Reading Saving Paradise, Chapter 14 - Part II

The Stone of Hope

Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial

African-American Christians labored to create routes to liberation here and now – not in a time beyond this world. 

Slave revolts in the late 18th century prompted whites to ban black churches among slaves, forcing them to attend white services (sitting at the back of the church), or black services led by white ministers, under the eye of guards.  But by the end of the century, free blacks were already forming their own churches. 

Ernest Watson, In the Name of the Father

White supremacy reasserted itself with vehemence and violence.  The frequency of lynching testifies to how deeply Christian notions of redemptive violence were inscribed in the American psyche.  (The last lynching in the U.S. occurred in 1968, the year Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.) 

W. E. B. DuBois (1868-1963)

In the face of black suffering, some African Americans challenged the traditional Christian pieties of atonement and an omnipotent deity.  W. E. B Dubois confronted God:

Keep Not Thou Silent, O God!

Sit no longer blind, Lord God, 

deaf to our prayer and dumb to our dumb suffering.

Surely Thou, too, art not white, O Lord, 

a pale bloodless, heartless thing!

Ida Wells-Barnett (1862-1931)

The greatest activist to say “no” to lynching was Ida Wells-Barnett.  A member of the Beale Street Baptist Church, she launched her career as a journalist writing under the pen name “Iola”.

Our American Christians are too busy saving the souls of white Christians from burning in hell-fire to save the lives of black ones from present burning in fires kindled by white Christians. 

Wells-Barnett, a deeply religious woman, saw herself as a lone prophet.  She understood her life – and that of the women of her generation – as living in a kind of exile; although they had escaped Egypt and slavery, they had not yet reached any sort of promised land.  Uncompromising and single-minded in her moral clarity and vision, her oratory, flair for language, and passionate commitment to ending lynching and gaining justice for black women accomplished a great deal. 

Wells-Barnett and other courageous witnesses invoked outrage at injustice. They advanced the sacred work of religious community:  to raise prophetic voices against injustice and violence; to organize communities to resist the principalities and powers of this world; and to make space for lamentation. 

Deep mourning is not something a person can do alone. However, held in the embrace of community  rituals and traditions, grief can find its depth, anger can voice its anguish, and protest can fuel creative action – even in the midst of or aftermath of injustice and tragedy.  

“The beloved community”

Paradise is a place for the brokenhearted.  Within the embrace of paradise – the realm of God’s ongoing creativity, the realm of the Spirit’s all-permeating breath – those who suffer may find balm. 

The challenge for those who are committed to life here and now is to keep the human heart open to truthful encounter with human-created horrors.  What does it take for the privileged or protected to acknowledge and confront human acts of pitiless cruelty, torture, and humiliation? Emotional attentiveness is more possible when people ground their life in something more than outrage alone: in a deep affirmation of life’s goodness, in epiphanies of life’s beauty and the possibilities of grace.

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968)

After World War II, African American church leaders, most notably Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968), combined the burning passion for racial justice with Social Gospel theology.  The Social Gospel’s focus on engagement with life here and now – rather than salvation in an afterlife – provided King with an antidote to his own experience of a black Baptist piety that counseled people to accept suffering and discrimination in this life and anticipate release and vindication in the afterlife.  King’s study of Mahatma Gandhi in graduate school – and his friendship with Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist who organized nonviolent resistance to the Vietnam war – help King develop his methods of nonviolence resistance to oppression. 

King integrated these various strands of this-worldly salvation in his call for “beloved community.”  His clear analysis of the connections between racism and the Vietnam War testify to the enduring importance of prophetic critique.  His concrete commitment to embody human solidarity and justice here and now reveal what it means to love the world.

When King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, the citation read: 

Martin Luther King, Jr. is the first person in the Western world to have shown us that a struggle can be waged without violence. He is the first to make the message of brotherly love a reality in the course of his struggle, and he has brought this message to all men, to all nations and races. Today we pay tribute to Martin Luther King, the man who has never abandoned his faith in the unarmed struggle he is waging, who has suffered for his faith, who has been imprisoned on many occasions, whose home has been subject to bomb attacks, whose life and the lives of his family have been threatened, and who nevertheless has never faltered.  

Four years later, King was assassinated.  

"Out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope"

Each side of the Stone of Hope includes an additional statement attributed to King.  The first, from the "I Have a Dream" speech, is "Out of the Mountain of Despair, a Stone of Hope"—the quotation that serves as the basis for the monument's design. 

The community of paradise

As Brock and Parker conclude Saving Paradise they write:

Paradise is not a place free from suffering or conflict, but a place in which the Spirit is present and love is possible.   Paradise is human life restored to its divinely infused dignity and capacity – and it is a place of struggle with evil and injustice, requiring the development of wisdom, love, nonviolence, and responsible uses of power.  We can come to know the world as paradise when our hearts and souls are reborn through living rightly with one another and the earth.   Generosity, nonviolence, and care for one another are the pathways into transformed awareness. 

This way of living does not spring simply from the imagination of a better world, but from a profound embrace of this world.  It does not begin with knowledge or hope.  It begins with love. 

Paradise can be experienced as spiritual illumination of the heart, mind, and senses felt in moments of religious ecstasy, and it can be known in ordinary life lived with reverence and  responsibility.  Entering paradise in this life is not an individual achievement but is the gift of communities that train perception and teach ethical grace. 

Paradise provides deep reservoirs for resistance and joy.  It calls us to embrace life’s aching tragedies and persistent beauties, to labor for justice and peace, to honor one another’s dignity, and to root our lives in the soil of this good and difficult earth. 

Would Martin Luther King agree with Brock and Parker?

Paradise is not a place free from suffering or conflict, but a place in which the Spirit is present and love is possible.

 

Paradise is human life restored to its divinely infused dignity and capacity – and it is a place of struggle with evil and injustice, requiring the development of wisdom, love, nonviolence, and responsible uses of power. 

Generosity, nonviolence, and care for one another are the pathways into transformed awareness. 

Entering paradise in this life is not an individual achievement but is the gift of communities that train perception and teach ethical grace.