One of the signatures of my life are pockets of unfinished things.
I have shelves of unfinished books, stacks of papers to be gone through, any number of unfinished household projects, and – thanks to an attempt, at least, to finish unpacking one corner of the guest room in our house – a folder of unfinished songs. At the end of the last century, I was a songwriter, collaborating with a good friend. I wrote lyrics and contributed on the harmonies. When that chapter of my life came to a close, I came away with the idea that I was not a melody maker, so the not-yet-songs found their way into folders and unfinished stacks and have stayed hidden for so long that I find it hard remembering them. Some in the stack have stayed with me in one form or another, but others were a complete surprise. This is one that caught my attention:
a world away
on a road outside nairobi someone’s walking home someone’s burning dinner someone’s about to go half a world away from me I don’t know any names on a road outside nairobi it happens just the same
on a subway in st. petersburg someone has to stand a woman’s having trouble another lends a hand as the five o’clock train fills up like a mobile sardine can on a subway in st. petersburg they’re heading home again
name a town pick a place take a lap in the human race find yourself a world away in the people you won’t see today
in a house in yokahama the little one’s asleep while parents balance bank accounts and say the rent’s too steep grandma’s on the telephone asking how’s my little girl in a house in yokahama it’s not such a different world
name a town pick a place take a lap in the human race find yourself a world away in the people you won’t see today
Part of the reason this particular text struck me is the theme, which is one I’ve carried with me for many years. I can remember saying to friends in college, “Sometimes it bothers me that there are places I’ve never been – whole cities, countries – where no one has ever waked up and said, ‘I wonder what Milton is doing.’ They have never missed me and they’re doing just fine.” As long as I’m printing older works, I even wrote this poem a few years back:
spokane
a family is gathering for a meal outside Spokane the daughter is still wearing her soccer uniform the mother is chatting as she passes the potatoes the father is nonverbal, tired trying to engage the dog is waiting for someone to share
they will finish their dinners their conversations their homework they will turn on the television the phone will ring several times It will not be me
no one in that house knows I live across the continent or I have tales to tell of my youth of my life, of what I did yesterday they don’t know I can cook or play guitar, or that I’m writing a poem they don’t know I’ve never been to Spokane and they’re not concerned
they are finding their dreams building their lives breaking their hearts living out their days without knowing me and they are not the only ones
in all my years the phone has never rung and a voice declared “come quickly to spokane we just realized we can’t go on without you” the same could be said for the table across the room from me here in the coffee shop
the gossamer tether of humanity doesn’t appear to reach as far as the next booth unless the light is just right and I can see the lines I’m not sure which view is easier to live with
The other reason I was caught by the folder I found was there were several poems/lyrics that were fairly complete and yet had sat in the blue cardboard folder with the picture of Pooh reading to Piglet while each one of them sits on a stack of books and the inscription, “Words and Such.” On the bookshelf next to the desk where I’m writing tonight are three more binders of unborn and unfinished songs, a whole stack of journals with snippets of insight, a couple of folders with articles and quotes, five icons that need to be completed, and a draft of a novel that I finished, but never could figure out what to do next. Within arm’s reach is an archaeological exhibition of the layers of my writing life with almost as much left undone as done, I suppose.
The last phrase takes me once more to the prayer that has traveled with me through much of this Lenten season: “forgive us for the things we have done and the things we’ve left undone.” I’m not sure I need to ask forgiveness in this case – except for a couple of the lyrics – as much as I need to attend to my past, to regard it. Some things pass by for reasons we understand and others for reasons we cannot explain. Sometimes we walk away on purpose and other times we just let things fall away. I look over at the bookshelf and I think of Ezekiel standing over the valley of dry bones and watching God reanimate those who had been lost and left for dead. What he thought was over wasn’t over.
Though much of what I found in my excavation might be considered, in the parlance of The Princess Bride, to be “mostly dead,” I’m doing good work to go back through the layers of my life and remember, as best I can, not only what and why I wrote, but for whom and with whom. Whether any of the songs are ever finished, or any other of them are seen by anyone else but me, living in the layers, as Stanley Kunitz pointed out, is how I continue to move towards wholeness. Here are the closing lines to his poem:
In my darkest night, when the moon was covered and I roamed through wreckage, a nimbus-clouded voice directed me: “Live in the layers, not on the litter.” Though I lack the art to decipher it, no doubt the next chapter in my book of transformations is already written. I am not done with my changes.
