Today's selection
- from A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and
Speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. by Marin Luther King,
Jr., edited by James M. Washington.
Martin
Luther King, Jr. speaks on the subject of non-violence. Dr.
King, as Gandhi before him, had advocated non-violent protest
-- but believed it was not enough merely to be non-violent.
For King, there was a higher standard, and that was that you
must love the person that harms you. In the following excerpt,
King was speaking in 1961 to white liberals from the
"Fellowship of the Concerned" at their annual meeting. He knew
that many among them objected to student "sit-ins" and
"freedom rides" and preferred a more gradual approach -- in
part because of the savage beatings being inflicted on them --
and that his task was to persuade these veteran white liberals
to see the student movement as a natural outgrowth of their
own work and his own teachings:
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"Those
who adhere to or follow this philosophy [of non-violence] must
follow a consistent principle of noninjury. They must
consistently refuse to inflict injury upon another. Sometimes
you will read the literature of the student movement and see
that, as they are getting ready for the sit-in or stand-in,
they will read something like this, 'If you are hit do not hit
back, if you are cursed do not curse back.' This is the whole
idea, that the individual who is engaged in a nonviolent
struggle must never inflict injury upon another.
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"Now this
has an external aspect and it has an internal one. From the
external point of view it means that the individuals involved
must avoid external physical violence. So they don't have
guns, they don't retaliate with physical violence. If they are
hit in the process, they avoid external physical violence at
every point. But it also means that they avoid internal
violence of spirit. This is why the love ethic stands so high
in the student movement. We have a great deal of talk about
love and nonviolence in this whole thrust.
"Now when
the students talk about love, certainly they are not talking
about emotional bosh, they are not talking about merely a
sentimental outpouring; they're talking something much deeper,
and I always have to stop and try to define the meaning of
love in this context. The Greek language comes to our aid in
trying to deal with this. There are three words in the Greek
language for love; one is the word eros. This is a
beautiful type of love, it is an aesthetic love. Plato talks
about it a great deal in his Dialogue, the yearning
of the soul for the realm of the divine. It has come to us to
be a sort of romantic love, and so in a sense we have read
about it and experienced it. We've read about it in all the
beauties of literature. I guess in a sense Edgar Allan Poe was
talking about eros when he talked about his beautiful
Annabelle Lee, with the love surrounded by the halo of
eternity. In a sense Shakespeare was talking about
eros when he said 'Love is not love which alters when
it alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove;
O'no! It is an ever fixed mark that looks on tempests and is
never shaken, it is the star to every wandering bark.' (You
know, I remember that because I used to quote it to this
little lady when we were courting; that's eros.) The
Greek language talks about philia which was
another level of love. It is an intimate affection between
personal friends, it is a reciprocal love. On this level you
love because you are loved. It is friendship.
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"Then the
Greek language comes out with another word which is called the
agape. Agape is more than romantic love,
agape is more than friendship. Agape is
understanding, creative, redemptive, good will to all men. It
is an overflowing love which seeks nothing in return.
Theologians would say that it is the love of God
operating in the human heart. So that when one rises to love
on this level, he loves men not because he likes them,
not because their ways appeal to him, but he loves every man
because God loves him. And he rises to the point of loving the
person who does an evil deed while hating the deed that the
person does. I think this is what Jesus meant when he said
'love your enemies.'
"I'm very
happy that he didn't say like your enemies, because it is
pretty difficult to like some people. Like is sentimental, and
it is pretty difficult to like someone bombing your home;
it is pretty difficult to like somebody threatening your
children; it is difficult to like congressmen who spend all of
their time trying to defeat civil rights. But Jesus says love
them, and love is greater than like. Love is understanding,
redemptive, creative, good will for all men. And it is
this idea, it is this whole ethic of love which is the idea
standing at the basis of the student movement."
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A
Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Author: Martin Luther King
Publisher: HarperOne
Copyright 1986 by Coretta Scott King
Pages:
46-47
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