It is not
enough to talk about institutions and workplaces that fracture and separate
people based on race, religion, gender, and sexual orientation. We must also look
at the ways that we ourselves manifest these bigotries -- how we are the very
ones who uphold and are part of these institutions and workplaces.
Often, we find
that these institutions and workplaces are broken, dysfunctional, and wounded
in the very same ways that we are. The structures we have created are mirrors
not of who we want to be, but who we really are.
King would
remind each of us that we cannot heal the world if we have not healed
ourselves. So perhaps the greatest task, and the most difficult work we must do
in light of King's teachings, is to heal ourselves. And this work must be done
in relationship with our justice work in the world.
In A
Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway said that the world breaks us all, but
some of us grow strong in those broken places. King's teachings invite us to
grow strong in our broken places - not only to mend the sin-sick world in which
we live, but also to mend the sin-sick world that we carry around within us.
And we can only do that if we are willing to look both inward and outward,
healing ourselves of the bigotry, biases, and demons that chip away at our
efforts to work toward justice in this world.
Our differences
have been used to divide us instead of unite us, so consequently we reside in a
society where human brokenness, isolation, and betrayal are played out every
day.
I know that the
struggle against racism that King talked about is only legitimate if I am also
fighting anti-Semitism, homophobia, sexism, classism - not only out in the
world but also in myself. Otherwise, I am creating an ongoing cycle of abuse
that goes on unexamined and unaccounted for.
We are foolish
if we think we can heal the world and not ourselves. And we delude ourselves if
we think that King was only talking about the woundedness of institutional
racism, and not the personal wounds we all carry as human beings.
Ironically, our
culture of woundedness and victimization has bonded us together in brokenness.
The sharing of worlds to depict and honor our pain has created a new language
of intimacy, a bonding ritual that allows us to talk across and among our
pains. In exploring our common wounds, we sometimes feel more able to find the
trust and the understanding that eludes us as "healthy" people.
When we bond in
these unhealthy ways we miss opportunities in ourselves for moral leadership,
and to work collaboratively with others to effect change in seemingly small
ways that eventually lead to big outcomes.
Both Rosa Parks
and Martin Luther King, Jr. were leaders in the Montgomery bus boycott that
challenged Alabama's Jim Crow laws. Both were working together for a desired
outcome, and they could not have done it without the other.
Had Rosa Parks
not sat down on the bus and refused her seat to a white man that day in
December 1955, King could not have gotten up to promulgate a social gospel,
which catapulted the civil rights movement.
Each year, I
mark the Martin Luther King holiday by reexamining myself in light of King's
teachings. And in so doing, I try to uncover not only the ways in which the
world breaks me, but also how it breaks other people. These breaks keep us
fractured instead of united toward a common goal - a multicultural democracy.
I believe that
when we use our gifts in the service of others as King has taught us, we then
shift the paradigm of personal brokenness to personal healing. We also shift
the paradigm of looking for moral leadership from outside of ourselves to
within ourselves, thus realizing that we are not only the agents of change in
society, but also the moral leaders we have been looking for.
Our job,
therefore, in keeping King's dream alive is to remember that our longing for
social justice is also inextricably tied to our longing for personal healing.
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