In this trinity of existence – archaeologist, settler, explorer – I re-member my life in what has been, what is, and what is to come. I cannot see beyond the borders of my limitations and can reach farther than I can imagine.
First the news of Lazarus dying before Jesus had time to get there — Then the image of Jesus crying must have giv’n the disciples a scare . . .
He got to the tomb and called out his friend, with the others saying, “He stinketh” – they had no idea death was no end, Jesus said, “Death is not what you thinketh.”
God showed Ezekiel a valley of death then gift wrapped bones in new life and skin – God’s subversive pow’r in every breath: in our endings is where God begins
The conference is named for a former pastor of the church who was responsible for helping the church to galvanize its identity in the midst of the civil rights struggle. In 1958, they were meeting in a dairy barn that belonged to a rich benefactor. The church was an all white congregation. Crum invited James Lawson, an African-American and fellow Methodist, to come a preach. The man who owned the barn, and who was also going to donate land to let them build a church, said if Lawson came he would evict them and take back his land.
Ryan read part of the sermon Crum preached the following Sunday, prior to Lawson taking the pulpit. “Money cannot buy our witness,” he said. And then he repeated himself. Then Crum went on to say the second galvanizing principle was to stand against those who were wrong but “to love them in the midst of their wrongness.” “Speaking the truth without love,” said Crum, “is not Christian.”
And then, fifty-three years later, James Lawson himself stepped once again into the pulpit of Avent Ferry UMC. This man who went on from that Sunday in 1958 to pastor in India, to study with followers of Gandhi, to help found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, to train civil rights activists in nonviolent actions, to ride in the last stages of the Freedom Rides when the early riders had been beaten down, to pastor in Memphis and work with Martin Luther King to organize the sanitation workers stood up today to stand with those working to keep a well integrated and successful school system in Raleigh from being taken apart by forces reminiscent of those who opposed him fifty years ago. He spoke with a gentle and calm authority, not as one who had something to prove nor as a hero in the fading light, but as one who knew how to speak the truth in love and still had some truth to speak.
He talked about how hard it is to read the gospel stories of Jesus because we find it hard to let him be human, to really see him in the stories. “If you want to understand the stories of Jesus,” he said, “read a biography of Gandhi or Martin Luther King.” The fact that we were sitting in a room with no stained glass windows seemed perfect to me in that moment: he was calling us to see in new and clear images.
His words reminded me of something I read in Nathan Brown’s book, Letters to a One-Armed Poet, which chronicles his grief in the loss of one of his best friends. In a piece called “Nip and Tuck,” he writes,
I’ve buffed out so many scratches and dings in the paint of our stories, I now worry about their cosmetic integrity.
At the same time, “the truth” has always felt like salty taffy in my mouth – the way it yanks on loose teeth and takes forever to digest. And “the facts” of any matter seldom make people lean forward in their customary seats . . . seats on the front rows of lives that are filled enough already with the hassle and boredom of “what actually happened.”
Right now I’m reading The Great Gatsby with my American Literature class at school – me for about the tenth time, they for the first. Though I’ve read it with students several times, I’ve also reread it four or five times on my own because I am captured by the writing and the way the story unfolds. No matter now many times I read it, there is always something new to find there.
I love to tell the story for those who know it best seem hungering and thirsting to hear it like the rest
So sings one of my favorite hymns. Thinking about what Lawson had to say this morning, what Gatsby thinks about looking across the water at Daisy’s green light, what Nathan meant by “buffing and shining,” I wonder what are the stories of Jesus – the ones with the scratches and dents of humanity and hope?
We’ve often done a pretty good buffing job on the gospels over the years to make them fit nicely into our anthology of culture and faith. We can talk, for instance, about the gruesomeness of the Crucifixion and focus on Jesus’ suffering because he died for us and also, perhaps, because we don’t have to feel it firsthand. When the call of the story is for compassion and voluntarily taking on the pain of the poor and marginalized, we’ve move more quickly to metaphor. When it’s something we can’t fit comfortably into our categories, we explain it away as being added by church tradition or later inserts. When it comes to our weekly lectionary readings, we just skip over the hard parts. The prospect of a “taffy” truth that leaves us toothless and disquieted is more than we want to face on most days.
