A National Day of Service.

“One of the great tragedies of life is that men seldom bridge the gulf between practice and profession, between doing and saying. A persistent schizophrenia leaves so many of us tragically divided against ourselves. On the one hand, we proudly profess certain sublime and noble principles, but on the other hand, we sadly practice the very antithesis of these principles. How often are our lives characterized by a high blood pressure of creeds and an anaemia of deeds! We talk eloquently about our commitment to the principles of Christianity, and yet our lives are saturated with the practices of paganism. We proclaim our devotion to democracy, but we sadly practice the very opposite of the democratic creed. We talk passionately about peace, and at the same time we assiduously prepare for war. We make our fervent pleas for the high road of justice, and then we tread unflinchingly the low road of injustice. This strange dichotomy, this agonizing gulf between the ought and the is, represents the tragic theme of man's earthly pilgrimage.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Strength to Love

MLK Day is here. And today is A National Day of Service. I'm a teacher in a school that I'd personally in conversation define as in a poverty area. Certainly it is in an area of immigration, hard work, and need. I consider my work there to be service. I consider teaching to be service. I am paid. I do work a good part of that day overtime-unpaid. I do supply much to enrich the experience and I do think this work has had value to others growth and to my growth.

Just Friday, as I stopped to buy a classroom volunteer a gift at Starbucks (and she's done so much), a man deferred a place in line to me and then praised my being a teacher -while rather cutely arranging to pay for my tea- in a real act of kindness and support for my service. Teachers live within a very important role- in community. I blog very aware of that. I have blogged long free hours here in part as an act of service because NCLB and the politics of education required that of me, as it affected my students with narrowing curriculum so critically.

My service this day, this year, isn't an elaborate plan, walk the beach-pick up trash. Put out my blog. Later give a few hours in preparation for lessons. My spouse would like to go work at a community garden. His service to the community astounding me really. And we are surely minions in this caring when we look to those inspiring us locally and nationally.

However you are spending this day, or the days in your life, it certainly behooves us to feel united in community.

I'm going to make a few observations. This is a blog founded on my opinions. 
It is far from a place I'd hold up to research- however I think we are experiencing a considerable issue in our nation with the dichotomies of building up the hero, destroying the hero. And I think we can better understand this.  I started bouncing this around with John Edwards I think, and it seems it came fully to me as I generally avoided the Lance Armstrong mess just now out on the airwaves.
I was thinking about Martin Luther King Junior yesterday. Filtering a long time of reading his words.

It seems to me a biologic drive to both place someone on a pedestal, and then chip away at it.
It seems to me a god-like issue in our basic biology of mind, in that we project a desire to have a person be a god, then strip them down for their human failure to attain it. Sports is driven to make us worship super heroes, again and again we want to see the records set, to idealize the perfect "game," and then we again and again look at clay feet.
I heard on the radio that the reason Armstrong's other competitors weren't given the awards he was stripped of (and I'm operating here on memory of a thing I briefly heard on NPR) was that at least seven places below him bikers had doped as well. In a muck like this-his actions are lost to a culture that lies all the time-botoxes, enhances, implants, cheats. I watched a woman analyze Armstrong who had so much work done to face I couldn't entirely recognize her. And she did that to achieve and keep her audience that apparently won't tolerate wrinkles or a small bust or a less than attractive female. We beat the other up for it-for being too human or too obviously flawed. Image seems everything now.
I HEARD someone this week-one that I know has a  history of using daily an illegal substance- in an outrage over Armstrong and their feeling of betrayal and outrage over "the children" who looked up to him. You think about that. I had to shake my head. So I see this as a part of a human need to have a "darker" brother or a guilty one-a place to put all the anger, resentment, a receptacle-a place to put our negative emotion. To avoid seeing our own issues, maybe no more than that. (And, yes, I'm regularly treated to hearing those who hate the poor and who blame them for their poverty and have a lot to say about public education.)

