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January 20, 2003
Martin Luther King Jr. Day
is a mouthful of a name for a Holiday, combining as it does the name of the man, and of his father, and the father’s namesake: the founder of the Protestant Reformation, whose name tellingly recalls Saint Martin, who might be considered a model of Christian reform, as he is celebrated for charity, although he gave, not as Jesus suggested: everything, but did at least give away half of his cloak...This is still a young holiday, and the name is apt to shorten, though “King Day” doesn’t sound quite right either, summoning up hereditary rule. “MLK Day” trips off the tongue, and maybe that’s where we’ll end up generations down the line, when the Holiday is so well ingrained as to be rendered in impersonal initials, sort of the way we always say “the Fourth of July”, rather than “Independence Day”.
In the meantime, we’ll have to struggle with the words, and the meaning too. I didn’t find much inspiration on a frigid day in the Park, where several Coots were squeezed into a small opening in the ice now spreading across the Reservoir. These birds, whose plumage is almost entirely black, appeared to be segregated from the mixed flocks of gulls and ducks that occupied larger expanses of open water. It didn’t seem like an auspicious sign for the Holiday, but those are birds and we are Human beings, who like to think of ourselves as something beyond the merely Animal.
Exactly what this Holiday means, and how it should be celebrated, remain in flux, and may be interpreted differently among different constituencies. Certainly the issue of race is central, though we would hardly sponsor a Holiday called Race Day. Indeed, there was resistance to the creation of a Holiday at all, but there was a stronger consensus that it was needed, that it was an appropriate and necessary gesture; an admission of wrong and a rededication to right, rendered in a form that conferred the proper moment upon the utterance.
The racial boundaries of Dr. King’s era seem to have expanded into today’s concept of diversity. I have sometimes construed this Holiday as a way of focusing on issues of our diverse identity as such. The very notion of Identity is a door straight to the Mysteries, for which cause it is charged and unpredictable in all its manifestations, the idea of race not least among them. Race, which must be acknowledged and ignored, celebrated and disregarded, all at the same time, for we are all the same, and we are all different.
That’s what I call a Mystery.
Perhaps we’ll be comfortable with MLK Day about the time a shrinking World has mixed our gene pool into a single race, something which could happen faster than we’re prone to imagine. Would that be a threat to our identity?
That there is a threat inherent in the very notion of race is the great taboo in our discussions of the matter. Dr. King’s accomplishment was that he offered a way around the threat and the fear, and that’s what I really want to talk about today. And it doesn’t even have anything to do with race.
It was King’s dedication to nonviolence that made him an acceptable vessel for the new Holiday. This is not to say that he represented a “safe Negro”, as has sometimes been asserted. By refusing to wield the customary tool of power, he was able to retain that spiritual potency which is so often sacrificed when religious figures engage the secular world directly. By maintaining this difficult position, balanced on the fulcrum of a Mystery, and through being martyred for it, he was transformed into a symbol. And a true symbol, fit to rank with the old Holidays of the Ancestors. These are symbols with real power: the power to guide our choices in hard places. If we choose Dr. King’s way, including his pacifism, we will not often be wrong.
The True Holidays are alive; changing and responsive to our needs. Today, I say there is a great irony played out that testifies to the vitality of this new Holiday. For the secular rulers of our nation are unmatched in strength, and just the sort who could only be defeated by a peaceful warrior. They have much in common with those who said that Dr. King was weak in that he did not fight with weapons. The institution of his Day serves to condemn their warmongering; their palpable desire for conflict; their pride in being willing to kill. They say they are willing to die, but so was Dr. King, and so must we all be. We all have to die, but we do not have to kill, at least not other people, the ones who are so unlike, and yet so like to us. He would have us try another way.
When we choose violence and the rule of might, we dishonor the legacy of Dr. King, which we have enshrined among our national symbols. If our leaders thought his was a safe Holiday they were wrong, for it makes them hypocrites if they celebrate it, and un-American if they do not. That’s a working Holiday, whatever you call it.
January 7, 2003
We Now Return to Our Regularly Scheduled Season
Already in progress…January 6, 2003
Epiphany
So what is left?At the end of the Holidays?
After the songs and the snowfall; the parties and the presents; midnight and morning? All in celebration of what?
To know that would be an epiphany indeed.
On the First Day of Christmas I posed three Riddles. I assumed that they all had the same answer, and that I knew what it was. Yet I've also said that Riddles may have more than one answer, if we can guess as much.
Who is as a Cherry without any Stone?
My Mother told me that this is Mary, and I suppose she should know better than I. Neither womb nor fruit can take precedence in a birth of this kind.
Or of any kind.
Who is Child and Parent at once?
One who is Father and Son to Himself, yes, but less rarely, anyone who has fostered children, and not by blood alone. Every parent was once a child, nor is that status lost, though generations pass.
Who is Born with the Reborn Sun?
I, for one; along with many others, if only by happenstance. Yet if there is One beyond coincidence, He was only born that all of us might take heart in the returning light of a new morning, a new year, and the same old Sun.
Maybe you have other answers, wiser than mine.
Let them open a way into the New Year.
Then you will be as wise as those travelers from afar, who, guided by a star, came to realize.
January 5, 2003
The Twelfth Day of Christmas
January 4, 2003
The Eleventh Day of Christmas
January 3, 2003
The Tenth Day of Christmas
January 2, 2003
The Ninth Day of Christmas
January 1, 2003
The Eighth Day of Christmas
Is also New Year’s Day.December 31, 2002
The Seventh Day of Christmas
December 30, 2002
The Sixth Day of Christmas
December 29
The Fifth Day of Christmas
December 28, 2002