But he was not a secular social revolutionary. He was God’s revolutionary. And God’s passion – what God is passionate about, according to Jesus – is for an earth in which swords are beaten into plowshares, in which nations do not make war against nations anymore, in which every family shall live under their own vine and fig tree (not just subsistence, but more than subsistence), and no one shall make the afraid (Micah 4.1-4, with close parallel in Isaiah 2.1-4). This was the passion of Jesus, and for Christians, Jesus is the revelation of God’s passion.
Of course, Jesus and the Bible are also personal as well as political. Of course. But we have not often seen the political meaning of Jesus and the Bible. It is there – and once one sees it, it is so obvious. Not to see it is the product of habituated patterns of thought, or of willful blindness.
Jesus was (and is) not about endorsing the rule of domination systems that privilege the wealthy and powerful. Jesus was (and is) about God’s passion for a very different kind of world.
Yes, and we have church buildings and jobs and families and debts and obligations and other stuff we want to do. In the jukebox that is my mind, I cue the Beatles:
you say you want a revolution well you know we don’t want to change the world
My friend Burt called tonight while I was cooking dinner. We’ve been close friends since college – a long time ago, now. It had been awhile since we talked, so we both had stories to tell along with new scratches and dents to share. When we were younger, we thought we would change the world.
every time I look at you I don’t understand why you let the things you did get so out of hand you’d have managed better if you’d had a plan why’d you choose such backward time and such a strange land if you’d come today you could have reached a whole nation people in 4 B.C. had no mass communication . . .
I’m sure Jesus would have broken the record for followers had he been able to Tweet, though shrinking the parables to one hundred and forty characters would have been a challenge, even for the Messiah. Even if he could have reached the world, the quality of the encounters would have been fundamentally different. Judas criticized him for lack of a plan yet, it seems to me, that is what is perhaps most essential about the gospel stories. The disciples didn’t greet him every morning with a papyrus Day-Timer and say, “We’ll start with healing a blind man after breakfast, on the way to town a woman will touch your cloak, at lunch you’ll feed the five thousand, and then raise Jarius’ daughter from the dead in the early afternoon before you catch the boat for a little ‘me’ time.”
Jesus walked. And Jesus was interrupted.
In fact, the context for most of his ministry was interruptions. He walked – occasionally with somewhere specific to go – and people stopped him. Love is more easily transferred by analog. Tonight, Ginger and I planned to go to the opening of The Cookery, which bills itself as “Durham’s Cooking Incubator.” Read their words:
Starting a food business can be daunting. We are here to foster creative culinary minds as they set out to become the next big thing on the local food scene. With our certified facility and regulatory expertise, you can jump-start your culinary venture today.
Though Durham is known as the “Bull City,” I think we could more aptly be called “City of Encouragement” because of the way people pull for one another around here. Durhamsters are good at cheering each other along and helping to make each other’s dreams come true.
Since we knew parking would be tough and the evening was amazingly beautiful, Ginger and I decided to walk from our house down West Trinity Avenue to Buchanan, along side of Duke’s East Campus, through Brightleaf Square, and down to Old Chapel Hill Road where The Cookery was ringed by food trucks, not the least of which was Pie Pushers, Durham’s latest addition and the dream of our friends Becky and Mike.
We were not far from the house when we met a woman walking an old black dog whom we could tell had been at the vet because on leg was shaved where he had had an IV. (Lola is sporting the same style right now.) The rest of the way down West Trinity took us past a plethora of pink dogwoods in full bloom, parents out walking with children, some people waiting at bus stops, and folks coming home from work. The turn on to Buchanan took us alongside the brick wall that rings the campus and past all kinds of walkers and runners making the loop. We crossed the tracks in Brightleaf and passed the houses along the lower part of Buchanan, some that have been restored and others still boarded up. One old house that we had looked at when we first moved to town was on the market again, still looking for the tenacious love that will help it heal.
When we got to The Cookery, we were preceded by a couple of hundred of our fellow citizens and four or five food trucks. I got my slice from Mike and Becky and Ginger and I both got a couple of “garlic knots” – Mike’s creation of a roasted garlic clove (with some cheese, or pesto, or sausage) wrapped in a lovely little blanket of pizza dough (his recipe) and baked. As we stood in line, we saw Sean from Fullsteam (one of our best community encouragers and damn good beer maker), Brian from Housing for New Hope, a couple Ginger knew from her exercise class, Derek (a photographer for the Indy), and then we met the folks from Berenbaums. They are a bakers who are just starting out and selling their wares at the Durham Farmer’s Market. Their cookies and cheddar biscuits (oh, my) are offered on a sliding scale: you pay what you can. The folks at Ninth Street Bakery, who are very established, are helping them get their start.