I did see a small clip of Armstrong yesterday as the dials were switched, in which I took it Oprah wanted him to declare himself a monster.

Long ago I wrote here about these themes.
How the place of birth, the circumstances frame us.
But it would seem to me that man, with clay feet, cannot generally hold on long to deification.
We act on a great deal unconsciously. Opening our mind to the nature of reality seems to me to be a way to move us forward.

I think in his time Martin Luther King Junior moved us forward.

That's an amazing achievement, one he prepared for with amazing effort and determination.
To develop the capacity to speak to a community so that a group holding the weight/burden of hate, fear, the community failures,  might then be seen with new eyes-that is beyond words I can ever put on a paper as an accomplishment.  It is the stuff of prophets. My father once, and I was very disappointed in him then, pointed out to me King was flawed. But I suppose that would be just an observation made by a father wanting to remind me that we are all very human-because I can't believe he didn't admire his work-my father's own behaviors told me he valued looking at others based on actions, care, effort. Dad, of course, valued hard work above all else.

King inspired my career choice, my deeper thoughts, my understandings.
He informed my work especially early on.
His book "The Strength To Love" remains among the books that I admire the most. His clarity seems to me like a world changing new vision. It was for me. I've read very coherent work critical of King in some respects, or looking from different lenses at his work. The most challenging those written critical of Christian worldviews. I've heard folks in the "now" try to interpret the "then"-and I've seen womanizing brought forward to discuss him. More and more over the last two years I've thought about my own issues in self esteem, effectiveness, in analyzing my perceptions.  I've thought about a good number of "fall from grace" persons as they fell out of the morning gossip. And I've been looking at the function of a gossipy internet or media culture in holding others to standards not remotely met by selves. It seems overall it freezes us, holds us back. Here I am thinking specifically about building up a hero and tearing them to pieces.

For me as I was talking about Martin Luther King Jr. with my 3rd grade students Friday I could recall with a 53 year lens-as much as my memory serves -and I was listening to their observations from their watching a video on King. My students are reading very well, their math knowledge is growing, their inquisitive skills and questioning fully alive-their dreams very palpable. While they did want to know about what once was-and the video (Our Friend Martin) showed people being brutalized with hoses as they protested-what I noted was their compassion. Even for the characters in the story line that were bullying. How can we help them, one child said.

Compassion and love require the capacity to place yourself in another's shoes.
To actually hear them or give them an opportunity to be heard. It is not an opportunity to be heard when you have set up a kangaroo court, already judged, framed and limited what they can say, and then analyze whatever they squeak out to convict them and verify your point of view. Post Oprah I heard a lot of this.  It is nothing but requiring of them that they hold  and respond to your perception no matter what. And I certainly see that. For someone like Armstrong I'm not so worried, but for me I realize these are speaking to me of capacities we hold- to act in ways where there are victims we aren't hearing or reasons we aren't facing. (In Armstrong's case I wonder about those that wanted a cancer survivor to go on to literally be superhuman beating death and every other limit we have. Why does that warrant millions of dollars and adoration? )
It requires that we build the abilities to see differing points of view.
As a teacher I thought about that. 
An ability to suspend our "rightness" to be able to think from the other perspective. This is no easy evolution. No easy thing to ask.

On a National Day of Service we demonstrate our capacity for care. I was so impressed by the use of the word service over a Day of Charity or some other thing such as a day just talking about MLK.


