Strength to Love

I'm currently writing an essay for my "Theology of the Human Person" class on the topic of Desire and Love. As part of the reading for this, I have been looking at a book titled Strength to Love, which is a collection of Martin Luther King's sermons on the topic of love.

Picture if you will, the man himself preaching the following words:

Time is cluttered with the wreckage of communities which surrendered to hatred and violence... For the salvation of our nation and the salvation of mankind, we must follow another way...

To our most bitter opponents we say: "We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We shall meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will, and we shall continue to love you... Throw us in jail, and we shall still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and we shall still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our community at the midnight hour and beat us and leave us half dead, and we shall still love you. But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. One day we shall win freedom, but not only for ourselves. We shall so appeal to your heart and conscience that we shall win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory."

Martin Luther King. Strength to Love (Hodder & Stoughton: London), p.40.

The power of these words, first preached in the early 1960s, stopped me dead in my tracks, and moved me to tears. It also made me re-examine some of my own interactions with people this weekend which were less than loving. King here is advocating a radical and sacrificial love for 'enemies'... and yet I had trouble behaving in a civil way to people I call 'friends'.

Not one of my greatest moments. :-(