On the way home, we turned left on to Main Street when we got back to campus and looped around to Ninth Street so we could make a stop at Chubby’s Tacos for some chips and queso and a couple of frozen margaritas. On the way in we met a young woman wearing a Baylor t-shirt and she and I had a brief “Sic ‘em, Bears” moment. We walked home down Markham to Watts Street and back to Trinity. At about the same place where we had met the woman with her dog, we saw a man about a hundred yards in front of us who was having a fight with a plant, evidently, because he tore up the leaves and stomped on them and then punched at the air above them as they lay broken on the sidewalk. When he walked past us, he reeked of anger and he kept on going. We finished climbing the hill, and walked down out street and home to our waiting puppies.
“This feels like our town,” Ginger said somewhere on the way home.
I know. What’s this have to do with Jesus? Well, I drive up and down many of the same roads we walked this evening and I don’t get to see the detail. Someone honked and waved as we walked, but I couldn’t tell who it was. They drove on, and we stepped into the middle of our city. If Jesus had better technology, the gospels would have been much shorter and much less interesting.
as I write, Ella, our Schnauzer is stretched out on the bed barking at the sound of our neighbor rolling his big trash cans out to the curb she cannot see him, only hear the rumble of the plastic wheels and she is convinced her sound makes a difference even though he doesn’t stop rolling along and no one inside of our house has made any move other than to say, “It’s the guy next door” and I think about my barking at the two boys after lunch who wouldn’t clear the tables because the trash wasn’t theirs and I wonder if Ella and I share something in common in our futile attempts to get someone to keep the world from filling up with garbage
The Fifth of April is an unusual first day of school, but today was just that for my students and me as we began our new chapter and sat down together for our first class in our new building. In each of my three English classes, we were also beginning novels. Here are their opening lines:
The boy with fair hair lowered himself down the last few feet of rock and began to pick his way toward the lagoon.
Mr. Jones, of the Manor Farm, had locked the hen-houses for the night, but was too drunk to remember to shut the pop-holes.
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
(I’ll post the book titles a bit later; see if you know them.)
Reading the first lines of novels always reminds me of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, which asks for “the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels.” The contest is named for Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who wrote this jewel before there even was a contest:
It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents–except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness. (Paul Clifford, 1830)
In 2010, this sentence won the prize:
For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity’s affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss–a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity’s mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world’s thirstiest gerbil.
Speaking of bad beginnings, as I write my beloved Red Sox, picked by many to win the AL East if not the World Series, lost another game, which means they are now 0-4 to begin the season. All of us good Sox fans are quick to lean into what the old song says, “It’s not how you start, it’s how you finish.”
In the middle of this first day – during my free period – I readLetters to One-Armed Poet, which is the wonderful work of my friend Nathan Brown chronicling his grief before and after the death of his dear friend and fellow poet, Jim Chastain. In a piece called “Walking Shadows,” Nathan writes,
And I’d’ve liked an ending more like Butch and Sundance – revolvers firing and flashing as we strut and fret our way out into a certain, yet glorious death.
But the disease forced you to follow the script, even though none of the actors in the screenplay liked it.
So, we played our parts. . . planted our poems like literary landmines in the red dirt and brimstone of the Southwest . . . until . . . your hour upon the stage was up.
Sometimes the endings aren’t what we hoped either – and often for reasons beyond our reach.
Here’s a shout out to the middles.
Nathan quotes from Jim’s poem “Folding the Laundry” in another piece:
Today is the future if tomorrow never comes.
Why not insist on a few interesting moments
every
day?
We have moved far enough into Lent for Ash Wednesday to be a memory, yet Resurrection Morning is still several sunrises away. This is gut check time for me in my journaling: am I going to keep my promise to write every night? In this particular venture, I don’t get a shot at a make up. Either I wrote every night or I didn’t. Granted, there’s not a whole lot riding on my writing, other than my promise to God and to myself. Still, the exercise and discipline has far reaching implications, should I be willing to lean in and learn, or re-learn, I should say. Every beginning has a back story, every ending a trail of preparation. In the middle is what makes all the difference.