One way I think we might improve, as a nation, is to allow our repulsion for a fallen sports character or our laughing at a on-line relationship for a footballer, or whatever pops up next week, to be seen as the human foibles we certainly carry. See the sadness over the condemnation of person. And YES we do need to make clear what things we can't allow-a person doing X cannot do Y. Or however that works out algebraically.
It just doesn't rate a 24 hour news network of pretty nasty folk beating the dead horse. I would hope we put things in perspective- over whip it up to have news to sensationalize and sell with. Holding up a phone to show your fellow staff members a teacher found to have porn videos in her past (showing her videos), this is pushing into another your own projections. It really is.  Being titillated and condemning together seems odd expressions-but we can ask ourselves what that is about. Ultimately this is about a process of noticing. Seeing these inconsistencies that we should look to self to understand.
We are asking another to hold our derision at times- over dealing with and working on our own capacity for hate, for fear, for acting out.  I extend this into those that endlessly have their eye out the door, what is so and so down the hall doing-how can I stop them/control them/judge or label them-how can my jealousy, my insecurity, my own self-repulsion deny another their opportunity to shine. And saying this to myself as well. I like the most teaching advise I got years ago-"you can only change yourself in relationship to the other."
There are lines that we must understand. We need love to do this, compassion.
Recent events in my life reminded me of this. 

Love is a wonderful answer to use as a guidepost. As is a trusting community of care.

A cynic will not read "The Strength To Love" openheartedly, nor someone utterly opposed to religious guidance, but once those walls fall-King has a great deal to tell us about how feeling vulnerable and holding on to our own insecurity-over projecting -which is both a hard and painful process, leads us to move toward evolving a being that can serve the greater good and affect change that matters. And feel.
As I sat thinking while my class was learning about MLK, it struck me that we teach children to react- with how we react.  If we almost celebrate the falling from grace of a biking star-then they learn that these sensationalized scandals are how we build up and tear down in a cult of celebrity. But it doesn't serve us too well when we don't see those failing as very present in our own selves. I liked that in the story we watched they wanted the bullies to also be redeemed and certainly be helped.

Collectively, learning from history, and in the present, we can develop awareness, compassion and love. We learn through our mistakes. Acknowledging them is a key component.

So I'll quote to wind down here something very meaningful for me from Martin Luther King Junior, on loving enemies, those we feel deserve nothing but our disrespect (quoted from Wikipedia), that we forgive for both of our sakes:

Loving Your Enemies (November 1957)

Delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama, on 17 November 1957.

• Far from being the pious injunction of a utopian dreamer, this command is an absolute necessity for the survival of our civilization. Yes, it is love that will save our world and our civilization, love even for enemies.

• How do you go about loving your enemies? I think the first thing is this: In order to love your enemies, you must begin by analyzing self. And I’m sure that seems strange to you, that I start out telling you this morning that you love your enemies by beginning with a look at self. It seems to me that that is the first and foremost way to come to an adequate discovery to the how of this situation. [...] some people aren’t going to like you. They’re going to dislike you, not because of something that you’ve done to them, but because of various jealous reactions and other reactions that are so prevalent in human nature. But after looking at these things and admitting these things, we must face the fact that an individual might dislike us because of something that we’ve done deep down in the past, some personality attribute that we possess, something that we’ve done deep down in the past and we’ve forgotten about it; but it was that something that aroused the hate response within the individual. That is why I say, begin with yourself. There might be something within you that arouses the tragic hate response in the other individual.

• The success of communism in the world today is due to the failure of democracy to live up to the noble ideals and principles inherent in its system. And this is what Jesus means when he said: "How is it that you can see the mote in your brother’s eye and not see the beam in your own eye?" Or to put it in Moffatt’s translation: "How is it that you see the splinter in your brother’s eye and fail to see the plank in your own eye?" And this is one of the tragedies of human nature. So we begin to love our enemies and love those persons that hate us whether in collective life or individual life by looking at ourselves. And this is one of the tragedies of human nature. So we begin to love our enemies and love those persons that hate us whether in collective life or individual life by looking at ourselves.

• A second thing that an individual must do in seeking to love his enemy is to discover the element of good in his enemy, and everytime you begin to hate that person and think of hating that person, realize that there is some good there and look at those good points which will over-balance the bad points.

