The power to direct our lives and achieve our goals is essential to spiritual health. Where can we find our power? The life and work of Martin Luther King provide three answers. Natural gifts give power when matched to appropriate work. Faith gives power when we align our lives with divine aims. Righteous causes give power when inspiring dreams call us to action.
I’ve preached a number of Martin Luther King day sermons over my career. Although it’s not a religious holiday, and Dr. King was a Baptist, not a Unitarian, it would feel wrong to let the holiday go by without giving it due attention, the same way Thanksgiving has found its way onto the Unitarian Universalist liturgical calendar, or the holidays we routinely recognize from other faiths, such as Christmas or the High Holy Days.
Dr. King is such an inspirational figure, and so tied to causes that are so important to us, and connected to an American history that affects us all, and lead work that many of our Unitarian Universalist clergy and laity collaborated in and continue after him, that honoring him each year gives us a hook to speak of ourselves as well.
This year, as I’m devoting a year to a series of sermons on spiritual basics, I thought that my final MLK day sermon was an appropriate Sunday to examine the spiritual theme of power.
Spiritual power is the ability to affect change in the world. It takes power to heal, to repair, to build. It takes power to make justice, to advance equality, to keep the peace. Workers use their power to accomplish tasks. Leaders use their power to organize the power of others. If you have a spiritual goal, spiritual power is required to win it.
Dr. King defined power simply. He said, “[P]ower properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political, and economic change.”
Dr. King offered that definition in a speech titled “Where Do We Go From Here?” that he gave on August 16, 1967 at a gathering marking the tenth anniversary of the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
After defining power plainly as the “ability to achieve purpose” Dr. King then immediately acknowledges the conflicting feelings people have about power and he analyses the misunderstanding that leads to our ambivalence. He says:
“Now a lot of us are preachers, and all of us have our moral convictions and concerns, and so often we have problems with power. But there is nothing wrong with power if power is used correctly.
You see, what happened is that some of our philosophers got off base. And one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites, polar opposites, so that love is identified with a resignation of power, and power with a denial of love.”
Against the misconception of the incompatibility of power and love, Dr. King offers this corrective view. He says:
“Now, we got to get this thing right. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.”
He then critiques what has happens when power and love are separated, using the example of race relations in the United States. He says:
“Now what has happened is that we’ve had it wrong and mixed up in our country, and this has led Negro Americans in the past to seek their goals through love and moral suasion devoid of power, and white Americans to seek their goals through power devoid of love and conscience. It is leading a few extremists today to advocate for Negroes the same destructive and conscienceless power that they have justly abhorred in whites. It is precisely this collision of immoral power with powerless morality which constitutes the major crisis of our times.”
Dr. King criticizes those with claims to moral righteousness who abjure their power and take satisfaction in an imagined holy victimhood. But he criticizes equally those who give up their morality in order to grab whatever they can through violence. Dr. King’s definition of power, to be complete, must be: the ability to achieve purpose through moral means. Not immoral power, or powerless morality, but love wed to power: powerful morality.
Whatever purpose you have in mind: the reorganization of civil society, or organizing your sock drawer, to achieve purpose requires power. To shun all power because so often the powerful abuse their power, allows bad example to write a false definition of what power actually is, while condemning ourselves to impotence that serves neither ourselves nor anyone else.
Those of us who have problems with power, though no problem with love, need to realize that the ability to achieve purpose requires the two working together. Power wed to love. Love wed to power.
“Now let us sing, sing to the power of the love within.”
We, who are happy to claim ourselves as lovers, but have trouble naming our power, need to hear Dr. King’s warning: “power without love is reckless and abusive, [but] love without power is sentimental and anemic.” Power without love is monstrous. Love without power is pathetic. Power with love is the only force sufficient to create expanding, lasting good in the world.
If you want your love to be useful, it must be activated. If you want to achieve any loving purpose you must be find your power. If you want to help, and serve, and lead and change, and make and remake, your love must be allied with power, the ability to achieve purpose.
“O Spinner, Weaver, of our lives, your loom is love. May we who are gathered here
be empowered by that love to weave new patterns of Truth and Justice into a web of life that is strong, beautiful, and everlasting.”
So where do we find our power?
Dr. King gives us an example by his life of three sources of power.
First, we must admit the special person that Dr. King was. Natural gifts are not evenly distributed among all persons. It would be naïve to hold that everyone could do what Dr. King did, if we simply followed his example.
So let’s be humble, because false pride would do us no good, but let’s not let the truth of Dr. King’s special power hold us back from doing the good we can.
Few persons have Dr. King’s manifest gifts. But we each have our own gifts. There is something that you can do, and do well, and do powerfully. There is the first source of your power: your skill, your talent, your insight and intuition. Your big heart, and quick brain. Your health and muscles. Your empathy and poetry, and perfect pitch and eye for beauty. Your stubborn courage, and light touch. Honoring Dr. King’s birthday and all he could do, should remind us to honor the day you were born and the gifts you’ve developed through your life of experiences.
But there is a second dimension to the power that comes from our natural gifts. Gifts alone are not enough. Power comes not from having talents, but from using talents. To find a use for your talents requires an appropriate context, which is nearly as much a stroke of luck as having the talents themselves. Having talents and a place to use them gave Dr. King his power. He found an outlet that could use his considerable gifts of charisma, intelligence, strategy, leadership, and so on.
Without the context of the Civil Rights movement, Dr. King might well have been merely the gifted pastor of a Baptist congregation in Atlanta. He would have turned his gifts, certainly, toward other good uses, but except that the Civil Rights struggle created a role for him to step into, he might not be the man we know today, or the holiday we mark tomorrow.