If you’re a writer yourself, or someone still trying to carve out the time to begin, you’ll find encouraging the interview below in which Kate discusses her schedule: stumbling out of bed at 5 o’clock for coffee, then writing just one hour a day, stopping after two pages, no matter what kind of roll she’s on.
One hour.
Even that’s a challenge for most of us, sure, to capture an hour all to ourselves. But it does shoot down the excuse for many of us that we’d produce heart-warming stories, too–if only we could quit that job, hire that staff of household servants and pay someone to dress like us and show up at our meetings.
One hour. Two pages. Coffee.
After my new first day of school, I went to get my prescriptions refilled, got some milk at King’s Red and White, happened upon my friends Mike and Becky and their new “Pie Pushers” pizza truck and got to see what it looks like in person, and then picked up my father-in-law from the Senior Center where he goes during the day as his Alzheimer’s continues to disappear him a little at a time, and then came home to cook dinner. The day held beginnings and endings, pasts and pendings, hopes and hurts and home, like most any other day in the middle of my life as far as I know.
allergies are never mentioned in any of the gospel stories no one called out to Jesus to ask for sinus relief even in the desert’s dust
with my head as stuffed as a dorm dirty clothes bag and aware of the gathering pollen storm I understand the question – who sinned that this man should be this way?
John 9 tells the story of a man born blind whom Jesus healed by spreading mud on his face and telling him to and wash. Though Jesus is clear that the man was not the cause of his blindness, I was struck by the unwillingness of others to see him as anything other than blind, even after he said he could see.
sunday sonnet #24
Jesus saw a man blind from his birth – the disciples wondered who had sinned; Jesus spit to make mud of the earth and said, “Go and wash to see again.
The man went to show he had been healed, the priests and people cut him down to size — new eyes weren’t something that could be real; one who saw they did not recognize.
As metaphor the tale hit home most true: how am I one who lives without sight? Am I blind to what God has that’s new? Will I go and wash without a fight?
Better remembered for my kindness than be recognized for my blindness.
Tomorrow, April 3, marks the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech to the Memphis sanitation workers in 1968 — his last speech before he was assassinated. After spending the morning talking with some church friends about what it means to be a peacemaker, I offer his words tonight, which read as strikingly current in light of the unrest around the world as people rise up to claim their freedom.
A complete video of the speech does not exist. I’ve included what I could find.
Peace, Milton
___________________________________
Thank you very kindly, my friends. As I listened to Ralph Abernathy and his eloquent and generous introduction and then thought about myself, I wondered who he was talking about. It’s always good to have your closest friend and associate to say something good about you. And Ralph Abernathy is the best friend that I have in the world. I’m delighted to see each of you here tonight in spite of a storm warning. You reveal that you are determined to go on anyhow.
Something is happening in Memphis; something is happening in our world. And you know, if I were standing at the beginning of time, with the possibility of taking a kind of general and panoramic view of the whole of 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 and I would watch God’s children in their magnificent trek from the dark dungeons of 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. And I would watch them 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 aesthetic life of man. But I wouldn’t stop there.
I would even go by the way that the man for whom I am named had his habitat. And I would watch Martin Luther as he tacked his ninety-five theses on the door at the church of 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 to 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 20th 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.”
And another reason that I’m happy to live in this period is that we have been forced to a point where we are going to have to grapple with the problems that men have been trying to grapple with through history, but the demands didn’t force them to do it. Survival demands that we grapple with them. Men, for years now, have been talking about war and peace. But now, no longer can they just talk about it. It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it’s nonviolence or nonexistence. That is where we are today.
And also in the human rights revolution, if something isn’t done, and done in a hurry, to bring the colored peoples of the world out of their long years of poverty, their long years of hurt and neglect, the whole world is doomed. Now, I’m just happy that God has allowed me to live in this period to see what is unfolding. And I’m happy that He’s allowed me to be in Memphis.
I can remember — I can remember when Negroes were just going around as Ralph has said, so often, scratching where they didn’t itch, and laughing when they were not tickled. But that day is all over. We mean business now, and we are determined to gain our rightful place in God’s world.
And that’s all this whole thing is about. We aren’t engaged in any negative protest and in any negative arguments with anybody. We are saying that we are determined to be men. We are determined to be people. We are saying — We are saying that we are God’s children. And that we are God’s children, we don’t have to live like we are forced to live.
