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A Small Meditation Ahead of the Inauguration

A Small Meditation Ahead of the Inauguration

Last updated on: January 18, 2025 at 6:00 am by James Ford

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A Small Meditation Ahead of the Inauguration 2024-12-15T11:06:53-08:00 James Ford

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Martin Luther King, Jr
Washington DC
August 28, 1963

We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. There are some things in our social system to which all of us ought to be maladjusted. Hatred and bitterness can never cure the disease of fear; only love can do that. We must evolve for all human conflict a method, which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love. Before it is too late, we must narrow the gaping chasm between our proclamations of peace and our lowly deeds which precipitate and perpetuate war. One day we must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek but a means by which we arrive at that goal. We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means. We shall hew out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Adapted

In a shocking meeting of several calendars we are about to witness the inauguration of someone I consider a con artist and criminal of several sorts with monstrous agenda as president of the United States on the date we annually recall the remarkable life of Martin Luther King, Jr.

At this moment I find it helpful to consider the minister most of all. To see him as someone who might help us as we embark upon what many consider a curse, these most interesting times.

Interesting times, indeed.

When Dr Martin Luther King, Jr was assassinated, after the police and FBI arrived, during all the confusion, people running around, agents trying to get a handle on what had happened, one agent informed his superior on a walkie-talkie how he just heard Coretta Scott King say that Martin’s dream would never die.

There was, I gather, a pause. Then the agent’s superior instructed him to, “Find out what that dream was.”

Dreams. What a question; really, what a wonderful question. What was Martin’s dream? But, most of all, for today, as America and the world trembles, for us, what was Dr King’s dream?

Dr King spoke to a large part of this dream within his work for racial justice. Which is how it has to be. That is the universal must always be expressed within the particular. All lives matter is a true statement, but its true because black lives matter. It’s one of those laws of the heart. Love is not found in general, it is always your love, it is always my love – some specific love.

Love. Dreams.

So, what is the deep dream that we call love?

Well, in his “I Have a Dream” speech, Dr King sang it out to us. “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” Here we find the dream, the deep dream, dreamed into our lives across cultures and throughout time from the deepest place of our hearts, from the most profound knowing of our beings. Love. This is the truth. We are all caught up together more intimately than words can ever convey. True love.

And it really is a universal dream. No religion owns love, although all partake of it to one degree or another. And, honestly, some articulate it better and more completely, although also which is better is often a bit different for each of us. Recently a friend commented how while he found the Christian and Jewish and Muslim mystics speaking of all being one a valuable pointer on his own way to knowing the deepest, he found the Zen Buddhist expression not one, not two in fact a little more helpful. But that difficult sense of connection tells us something about how we need to relate to each other. Family becomes a powerful image. If not quite right. But, it points. As does the word love, and the statement love beyond belief. It none is quite right.

And this is our life line. This is the thread we can follow.

You, and you, and you, and me, each and every one of us are born precious and unique, a gift. Each of us as we leap into the world, beautiful and passing. And, equally true, we are birthed out of and of the world, each of us therefore related to everyone and everything.

The wisdom of our hearts. The reminder we are not alone. Not even in the darkest of times.

It is the great mystery out of which all life flows. It is a way of love.

And it is a way of resistance.

And here is the work set out for all of us.

To resist hate. To hold up a higher possibility. To remember there is a way through.

There are hard times we are going into.

We need to recall the dream that Martin Luther King Jr called us to.

Our better angels.

It is the way through…

Holy resistance…

The transforming power of love engaged.

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Martin Luther King Jr

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About James Ishmael Ford

James Ishmael Ford's latest book the Intimate Way of Zen is available from the publisher Shambhala, your local bookstore, or all online book venders. You can read more about the author here.

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