• There is something within all of us that causes us to cry out with Ovid, the Latin poet, "I see and approve the better things of life, but the evil things I do." There is something within all of us that causes us to cry out with Plato that the human personality is like a charioteer with two headstrong horses, each wanting to go in different directions. There is something within each of us that causes us to cry out with Goethe, "There is enough stuff in me to make both a gentleman and a rogue." There is something within each of us that causes us to cry out with Apostle Paul, "I see and approve the better things of life, but the evil things I do." So somehow the "isness" of our present nature is out of harmony with the eternal "oughtness" that forever confronts us. And this simply means this: That within the best of us, there is some evil, and within the worst of us, there is some good. When we come to see this, we take a different attitude toward individuals. The person who hates you most has some good in him; even the nation that hates you most has some good in it; even the race that hates you most has some good in it. And when you come to the point that you look in the face of every man and see deep down within him what religion calls "the image of God," you begin to love him in spite of. No matter what he does, you see God’s image there. There is an element of goodness that he can never sluff off. Discover the element of good in your enemy. And as you seek to hate him, find the center of goodness and place your attention there and you will take a new attitude.

• Another way that you love your enemy is this: When the opportunity presents itself for you to defeat your enemy, that is the time which you must not do it. There will come a time, in many instances, when the person who hates you most, the person who has misused you most, the person who has gossiped about you most, the person who has spread false rumors about you most, there will come a time when you will have an opportunity to defeat that person. It might be in terms of a recommendation for a job; it might be in terms of helping that person to make some move in life. That’s the time you must do it. That is the meaning of love. In the final analysis, love is not this sentimental something that we talk about. It’s not merely an emotional something. Love is creative, understanding goodwill for all men. It is the refusal to defeat any individual. When you rise to the level of love, of its great beauty and power, you seek only to defeat evil systems. Individuals who happen to be caught up in that system, you love, but you seek to defeat the system.

• The Greek language comes out with another word for love. It is the word agape. [...] agape is something of the understanding, creative, redemptive goodwill for all men. It is a love that seeks nothing in return. It is an overflowing love; it’s what theologians would call the love of God working in the lives of men. And when you rise to love on this level, you begin to love men, not because they are likeable, but because God loves them. You look at every man, and you love him because you know God loves him. And he might be the worst person you’ve ever seen. And this is what Jesus means, I think, in this very passage when he says, "Love your enemy." And it’s significant that he does not say, "Like your enemy." Like is a sentimental something, an affectionate something. There are a lot of people that I find it difficult to like. I don’t like what they do to me. I don’t like what they say about me and other people. I don’t like their attitudes. I don’t like some of the things they’re doing. I don’t like them. But Jesus says love them. And love is greater than like. Love is understanding, redemptive goodwill for all men, so that you love everybody, because God loves them. You refuse to do anything that will defeat an individual, because you have agape in your soul. And here you come to the point that you love the individual who does the evil deed, while hating the deed that the person does. This is what Jesus means when he says, "Love your enemy." This is the way to do it. When the opportunity presents itself when you can defeat your enemy, you must not do it.

• I think the first reason that we should love our enemies, and I think this was at the very center of Jesus’ thinking, is this: that hate for hate only intensifies the existence of hate and evil in the universe. If I hit you and you hit me and I hit you back and you hit me back and go on, you see, that goes on ad infinitum. It just never ends. Somewhere somebody must have a little sense, and that’s the strong person. The strong person is the person who can cut off the chain of hate, the chain of evil. And that is the tragedy of hate, that it doesn’t cut it off. It only intensifies the existence of hate and evil in the universe. Somebody must have religion enough and morality enough to cut it off and inject within the very structure of the universe that strong and powerful element of love.

• Somewhere somebody must have some sense. Men must see that force begets force, hate begets hate, toughness begets toughness. And it is all a descending spiral, ultimately ending in destruction for all and everybody. Somebody must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate and the chain of evil in the universe. And you do that by love.

