and theological debate. But Jesus immediately pulled that question from mid-air, and placed it on a dangerous curve between Jerusalem and Jericho. And he talked about a certain man, who fell among thieves. You remember that a Levite and a priest passed by on the other side. They didn't stop to help him. And finally a man of another race came by. He got down from his beast, decided not to be compassionate by proxy. But with him, administered first aid, and helped the man in need. Jesus ended up saying, this was the good man, because he had the capacity to project the "I" into the "thou," and to be concerned about his brother.

I remember when Mrs. King and I were first in Jerusalem. We rented a car and drove from Jerusalem down to Jericho. And as soon as we got on that road, I said to my wife, "I can see why Jesus used this as a setting for his parable." It's a winding, meandering road. It's really conducive for ambushing. You start out in Jerusalem, which is about 1200 miles, or rather 1200 feet above sea level. And by the time you get down to Jericho, fifteen or twenty minutes later, you're about 2200 feet below sea level. That's a dangerous road. In the day of Jesus it came to be known as the "Bloody Pass." And you know, it's possible that the priest and the Levite looked over that man on the ground and wondered if the robbers were still around. Or it's possible that they felt that the man on the ground was merely faking. And he was acting like he had been robbed and hurt, in order to seize them over there, lure them there for quick and easy seizure. And so the first question that the Levite asked was, "If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?" But then the Good Samaritan came by. And he reversed the question: "If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?".

Martin Luther King Jr.

I found that thought again today, thinking of Dr. King and my cousin who share a day of remembrance.

"Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like any man, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land. And I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord."
Martin Luther King Jr.

I hope for you today, that you have dreams, possibility, understand the love you bring to the world is beyond measure. You, in the world, it is the expression of the divine. We are needed. And our shining as the star- is what we offer to a very dark night.