Today continuing with King's thought on fear being mastered through love.
...Racial segregation is buttressed by such irrational fears as loss of preferred economic privilege, altered social status, intermarriage, and adjustment to new situations. Through sleepless nights and haggard days numerous white people attempt to combat these corroding fears by diverse methods. By following the path of escape, some seek to ignore the question of race relations and to close their mind to issues involved. Others placing their faith in such legal maneuvers as interposition and nullification, counsel massive resistance. Still others hope to down their fears by engaging in acts of violence and meanness toward their Negro brethren. But how futile are all these remedies! Instead of eliminating fear, they instill deeper and more pathological fears that leave the victims inflicted with strange psychoses and peculiar cases of paranoia. Neither repression, massive resistance, nor aggressive violence will cast out the fear of integration; only love and good will can do that.
Whenever we fight against coming together to understand and appreciate one another, we create more violence among us. King's comments about his day may have changed through the decades, but there is such fear still at hand that we are able to construct more and more "sensible" excuses as to why we keep ourselves separated from one another. I am still amazed at comments - often without using all the words necessary to be openly clear - that continue to keep races separate. One side may do it out of a lingering fear the other side may do it out of a lingering anger. The end result, we move away from one another rather than building bridges that reunite the separated. As I started reading this piece on fear, I also thought that the same situation of fear is at hand in all of our civil and church discussions about the place of people in the GLBT community. As King moves down through this discussion of fear, I hear the church - afraid and unable to live with a sense of grace and hopefulness. Instead, there is verbal violence, segregation, scapegoating, and an utter refusal to be the community of love we claim to be.
Connection: Sometimes, it is not easy to know when our actions are being led by fear. When we act out of fear for so long, it becomes our well-justified way of life that we then try to protect and defend at all costs.
When you call us to love one another, O God, we say it with gusto but we shrink away from opportunities to walk in your ways. Encourage us. Amen.
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