King and Heschel

Some years ago a friend told me that he read Martin Luther Kings Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail" on this day of recollection. I began doing it myself and am struck every time by its power. The letter was written while King was held in solitary confinement in April 1963 in response to a statement from eight white, "liberal" Alabama clergy admonishing King to pursue racial justice through the courts not in the streets. Episcopal Bishop C.C. Jones Carpenter was the instigator and first signer of the clergy statement, "Call to Unity." Despite his credentials as a critic of segregation, Carpenter, as the senior Episcopal bishop in the US, failed to lend his prestige to King's efforts. Carpenter criticized King for a lack of respectability (according to Taylor Branch in his magisterial Parting the Waters, America in the King Years, 1954-63). Alas, it is just what one might expect from an Episcopalian.

King's letter is nothing less than a definitive statement about the need for prophetic action to achieve social change. For us in an election year, as we listen to the sound bites and moral shuffling of the candidates, it is a reminder of how far we have fallen from the mountain on which King stood. I have said this before, in an earlier post, but it bears repeating: the church has fallen silent as a prophetic witness. No one speaks with moral authority from the pulpit, with the possible exception of Jim Wallis. But in the streets where poverty continues to destroy the lives of men and women and children of color, and in the fields where migrant workers are exploited for our collective benefit (and then excoriated by opportunistic politicians for being immigrants and poor), there are few with the courage or the will to object.

We live in a state of governmental control that has, over the years, grown tighter, but we have scarcely noticed. At play in our consumer gardens, we worry mostly about our perquisites. We are like the proverbial frog in the slowing warming water that, when it reaches boiling, will cook us before we know what has happened. And yet no church leaders speak out against the slow evaporation of our basic liberties.

We live next to the federal building here in Portland and the other day Connie saw a woman standing in one of the windows with a pair of binoculars focused on a floor somewhere below ours. We had heard a story when we moved in about federal agents raiding the apartment we now live in because the resident was cleaning a rifle (he was a former member of the military who owned the gun legally). I offer this image as a symbol of the way we have become accustomed to living. We are watched, we watch each other, we have accepted the basic premises of a police state.

King and the black Americans of his day--and of the country from its beginnings--lived in a police state. Those of us who were teenagers in the 60s remember the dogs and the fire hoses, the murders and jailings. I was in Lynchburg, Virginia, as a college student between 1962 and 1966, and was dragged out of bed to be beaten for my modest civil rights activities. The local newspaper published a front-page notice edged in black suggesting I go back north to be with my communist buddies. The paper made it clear where I might be found. The rumor was the American Nazi Party was looking for me.

"Letter from Birmingham Jail" is addressed to all of us who urge care and caution, who are content in our wealth and respectability. Bishop Carpenter, by all accounts a decent man, stands for our cowardice. Decent though we are, we are content to allow the poorest and the least powerful to be sacrificed to our need for order and security. "We know through painful experience," King wrote, "that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor." Are we oppressed? Surely, that is an overstatement. Analogously, we might ask: has global warming inconvenienced or hurt us? Not yet.

The churches are silent. Our political leaders are compromised nearly beyond redemption. Who is there like King and his comrades in the 60s that might bring to our public dialog the moral clarity of "Letter from Birmingham Jail"?

As it happens, this year some Jewish leaders are also remembering Abraham Joshua Heschel this week; he would be 101 years old. A mystic, scholar, and activist, Heschel marched with King in Selma. But he represents that other side of activism, the meditative preparation required if one is to survive solitary confinement, ostracism, and rebuke--if one is to meet death with equanimity. In his brief book, The Sabbath, Heschel writes of the sanctification of time. "In technical civilization, we expend time to gain space. To enhance our power in the world of space is our main objective. Yet to have more does not mean to be more....There is a realm of time where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord. Life goes wrong when the control of space, the acquisition of things of space, becomes our sole concern." The Sabbath offers another vision of who we are called to be.

These things in space are the idols of empire, and we have fallen before them in worship. Although King and his fellow activists were extraordinarily successful in bending the will of empire to justice, their accomplishments are slowly being eroded by our national obsession with security. We live in the empire. We are each implicated in its actions everywhere. We are all in a Birmingham jail. And we are silent.