Martin Luther King Jr. Was A Saint, But Also Just A Man — That’s The Glory Of It
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Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mathew Ahmann at the March on Washington, August 1963.
(OPINION) Part of what makes saints remarkable—as well as misunderstood and sometimes reviled — is the fullness of their humanity.
We’d prefer they come wrapped in pure polished gold (or at least carved from alabaster), ready for mounting on a church shelf or a plinth in a public square.
Sadly for us — and for our religious and civic saints, too — nobody, not even the greatest among us, navigates life on Earth without amassing dings, tarnish and cracks.
Abraham Lincoln suffered chronic depression, disrespected his father, fought with his wife and was slow to embrace the abolition of slavery. Ulysses S. Grant battled alcoholism, appointed lizardry politicians to office and got grandly duped by con men.
And then there was Martin Luther King Jr., the greatest of American civil rights leaders, who seems to have been a womanizer and probably a plagiarizer — a fully human, three-dimensional man with the frailties that implies. That he was a pastor who did his work in the name of God has for some critics made his failings even more despicable and hypocritical.
But the 20th century produced no American greater than King, in any arena.
He upended hundreds of years of slavery and Jim Crow discrimination. He called an entire nation to account, stood up squarely in the face of unimaginable bile, threats and persecution. At last, he gave his life for the cause of freedom.
Most amazingly, he did all this while declaring love and forgiveness for his oppressors, and while insisting his followers respond to racism without violence, even as they were battered by water hoses and vicious dogs.
Here’s one glimpse of what America looked like with King among us, as opposed to what it might have looked like had he never been here: In the days following his murder in Memphis on April 4, 1968, one U.S. city after another erupted into riotous fireballs that lasted for days, until it seemed the whole nation might go up in smoke.
Without King to speak peace upon the land, there was little peace to be had.
The country didn’t burn down, thank God, and of course there had been riots even during King’s lifetime. But the riots reminded us of our need for peacemakers. Without their divine influence, we would quickly devolve into rage and chaos. The membrane that separates civil order from anarchy is thin.
Looking back from a distance of more than a half-century, it’s still hard to comprehend what a difference King made. Just one man. And to think he accomplished all he did by age 39. It’s staggering.
But this is exactly why saints are daunting — and why they’re inspiring. It’s because they’re not encrusted in gold or carved from stone. They’re just people.
They’re every corpuscle as human as we are. They fret over their kids. They cry when they’re hurt, which is often. They get blue. They get sleepy. They get diarrhea. They drink too much. They dream ridiculous dreams. They commit ridiculous sins. They grasp profound cosmic mysteries but miss plain facts right in front of their noses.
Still, somehow, with God’s help or through some inspiration of their own, they transcend their human limitations, which are the same limitations afflicting us.
Their transcendence can feel like a rebuke to us, even when the saints don’t mean it to. They’ve gone somewhere we haven’t gone, done things we don’t feel capable of. They’ve achieved moral greatness despite themselves. We haven’t.
Yet if these gnarly saints can sometimes enter a realm beyond the one in which we live, then there’s also hope for us. They show us by example that such a realm does exist. Perhaps we ought to allow them to serve as inspirations.
We likely won’t achieve greatness. We probably won’t change the nation.
But if King could respond calmly when he was cursed, reviled and jailed, maybe we can at least stay calm when our sorehead neighbor complains about our kids being too loud. If King could march into the teeth of angry police armed with billy sticks, tear gas and guns, maybe we can at least speak up at the office in support of a coworker who’s been treated unfairly. If King could lay down his life in the pursuit of justice, maybe we can volunteer an offering or an afternoon to help the despised.
Let’s resolve to let the memory of King’s best works produce our best works.
Paul Prather has been a rural Pentecostal pastor in Kentucky for more than 40 years. Also a journalist, he was the Lexington Herald-Leader’s staff religion writer in the 1990s, before leaving to devote his full time to the ministry. He’s the author of four books. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.