• There’s another reason why you should love your enemies, and that is because hate distorts the personality of the hater. We usually think of what hate does for the individual hated or the individuals hated or the groups hated. But it is even more tragic, it is even more ruinous and injurious to the individual who hates. You just begin hating somebody, and you will begin to do irrational things. You can’t see straight when you hate. You can’t walk straight when you hate. You can’t stand upright. Your vision is distorted. There is nothing more tragic than to see an individual whose heart is filled with hate. He comes to the point that he becomes a pathological case. For the person who hates, you can stand up and see a person and that person can be beautiful, and you will call them ugly. For the person who hates, the beautiful becomes ugly and the ugly becomes beautiful. For the person who hates, the good becomes bad and the bad becomes good. For the person who hates, the true becomes false and the false becomes true. That’s what hate does. You can’t see right. The symbol of objectivity is lost. Hate destroys the very structure of the personality of the hater. [...] when you start hating anybody, it destroys the very center of your creative response to life and the universe; so love everybody. Hate at any point is a cancer that gnaws away at the very vital center of your life and your existence. It is like eroding acid that eats away the best and the objective center of your life. So Jesus says love, because hate destroys the hater as well as the hated.

• Now there is a final reason I think that Jesus says, "Love your enemies." It is this: that love has within it a redemptive power. And there is a power there that eventually transforms individuals. That’s why Jesus says, "Love your enemies." Because if you hate your enemies, you have no way to redeem and to transform your enemies. But if you love your enemies, you will discover that at the very root of love is the power of redemption. You just keep loving people and keep loving them, even though they’re mistreating you. Here’s the person who is a neighbor, and this person is doing something wrong to you and all of that. Just keep being friendly to that person. Keep loving them. Don’t do anything to embarrass them. Just keep loving them, and they can’t stand it too long. Oh, they react in many ways in the beginning. They react with bitterness because they’re mad because you love them like that. They react with guilt feelings, and sometimes they’ll hate you a little more at that transition period, but just keep loving them. And by the power of your love they will break down under the load. That’s love, you see. It is redemptive, and this is why Jesus says love. There’s something about love that builds up and is creative. There is something about hate that tears down and is destructive. So love your enemies.

• History unfortunately leaves some people oppressed and some people oppressors. And there are three ways that individuals who are oppressed can deal with their oppression. One of them is to rise up against their oppressors with physical violence and corroding hatred. But oh this isn’t the way. For the danger and the weakness of this method is its futility. Violence creates many more social problems than it solves. And I’ve said, in so many instances, that as the Negro, in particular, and colored peoples all over the world struggle for freedom, if they succumb to the temptation of using violence in their struggle, unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolate night of bitterness, and our chief legacy to the future will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos. Violence isn’t the way.

• Another way is to acquiesce and to give in, to resign yourself to the oppression. Some people do that. They discover the difficulties of the wilderness moving into the promised land, and they would rather go back to the despots of Egypt because it’s difficult to get in the promised land. And so they resign themselves to the fate of oppression; they somehow acquiesce to this thing. But that too isn’t the way because non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good.

• But there is another way. And that is to organize mass non-violent resistance based on the principle of love. It seems to me that this is the only way as our eyes look to the future. As we 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 men better. Love is the only way.

Loving Your Enemies (Christmas 1957)

Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his sermon “Loving Your Enemies” at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, at Christmas, 1957. He actually wrote it while he was in jail for committing non-violent civil disobedience during the Montgomery bus boycott. In this sermon King discusses Jesus command to "love your enemies" and answers the question how one can love his enemies. Full text online here.

• Upheaval after upheaval has reminded up that modern man is traveling along the road called hate, in a journey that will bring us to destruction and damnation. Far from being the pious injunction of a Utopian dreamer, the command to love one's enemy is an absolute necessity for our survival. Love even for enemies is the key to the solution of the problems of our world.

• Jesus is not an impractical idealist; he is the practical realist.

• I am certain that Jesus understood the difficulty inherent in the act of loving one's enemy. He never joined the ranks of those who talk glibly about the easiness of the moral life. He realized that every genuine expression of love grows out of a consistent and total surrender to God. So when Jesus said "love your enemy," he was not unmindful of its stringent qualities. Yet he meant every word of it. Our responsibility as Christians is to discover the meaning of this command and seek passionately to live it out in our daily lives.