Now, what does all of this mean in this great period of history? It means that we’ve got to stay together. We’ve got to stay together and maintain unity. You know, whenever Pharaoh wanted to prolong the period of slavery in Egypt, he had a favorite, favorite formula for doing it. What was that? He kept the slaves fighting among themselves. But whenever the slaves get together, something happens in Pharaoh’s court, and he cannot hold the slaves in slavery. When the slaves get together, that’s the beginning of getting out of slavery. Now let us maintain unity.
Secondly, let us keep the issues where they are. The issue is injustice. The issue is the refusal of Memphis to be fair and honest in its dealings with its public servants, who happen to be sanitation workers. Now, we’ve got to keep attention on that. That’s always the problem with a little violence. You know what happened the other day, and the press dealt only with the window-breaking. I read the articles. They very seldom got around to mentioning the fact that one thousand, three hundred sanitation workers are on strike, and that Memphis is not being fair to them, and that Mayor Loeb is in dire need of a doctor. They didn’t get around to that.
Now we’re going to march again, and we’ve got to march again, in order to put the issue where it is supposed to be — and force everybody to see that there are thirteen hundred of God’s children here suffering, sometimes going hungry, going through dark and dreary nights wondering how this thing is going to come out. That’s the issue. And we’ve got to say to the nation: We know how it’s coming out. For when people get caught up with that which is right and they are willing to sacrifice for it, there is no stopping point short of victory.
We aren’t going to let any mace stop us. We are masters in our nonviolent movement in disarming police forces; they don’t know what to do. I’ve seen them so often. I remember in Birmingham, Alabama, when we were in that majestic struggle there, we would move out of the 16th Street Baptist Church day after day; by the hundreds we would move out. And Bull Connor would tell them to send the dogs forth, and they did come; but we just went before the dogs singing, “Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me around.”
Bull Connor next would say, “Turn the fire hoses on.” And as I said to you the other night, Bull Connor didn’t know history. He knew a kind of physics that somehow didn’t relate to the transphysics that we knew about. And that was the fact that there was a certain kind of fire that no water could put out. And we went before the fire hoses; we had known water. If we were Baptist or some other denominations, we had been immersed. If we were Methodist, and some others, we had been sprinkled, but we knew water. That couldn’t stop us.
And we just went on before the dogs and we would look at them; and we’d go on before the water hoses and we would look at it, and we’d just go on singing “Over my head I see freedom in the air.” And then we would be thrown in the paddy wagons, and sometimes we were stacked in there like sardines in a can. And they would throw us in, and old Bull would say, “Take ’em off,” and they did; and we would just go in the paddy wagon singing, “We Shall Overcome.” And every now and then we’d get in jail, and we’d see the jailers looking through the windows being moved by our prayers, and being moved by our words and our songs. And there was a power there which Bull Connor couldn’t adjust to; and so we ended up transforming Bull into a steer, and we won our struggle in Birmingham. Now we’ve got to go on in Memphis just like that. I call upon you to be with us when we go out Monday.
Now about injunctions: We have an injunction and we’re going into court tomorrow morning to fight this illegal, unconstitutional injunction. All we say to America is, “Be true to what you said on paper.” If I lived in China or even Russia, or any totalitarian country, maybe I could understand some of these illegal injunctions. Maybe I could understand the denial of certain basic First Amendment privileges, because they hadn’t committed themselves to that over there. But somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right. And so just as I say, we aren’t going to let dogs or water hoses turn us around, we aren’t going to let any injunction turn us around. We are going on.
We need all of you. And you know what’s beautiful to me is to see all of these ministers of the Gospel. It’s a marvelous picture. Who is it that is supposed to articulate the longings and aspirations of the people more than the preacher? Somehow the preacher must have a kind of fire shut up in his bones. And whenever injustice is around he tell it. Somehow the preacher must be an Amos, and saith, “When God speaks who can but prophesy?” Again with Amos, “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” Somehow the preacher must say with Jesus, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me,” and he’s anointed me to deal with the problems of the poor.”
