1/16/2023

Happy MLK Day,

            Watching you at yesterday’s service was part of a spirit filled day. The highlight was sharing a message at MFW about not fearing emotion. My latest revelation about being verklempt goes like this, “experiencing intense feelings comes from Divine ignition. The higher power is firing neurons throughout our system to show us we are alive. Activating our bodies in this way is healthy, so we need to embrace the experience rather than be embarrassed by it.” I hope you have a magical moment this morning & if you do, don’t be afraid to show it.

            Will Rev. Wm Barber be there today? Did you hear about his new “moral mission” of teaching divinity students at Yale? He will be a “professor of the practice” & run the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy. My Friends & I have been followers of his “Poor People’s Campaign” & like his message about taking up MLK’s mission. As he says, “We don’t need museums, we need a movement. The only way you honor your prophets is when they fall, you pick up the baton and walk the next mile.”

Please take a look at E McCaulley’s piece in the NYT today. He reminds us to be aware of MLK’s plea to wake up to how “racism created generational wealth for white Americans and robbed Black Americans of the same economic boost.” He included some great MLK quotes, including “like a monstrous octopus, poverty spreads its nagging, prehensile tentacles into hamlets and villages all over our world.”

Sadly, poverty has a way of regenerating itself when folks start wars. Burma is a good example. As you know prosperity was beginning to spread there which threatened the generals so they destroyed things to hold on to power. Some in the GOP seem to have adopted that principle, too.

Please recall the words of MLK, ““It is no longer a choice, my friends, between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence.”

BYBS,