By Father Casey

This weekend is the only time all year when our nation and our church both invite us to remember the same person. The Episcopal Church added Martin Luther King, Jr. to our calendar of saints in 1985, and a year later the United States began honoring him with a federal holiday. I’m not sure how Dr. King would feel about either. He was a great admirer of Dorothy Day, and he likely shared her sentiment, “Don’t make me a saint. I don’t want to be dismissed so easily.”

Sure enough, the mountain of Dr. King has been chiseled down to a handful of famous sayings – “I have a dream,” and “the arc of the moral universe is long,” among them. We all-too-easily forget that by the time of his death, he had become extremely unpopular due to his outspoken opposition to the Vietnam War. He had broadened his efforts from racial injustice and civil rights to economic reform and the eradication of poverty, and had, as a result, been deemed a radical. But “the radical King,” as Cornel West writes in the introduction to a collection by that name, “was the most significant and effective organic intellectual in the latter half of the 20th century, whose foundational motif was radical love.”[1]

And so, every year on Dr. King’s birthday I try to read the saint in his own words in order to receive his prophetic challenge. One of my favorite works to read is Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community.[2] Published just a year before his assassination, it could just as easily have been written last year, as its themes and messages still ring with relevance. I encourage you to give it a read, and as a preview let me share a few passages that are underlined in my own copy.

“We must work passionately and indefatigably to bridge the gulf between our scientific progress and our moral progress. One of the great problems of mankind is that we suffer from a poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance. The richer we have become materially, the poorer we have become morally and spiritually. Every man lives in two realms, the internal and the ex- ternal. The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals and religion. The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms and instrumentalities by means of which we live. Our problem today is that we have allowed the internal to become lost in the external. We have allowed the means by which we live to outdistance the ends for which we live. So much of modern life can be summarized in that suggestive phrase of Thoreau: “Improved means to an unimproved end.” This is the serious predicament, the deep and haunting problem, confronting modern man. Enlarged material powers spell enlarged peril if there is not proportionate growth of the soul. When the external of man’s nature subjugates the internal, dark storm clouds begin to form.”


“From time immemorial men have lived by the principle that ‘self‐preservation is the first law of life.’ But this is a false assumption. I would say that other‐preservation is the first law of life. It is the first law of precisely because we cannot preserve self without being concerned about preserving other selves. The universe is so structured that things go awry if men are not diligent in their cultivation of the other‐regarding dimension. ‘I’ cannot reach fulfillment without ‘thou.’ The self cannot be self without other selves. Self‐concern without other‐concern is like a tributary that has no outward flow to the ocean. Stagnant, still and stale, it lacks both life and freshness. Nothing would be more disastrous and out of harmony with our self‐interest than for the developed nations to travel a dead‐end road of inordinate selfishness.”


“One of the most persistent ambiguities that we face is that everybody talks about peace as a goal. However, it does not take sharpest-eyed sophistication to discern that while everbody talks about peace, peace has become practically nobody’s business among the power-wielders. Many men cry Peace! Peace! but they refuse to do the things that make for peace…One day we must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek but a means by which we arrive at that goal. We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means.”


“We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. And history is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says: ‘Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word.’ We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The ‘tide in the affairs of men’ does not remain at flood; it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, “Too late.” There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. ‘The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on…’ We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. This may well be mankind’s last chance to choose between chaos and community.”

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[1] The Radical King, edited by Cornell West (Beacon Press: Boston, 2015).

[2] Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (Harper and Row, 1967, reprinted by Beacon Press, 2010).

Fr. Casey +

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