And I want to commend the preachers, under the leadership of these noble men: James Lawson, one who has been in this struggle for many years; he’s been to jail for struggling; he’s been kicked out of Vanderbilt University for this struggle, but he’s still going on, fighting for the rights of his people. Reverend Ralph Jackson, Billy Kiles; I could just go right on down the list, but time will not permit. But I want to thank all of them. And I want you to thank them, because so often, preachers aren’t concerned about anything but themselves. And I’m always happy to see a relevant ministry.
It’s all right to talk about “long white robes over yonder,” in all of its symbolism. But ultimately people want some suits and dresses and shoes to wear down here! It’s all right to talk about “streets flowing with milk and honey,” but God has commanded us to be concerned about the slums down here, and his children who can’t eat three square meals a day. It’s all right to talk about the new Jerusalem, but one day, God’s preacher must talk about the new New York, the new Atlanta, the new Philadelphia, the new Los Angeles, the new Memphis, Tennessee. This is what we have to do.
Now the other thing we’ll have to do is this: Always anchor our external direct action with the power of economic withdrawal. Now, we are poor people. Individually, we are poor when you compare us with white society in America. We are poor. Never stop and forget that collectively — that means all of us together — collectively we are richer than all the nations in the world, with the exception of nine. Did you ever think about that? After you leave the United States, Soviet Russia, Great Britain, West Germany, France, and I could name the others, the American Negro collectively is richer than most nations of the world. We have an annual income of more than thirty billion dollars a year, which is more than all of the exports of the United States, and more than the national budget of Canada. Did you know that? That’s power right there, if we know how to pool it.
We don’t have to argue with anybody. We don’t have to curse and go around acting bad with our words. We don’t need any bricks and bottles. We don’t need any Molotov cocktails. We just need to go around to these stores, and to these massive industries in our country, and say, “God sent us by here, to say to you that you’re not treating his children right. And we’ve come by here to ask you to make the first item on your agenda fair treatment, where God’s children are concerned. Now, if you are not prepared to do that, we do have an agenda that we must follow. And our agenda calls for withdrawing economic support from you.”
And so, as a result of this, we are asking you tonight, to go out and tell your neighbors not to buy Coca-Cola in Memphis. Go by and tell them not to buy Sealtest milk. Tell them not to buy — what is the other bread? — Wonder Bread. And what is the other bread company, Jesse? Tell them not to buy Hart’s bread. As Jesse Jackson has said, up to now, only the garbage men have been feeling pain; now we must kind of redistribute the pain. We are choosing these companies because they haven’t been fair in their hiring policies; and we are choosing them because they can begin the process of saying they are going to support the needs and the rights of these men who are on strike. And then they can move on town — downtown and tell Mayor Loeb to do what is right.
But not only that, we’ve got to strengthen black institutions. I call upon you to take your money out of the banks downtown and deposit your money in Tri-State Bank. We want a “bank-in” movement in Memphis. Go by the savings and loan association. I’m not asking you something that we don’t do ourselves at SCLC. Judge Hooks and others will tell you that we have an account here in the savings and loan association from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. We are telling you to follow what we are doing. Put your money there. You have six or seven black insurance companies here in the city of Memphis. Take out your insurance there. We want to have an “insurance-in.”
Now these are some practical things that we can do. We begin the process of building a greater economic base. And at the same time, we are putting pressure where it really hurts. I ask you to follow through here.
Now, let me say as I move to my conclusion that we’ve got to give ourselves to this struggle until the end. Nothing would be more tragic than to stop at this point in Memphis. We’ve got to see it through. And when we have our march, you need to be there. If it means leaving work, if it means leaving school — be there. Be concerned about your brother. You may not be on strike. But either we go up together, or we go down together.
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 of life. At points he wanted to trick Jesus, and show him that he knew a little more than Jesus knew and 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 he got down with him, administered first aid, and helped the man in need. Jesus ended up saying, this was the good man, this was the great man, because he had the capacity to project the “I” into the “thou,” and to be concerned about his brother.
Now you know, we use our imagination a great deal to try to determine why the priest and the Levite didn’t stop. At times we say they were busy going to a church meeting, an ecclesiastical gathering, and they had to get on down to Jerusalem so they wouldn’t be late for their meeting. At other times we would speculate that there was a religious law that “One who was engaged in religious ceremonials was not to touch a human body twenty-four hours before the ceremony.” And every now and then we begin to wonder whether maybe they were not going down to Jerusalem — or down to Jericho, rather to organize a “Jericho Road Improvement Association.” That’s a possibility. Maybe they felt that it was better to deal with the problem from the causal root, rather than to get bogged down with an individual effect.