• Let us be practical and ask the question: How do we love our enemies?

• First, we must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. It is impossible even to begin the act of loving one's enemies without prior acceptance of the necessity, over and over again, of forgiving those who inflict evil and injury upon us. It is also necessary to realize that the forgiving act must always be initiated by the person who has been wronged, the victim of some great hurt, the recipient of some tortuous injustice, the absorber of some terrible act of oppression. The wrongdoer may request forgiveness. He may come to himself, and, like the prodigal son, move up with some dusty road, his heart palpitating with the desire for forgiveness. But only the injured neighbor, the loving father back home can really pour out the warm waters of forgiveness.

• Forgiveness does not mean ignoring what has been done or putting a false label on an evil act. It means, rather, that the evil act no longer remains as a barrier to the relationship. Forgiveness is a catalyst creating the atmosphere necessary for a fresh start and a new beginning. It is the lifting of a burden or the canceling of a debt. The words "I will forgive you, but never forget what you have done" never explain the real nature of forgiveness. Certainly one can never forget, if that means erasing totally for his mind. But when we forgive, we forget in the sense that the evil deed is no longer a mental block impeding a new relationship. Likewise, we can never say, "I will forgive you, but I won't have anything further to do with you." Forgiveness means reconciliation, a coming together again. Without this, no man can ever love his enemies. The degree to which we are able to forgive determines the degree to which we are able to love our enemies.

• Second we must recognize that the evil deed of the enemy-neighbor, the thing that hurts, never quite expresses all that he is. An element of goodness may be found even in our worst enemy. Each of us is something of a schizophrenic personality, tragically divided against ourselves. A persistent civil war rages within all or our lives. Something within us causes us to lament with Ovid, the Latin poet, "I see and approve the better things, but follow the worse," or to agree with Plato that human personality is like a charioteer having two headstrong horses, each wanting to be go in a different direction, or to repeat with the Apostle Paul, "The good that I would I do not, but the evil which I would not, I do."

• This simply means that there is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies. When we look beneath the surface, beneath the impulsive evil deed, we see within our enemy-neighbor a measure of goodness and know that the viciousness and evilness of his acts are not quite representative of all that he is. We see him in a new light. We recognize that his hate grows out of fear, pride, ignorance, prejudice, and misunderstanding, but in spite of this, we know God's image is ineffably etched in being. Then we love our enemies by realizing that they are not totally bad and that they are not beyond the reach of God's redemptive love.

• Third we must not seek to defeat or humiliate the enemy but to win his friendship and understanding. At times we are able to humiliate our worst enemy. Inevitably, his weak moments come and we are able to thrust in his side the spear of defeat. But this we must not do. Every word and deed must contribute to an understanding with the enemy and release those vast reservoirs of goodwill which have been blocked by impenetrable walls of hate.

• The meaning of love is not to be confused with some sentimental outpouring. Love is something much deeper that emotional bosh. Perhaps the Greek language can clear our confusion at this point. In the Greek New Testament are three words for love. The word eros is sort of aesthetic or romantic love. In the Platonic dialogues eros is the yearning of the soul for the realm of the divine. The second word is philia, a reciprocal of love and the intimate affection and friendship between friends. We love those whom we like, and we love because we are loved. The third word is agape, understanding and creative, redemptive goodwill for all men. An overflowing love which seek nothing in return, agape is the love of God operating in the human heart. At this level, we love men not because we like them, nor because they possess some type of divine spark; we love every man because God loves him. At this level, we love the person who does an evil deed, although we hate the deed that he does. [...] When Jesus bids us to love our enemies, he is speaking neither of eros nor philia; he is speaking of agape, understanding and creative, redemptive goodwill toward men. Only by following this way and responding with this type of love are we able to be children of our father which is in heaven.