And that context for his power required not just a righteous cause, but a movement of thousands ready to seize the moment, hosts of people working around him and organizations that long pre-dated him, like the NAACP, and the network of churches and clergy that surrounded him.
Dr. King found a place to use his gifts and moved himself into it. And once there created more opportunities for his gifts to shine. To find our power we begin with self-examination to know what we can do, and then we look to the world outside to find the place to do it. Power comes when your great talents meet the world’s great need.
The second source of power, for which Dr. King is an example, is the power that comes from faith.
When Dr. King talks about healthy power, he talks about moral power. Morality, from a faith perspective means action in line with and furthering the divine aims.
God presents to us a vision of the good, the true, and the beautiful. Our human work is to move toward those transcendent visions and make them manifest. The divine spirit cheers and encourages us when we make choices that move our lives and the world in those directions. We are buoyed up like a leaf carried downstream. When we choose against the flow of the divine, we are disordered and distressed and lost our power.
It’s not that God adds power to our good choices, the power to do is always our own. Rather, our intrinsic power is more fully engaged when we move along the path God clears for us. Like the aid of an enthusiastic coach on the sidelines, we move joyfully and more successfully when we accept God’s suggestion. Rejecting the divine path, the moral path, we find ourselves knocked down and weakened.
Dr. King’s power came, in part, because his cause was holy. But even a holy cause will thwart our effort unless we gain it through holy means. Only a divine path leads to the divine goals.
Elsewhere in his speech to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Dr. King says this about what happens to our power when we divorce our work from morality:
“Now, let me rush on to say we must reaffirm our commitment to nonviolence. And I want to stress this. The futility of violence in the struggle for racial justice has been tragically etched in all the recent Negro riots. … There is something painfully sad about a riot. One sees screaming youngsters and angry adults fighting hopelessly and aimlessly against impossible odds. And deep down within them, you perceive a desire for self-destruction, a kind of suicidal longing.
Occasionally, Negroes contend that the 1965 Watts riot and the other riots in various cities represented effective civil rights action. But those who express this view always end up with stumbling words when asked what concrete gains have been won as a result. At best, the riots have produced a little additional anti-poverty money allotted by frightened government officials and a few water sprinklers to cool the children of the ghettos. … Nowhere have the riots won any concrete improvement such as have the organized protest demonstrations.”
So, power comes when we work toward holy aims with moral means. And natural gifts bring power when they find expression in appropriate work. And thirdly, we find in Dr. King’s example, that power comes when ignited by a dream of a future different than today, a dream sufficient to call us to action: to achieve purpose.
Dr. King’s famous dream comes from a different, earlier speech. But in this speech that I’ve been quoting from 1967, he relates how far that dream has come into reality. It’s inspiring. It’s powerful. Here is a little of Dr. King’s summation of work that can be accomplished in just ten years:
“[T]en years ago during the piercing chill of a January day and on the heels of the year-long Montgomery bus boycott, a group of approximately one hundred Negro leaders from across the South assembled in this church and agreed on the need for an organization to be formed that could serve as a channel through which local protest organizations in the South could coordinate their protest activities. …
And when our organization was formed ten years ago, racial segregation was still a structured part of the architecture of southern society. Negroes with the pangs of hunger and the anguish of thirst were denied access to the average lunch counter. The downtown restaurants were still off-limits for the black man. Negroes, burdened with the fatigue of travel, were still barred from the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. Negro boys and girls in dire need of recreational activities were not allowed to inhale the fresh air of the big city parks. Negroes in desperate need of allowing their mental buckets to sink deep into the wells of knowledge were confronted with a firm “no” when they sought to use the city libraries. … All types of conniving methods were still being used to keep the Negro from becoming a registered voter. A decade ago, not a single Negro entered the legislative chambers of the South except as a porter or a chauffeur. Ten years ago, all too many Negroes were still harried by day and haunted by night by a corroding sense of fear and a nagging sense of nobody-ness.
But things are different now. In assault after assault, we caused the sagging walls of segregation to come tumbling down. …This is an accomplishment whose consequences are deeply felt by every southern Negro in his daily life. … In this decade of change, the Negro stood up and confronted his oppressor. He faced the bullies and the guns, and the dogs and the tear gas. He put himself squarely before the vicious mobs and moved with strength and dignity toward them and decisively defeated them. …
… We made our government write new laws to alter some of the cruelest injustices that affected us. We made an indifferent and unconcerned nation rise from lethargy and subpoenaed its conscience to appear before the judgment seat of morality on the whole question of civil rights.”
Think, as today, or tomorrow, we face our own “piercing chill of a January day” how the world might be changed ten years from now, if only a hundred leaders assembled and agreed on a dream and organized a movement around it.
Dr. King begins his assessment of those ten years with justified pride in the power that came when those first one hundred leaders gathered to organize. They gathered not around an accomplishment but around a dream. They had a dream powerful enough to raise their own power. A dream powerful enough to overcome their fears and doubts. A powerful dream: good, true, beautiful, aligned with holy aims. A powerful dream that called them to action. A powerful dream that demanded their power.
That power came with them, with their natural gifts finding an arena to work. That power came with the divine power that encourages persons whenever they align their choices with holy aims. And that power came with a dream: a dream that life could be different.
Our power could do the same. With each of us, claiming our gifts, finding our place, guided by justice, questing for truth, hearing the voices of the suffering, working together, joining in broad community, feeling our love, activating our power, achieving our purpose: a world transformed.