But I’m going to tell you what my imagination tells me. It’s possible that those men were afraid. You see, the Jericho road is a dangerous road. 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 the 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 days 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 priest asked — 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?”
That’s the question before you tonight. Not, “If I stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to my job. Not, “If I stop to help the sanitation workers what will happen to all of the hours that I usually spend in my office every day and every week as a pastor?” The question is not, “If I stop to help this man in need, what will happen to me?” The question is, “If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?” That’s the question.
Let us rise up tonight with a greater readiness. Let us stand with a greater determination. And let us move on in these powerful days, these days of challenge to make America what it ought to be. We have an opportunity to make America a better nation. And I want to thank God, once more, for allowing me to be here with you.
You know, several years ago, I was in New York City autographing the first book that I had written. And while sitting there autographing books, a demented black woman came up. The only question I heard from her was, “Are you Martin Luther King?” And I was looking down writing, and I said, “Yes.” And the next minute I felt something beating on my chest. Before I knew it I had been stabbed by this demented woman. I was rushed to Harlem Hospital. It was a dark Saturday afternoon. And that blade had gone through, and the X-rays revealed that the tip of the blade was on the edge of my aorta, the main artery. And once that’s punctured, your drowned in your own blood — that’s the end of you.
It came out in the New York Times the next morning, that if I had merely sneezed, I would have died. Well, about four days later, they allowed me, after the operation, after my chest had been opened, and the blade had been taken out, to move around in the wheel chair in the hospital. They allowed me to read some of the mail that came in, and from all over the states and the world, kind letters came in. I read a few, but one of them I will never forget. I had received one from the President and the Vice-President. I’ve forgotten what those telegrams said. I’d received a visit and a letter from the Governor of New York, but I’ve forgotten what that letter said. But there was another letter that came from a little girl, a young girl who was a student at the White Plains High School. And I looked at that letter, and I’ll never forget it. It said simply,
Dear Dr. King,
I am a ninth-grade student at the White Plains High School.”
And she said,
While it should not matter, I would like to mention that I’m a white girl. I read in the paper of your misfortune, and of your suffering. And I read that if you had sneezed, you would have died. And I’m simply writing you to say that I’m so happy that you didn’t sneeze.
And I want to say tonight — I want to say tonight that I too am happy that I didn’t sneeze. Because if I had sneezed, I wouldn’t have been around here in 1960, when students all over the South started sitting-in at lunch counters. And I knew that as they were sitting in, they were really standing up for the best in the American dream, and taking the whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the Founding Fathers in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
If I had sneezed, I wouldn’t have been around here in 1961, when we decided to take a ride for freedom and ended segregation in inter-state travel.
If I had sneezed, I wouldn’t have been around here in 1962, when Negroes in Albany, Georgia, decided to straighten their backs up. And whenever men and women straighten their backs up, they are going somewhere, because a man can’t ride your back unless it is bent.
If I had sneezed — If I had sneezed I wouldn’t have been here in 1963, when the black people of Birmingham, Alabama, aroused the conscience of this nation, and brought into being the Civil Rights Bill.
If I had sneezed, I wouldn’t have had a chance later that year, in August, to try to tell America about a dream that I had had.
If I had sneezed, I wouldn’t have been down in Selma, Alabama, to see the great Movement there.
If I had sneezed, I wouldn’t have been in Memphis to see a community rally around those brothers and sisters who are suffering.
I’m so happy that I didn’t sneeze.
And they were telling me –. Now, it doesn’t matter, now. It really doesn’t matter what happens now. I left Atlanta this morning, and as we got started on the plane, there were six of us. The pilot said over the public address system, “We are sorry for the delay, but we have Dr. Martin Luther King on the plane. And to be sure that all of the bags were checked, and to be sure that nothing would be wrong with on the plane, we had to check out everything carefully. And we’ve had the plane protected and guarded all night.”
And then I got into Memphis. And some began to say the threats, or talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers?
Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop.
And I don’t mind.
Like anybody, 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 so 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.
with my American Literature class at school – me for about the tenth time, they for the first. Though I’ve read it with students several times, I’ve also reread it four or five times on my own because I am captured by the writing and the way the story unfolds. No matter now many times I read it, there is always something new to find there. 
, and found these words:
.