Beloved Community
UU Fellowship of Midland, MI
January 16, 2005
Jane Thickstun

Reading

Today’s reading is from Martin Luther King Jr.'s Nobel Prize acceptance speech on December 10, 1964, in Oslo, Norway.

      I accept this award today with an abiding faith in America and an audacious faith in the future of mankind. I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history. I refuse to accept the idea that the "isness" of man's present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal "oughtness" that forever confronts him.

      I refuse to accept the idea that man is mere flotsam and jetsam in the river of life unable to influence the unfolding events which surround him. I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality.

      I refuse to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation must spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of thermonuclear destruction. I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant.

      I believe that even amid today's motor bursts and whining bullets, there is still hope for a brighter tomorrow. I believe that wounded justice, lying prostrate on the blood-flowing streets of our nations, can be lifted from this dust of shame to reign supreme among the children of men.

      I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits. I believe that what self-centered men have torn down, men other-centered can build up. …

      I still believe that we shall overcome.

Sermon

      Fifty years ago, Martin Luther King, Jr. led a year-long boycott of the bus system in Montgomery, Alabama, to protest segregation on the buses.  It was the start of King’s leadership in the civil rights movement.  The Montgomery Bus Boycott was a radically new kind of revolutionary struggle – instead of violently taking power from oppressors, King introduced a “new paradigm of nonviolent transformative struggles, which over the next nine years forced Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.” (Grace Lee Boggs)

      In a speech at a victory rally after the announcement of the U.S. Supreme Court Decision in favor of desegregating the busses, King described the overall goal as much broader than who sits where on busses.  He said, “the end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the Beloved Community. It is this type of spirit and this type of love that can transform opposers into friends. It is this type of understanding goodwill that will transform the deep gloom of the old age into the exuberant gladness of the new age. It is this love which will bring about miracles in the hearts of men [and women].” (thekingcenter.org)

      The Beloved Community is what King called that which he was working toward.  As his widow, Coretta Scott King says in a document from just last year, “My husband frequently used the term "the beloved community" to describe the kind of society, in which every person was valued and where all conflicts could be reconciled in a spirit of goodwill and mutual benefit. We are still struggling to make America a beloved community, where all of us can live together in a climate of understanding, cooperation and unity.”

      The concept didn’t originate with King, though.  It was coined by the philosopher Josiah Royce in the early 20^th-century.  He said:

      “Through the long centuries of human history, there has been building a Beloved Community.  All souls that love, all souls that aspire, strengthen its bonds.  Precious unto us are the names of the true and the brave, who have toiled and suffered for the sake of the Beloved Community.  Precious unto us are the nameless and the lowly who have served it with single-hearted devotion.  Of them are the treasures of the common life.

      “There are no strangers in the Beloved Community, none against whom doors are shut and harsh words spoken.  For they who belong to it are bound together in one living body, apart from which there is no life.” (source unknown)

      Dr. King popularized the term and invested it with a deeper meaning which has captured the imagination of people all over the world.

      The most important aspect of the Beloved Community is its inclusivity.  All creatures are included in the Beloved Community.  Nobody is free until all are free. 

      This is because King believed in the inter-relatedness and inter-dependence of human existence.  Now we would expand that notion to the interdependent web of all existence and extend it beyond human beings.  King says, “In a real sense, all life is interrelated. The agony of the poor enriches the rich. We are inevitably our brother’s keeper because we are our brother’s brother. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.”

      Other ways he expressed this idea are found in the responsive reading we read earlier.  “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” And “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

      King worked mostly on gaining rights for the black American community, but toward the end of his life he was expanding his scope.  He did a lot of work aimed at ending apartheid in South Africa.  Dr. King was concerned about the effects of imperialism on cultures and nations around the globe.  More and more, he focused on economic injustice as the evil afflicting not just black people, but people of all colors.

      In an article from Christian Century, the authors tell us that King “could not envision the Beloved Community apart from the alleviation of economic inequity and the achievement of economic justice.”  He felt that the structures of capitalism would need to be eliminated in order to secure the right of economic justice for all.  He was a champion of an egalitarian, socialistic approach to wealth and property. (1974)  He’s probably turning in his grave at the current growing gap between the rich and the poor in this country.

      In 1966, Dr. King gave a lecture at the General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association.  He talked about the need for the church to play a major role in achieving social change.  He challenged us to take a world perspective, suggesting that our technology has brought us closer together geographically, and now we need to come together in other ways.  He says, “through our scientific genius we have made of this world a neighborhood, and now through our moral and ethical commitment we must make it a brotherhood. We must live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools. This is a fact of life. No individual can live alone, no nation can live alone.”  He further says, “all life is inter-related, and somehow we are all tied together. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.  This is the inter-related structure of all reality.” (Ware Lecture)

      Another key feature of the Beloved Community is that it can only be achieved through non-violent means.  In a sermon, King says,  “The way of acquiescence leads to moral and spiritual suicide. The way of violence leads to bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers. But, the way of non-violence leads to redemption and the creation of the beloved community.”  (thekingcenter.org)  In the UUA lecture he says that “the morality of the ends is implicit in the means, and that in the long-run of history destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends.”  He felt that non-violence had a great power in disarming the opponent, in weakening his morale.  The way of non-violent resistence is not for the meek, however.  King describes what’s required of us in following the path of non-violence.  Speaking of an opponent, he says, “ If he hits you, you develop the quiet courage of accepting blows without retaliating. If  . . . he puts you in jail you go in that jail and transform it from a dungeon of shame into a haven of freedom and human dignity. Even if he tries to kill you, you develop the inner conviction that there are some things so precious, some things so eternally true that they are worth dying for.” (Ware Lecture)

