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Martin Luther King

Today is the feast day of St Benedict the African, another of the many black saints including the one (Martin de Porres) after whom I was named. It's also the anniversary of Martin Luther King's murder, coincidentally, and I have found myself thinking of him.

The late great reverend King is a man who needs no obituaries of course. he does need to be reclaimed from 2D status though. There is such mutability in life. People forget that people were real, that they breathed and wept and had family, and that their speech was drawn from the mix of the familiar with themselves, and they become icons.

One person who certainly didn't forget the good Reverend is the last survivor of his family, his older sister. You can read her touching story here.

Christine King Farris has seen a great deal of tragedy in her life. She has taught education for half a century at Spelman college, and today is surrounded in her office, by all reports, by photographs, screensavers and recordings of the beloved brother she lost forty years ago. Her other brother drowned the next year, and her mother was shot in church four years later.

Her story would be one of achievement and survival even if it were not the case that her blood was the same as that of her little 'Tweed', and her position would be no less poignant. She is apparently a woman of great dignity and humanity. Since the living are those who first should be recalled, perhaps she could be in the memory of people of goodwill today.

Christine King's story made me think, rather bizarrely, of Oliver Wendell Holmes. I was chatting with students yesterday during a break in a seminar in Bath and Holmes came up because the words of the great jurist were the seed for a great many oratical points that people think original; Kennedy's 'ask not what your country can do for you' line, for instance.

This is the way of things with words. Very few great speakers are original. Barack Obama's little tick of saying 'I love you back' to crowds, for instance, may be original but it does seem a straight lift from Pope John Paul's visit to Catholic University in Washington DC in 1979. When he was endorsed by Ted Kennedy, Obama had the grace to lift JFK's line about fires that lit the world. The Declaration of Independence was more or less plagiarised then refined from George Mason, the state and county declarations, John Locke and Tom Paine. Even Martin Luther King lifted the 'free at last' lines that mark his gravestone and that made for the soaring finale of his 'I have a dream' speech.

It's what is done with words that matters. In her youth, the heart of Christine Farris King and all around her were touched with fire. Unlike Holmes, the fire didn't come from war. It was not lit because of her brother's soaring words, though these strengthened it.

The fire was born of the courage that radical love gave Martin Luther King and tens of thousands, millions, of countless people whose names we will probably never know.

When Martin Luther King went out on his crusade, after all, he did so as a Christian preacher dedicated to an evolving doctrine of radical love that would confront iniquity and inequality. He was driven to stand with workers looking for higher pay, and campaigners for peace as much as with black people who were being horribly oppressed because of that doctrine. He was someone who felt Christ's suffering and redemption and forgiveness beside his frail human self.

King has become a sort of secular object, a symbol or thing, a bit like 'Gandhi' or 'Nelson Mandela'. Like them, he was actually a flawed man with many contradictions, as many men are. Beyond that, he was lifted by love and faith and hope to defy the undefiable and dream the impossible. That is his legacy, and in my mind that is what hangs around his big sister as she moves to preserve the wondrous things that she has done and seen.

She isn't the only survivor though. We all are, in the sense that because of her, and people like her, and because of her brother, we are slightly more free. In the course of human history, that sliver of liberty is a great advance. So I remember her brother today.

Eternal rest grant unto him O lord/and may perpetual light shine upon him/and may he rest in peace.

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