• Let us move now from the practical how to the theoretical why: Why should we love our enemies? The first reason is fairly obvious. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction. So when Jesus says "love your enemies," he is setting forth a profound and ultimately inescapable admonition. Have we not come to such an impasse in the modern world that we must love our enemies-or else? The chain reaction of evil-Hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars-must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.
  • This passage contains some phrases King later used in "Where Do We Go From Here?" (1967) which has a section below.

• Another reason why we must love our enemies is that hate scars the soul and distorts the personality. Mindful that hate is an evil and dangerous force, we too often think of what it does to the person hated. This is understandable, for hate bring irreparable damage to its victims. We have seen its ugly consequences in the ignominious deaths brought to six million Jews by a hate-obsessed madman named Hitler, in the unspeakable violence inflicted upon Negroes by blood-thirsty mobs, in the dark horrors of war, and in the terrible indignities and injustices perpetrated against millions of God's children by unconscionable oppressors.
  But there is another side which we must never overlook. Hate is just as injurious to the person who hates. Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man's sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true.

• Modern psychology recognizes what Jesus taught centuries ago: Hate divides the personality and love in an amazing and inexorable way unites it.

• A third reason why we should love our enemies is that love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend. We never get rid of an enemy by meeting hate with hate; we get rid of an enemy by getting rid of enmity. By its very nature, love creates and builds up. Love transforms with redemptive power.

• An even more basic reason why we are commanded to love is expressed explicitly in Jesus' words, "love your enemies....that ye may be children of your father which is in heaven." We are called to this difficult task in order to realize a unique relationship with God. We are potential sons of God. Through love that potentiality becomes actuality. We must love our enemies, because only loving them can we know God and experience the beauty of His holiness.

• The darkness of racial injustice will be dispelled only by the light of forgiving love. For more that three centuries American Negroes have been frustrated by day and bewilderment by night by unbearable injustice, and burdened with the ugly weight of discrimination. Forced to live with these shameful conditions, we are tempted to become bitter and retaliate with a corresponding hate. But if this happens, the new order we seek will be little more than a duplicate of the old order. We must in strength and humility meet hate with love.

• Time is cluttered with wreckage of communities which surrendered to hatred and violence. For the salvation of our nation or mankind, we must follow another way. This does not mean that we abandon our righteous efforts. With every ounce of our energy we must continue to rid this nation of the incubus of segregation. But we shall not in the process relinquish our privilege and our obligation to love. While abhorring segregation, we shall love the segregationist. This is the only way to create the beloved community.

• To our most bitter opponents we say: "We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We shall meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will, and we shall continue to love you. We cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws because noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. Throw us in jail and we shall still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and we shall still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our community at the midnight hour and beat us and leave us half dead, and we shall still love you. But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. One day we shall win freedom but not only for ourselves. We shall so appeal to your heart and conscience that we shall win you in the process and our victory will be a double victory."

• Love is the most durable power in the world. This creative force, so beautifully exemplified in the life of our Christ, is the most potent instrument available in mankind's quest for peace and security. Napoleon Bonaparte, the great military genius, looking back over his years of conquest, is reported to have said: "Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne and I have built great empires. But upon what did they depend? They depended on force. But centuries ago Jesus started an empire that was built on love, and even to this day millions will die for him." Who can doubt the veracity of these words. The great military leaders of the past have gone, their empires have crumbled and burned to ashes. But the empire of Jesus, built solidly and majestically on the foundation of love, is still growing. It started with a small group of dedicated men, who, through the inspiration of their Lord, were able to shake the hinges form the gates of the Roman Empire, and carry the gospel into all the world. Today the vast earthly kingdom of Christ numbers more than 900,000,000 and covers every land and tribe.

• Jesus is eternally right. History is replete with the bleached bones of nations that refused to listen to him. May we in the twentieth century hear and follow his words-before it is too late. May we solemnly realize that we shall never be true sons of our heavenly Father until we love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us.

On a Day of Service an act of forgiveness is a beautiful interpretation of our learning what King had to teach us.