      The motivating factor in creating the Beloved Community is love.  King talks about the three kinds of love distinguished in the Greek language, and tells us that what’s required for the building of this Beloved Community is the love Greeks call “agape,” “which is understanding, creative, redemptive good will for all . . ., an overflowing love which seeks nothing in return.”  This is what enabled participants in the civil rights movement to stand up to their opponents and say, in effect, “we will match your capacity to inflict suffering with our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with our soul force. Do to us what you will and we will still love you. We cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws because non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. Throw us in jail and we will still love you. Threaten our children, bomb our homes, send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities at the midnight hours and drag us out on some wayside road and beat us and leave us half dead; and, as difficult as it is, we will still love you. Send your propaganda agents around the nation and make it appear we are not fit morally, culturally or otherwise for integration and we will still love you. But be assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. And one day we will win our freedom. We will not only win freedom for ourselves, we will so appeal to your heart and your conscience that we will win you in the process and our victory will be a double victory.”  (Ware Lecture)

      Love and non-violence are the method, or the means, and the aim is the Beloved Community.  “The aftermath of nonviolence is reconciliation and the creation of the beloved community,” King says.  (thekingcenter.org)  Nonviolence doesn’t mean conflict-avoidant.  According to the King Center’s web site, “Dr. King’s Beloved Community was not devoid of interpersonal, group or international conflict. Instead he recognized that conflict was an inevitable part of human experience. But he believed that conflicts could be resolved peacefully and adversaries could be reconciled through a mutual, determined commitment to nonviolence. No conflict, he believed, need erupt in violence. And all conflicts in The Beloved Community should end with reconciliation of adversaries cooperating together in a spirit of friendship and goodwill.”  (thekingcenter.org)

      I’ve been focusing on Dr. King’s description of the Beloved Community, but I actually heard the term first among Unitarian Universalists, without any reference to Martin Luther King, Jr.  At the Unitarian church in Illinois where I first became a UU, the minister referred often to the Beloved Community.  A few years ago our UUA president asked UU ministers to join him in a “group of interfaith leaders” whose aim, he said, “is to create a simple network of . . . ‘faithful witnesses for the Beloved Community’.”  You can hear the term at our annual General Assembly, or wherever UU’s gather and talk about justice. 

      I recently discovered that the tradition of Unitarians and Universalists talking about Beloved Community goes back way before Martin Luther King’s time.  Tom Owen-Towle is a colleague and a friend of mine who has a new book out called Growing a Beloved Community: Twelve Hallmarks of a Healthy Congregation.  He points out that two prominent ministers from our tradition spoke of the Beloved Community early in the twentieth century, before King popularized the term.  John Haynes Holmes, a Unitarian, social activist and minister of Community Church of New York, writes about his church that “‘the core of its faith, as the purpose of its life, is “the Beloved Community”.’”   Clarence Skinner, a Universalist, and dean of Tufts School of Religion, writes, “The Beloved Community is not an organization of individuals seeking private and selfish security for their souls.  It is a new adventure, a spontaneous fellowship of . . . [people] seeking a new world.” (p. xii)

      We don’t have to wait for the realization of the Beloved Community in the whole world to get a glimpse of what it might look like.  Though it is ultimately necessarily global in scope, it can also be realized in microcosm in smaller communities such as our fellowship community.  Indeed, we have to start here, among the people we live with, the people we interact with regularly.  Our congregation can serve as a place to practice non-violent conflict resolution and agape love, and it can become a beloved community itself.  Our congregation can also serve as a support to us as we strive to create the Beloved Community in the wider world.

      Tom Owen-Towle asks:  “Is there a wider, more inclusive phrase than ‘Beloved Community’ to embrace the global, ecological, congregational, and interpersonal challenges of existence?  Can you imagine a more compelling imperative for liberal religion in today’s troubled world?  King, Holmes, and Skinner all recognized that the Beloved Community was an ideal that could only be approximated during their lifetimes.  Accordingly, King used the Beloved Community as a metaphor for a transcendent social order. . . . We can grasp the Beloved Community in part but not in full.  Although the quest for it transcends generations and history, it also transforms us in the here and now. . . .” (p. xii)

      In the process of transforming the world, we can be transformed ourselves. 

      We have new challenges in creating the Beloved Community that Martin Luther King didn’t forsee.  The struggle against racial injustice in America is far from over.  In addition, we are concerned, with Coretta Scott King, about “being equally vigilant in protesting against all forms of bigotry, prejudice and discrimination based on religion, gender, nationality, sexual orientation, age, physical or mental disability and other kinds of injustice that degrade the quality of life for millions of citizens.”  Economic injustice still leaves millions hungry while others dwell in luxury.  Violence is everywhere being used to settle differences, without of course resolving anything.  There is so much work to do.

      But with King, we can have an audacious faith in the future of humanity and our world.  We can refuse to accept despair as the final response to the trauma of our times.  With this faith we can hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. King was fond of quoting our Unitarian forebear, Theodore Parker, who said that “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.”  We have each other, and together we can find the courage to face the opposition.  Together we can find the vision that can focus our energies on a greater good than our own comfort.  Together we can create the Beloved Community and achieve justice for all in a harmonious and peaceful world.

The Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Midland is recognized by the Unitarian Universalist Association as a Welcoming Congregation. We welcome, affirm, promote and celebrate the full participation of all persons in all of our activities without regard to age, gender, sexual orientation, race or any other such category of exclusion.

Please feel free to contact us with any feedback, corrections or questions at jaham@delta.edu