"An inescapable network of mutuality”
I will be reading Martin Luther King, Jr’s sermon collection, Strength to Love, across four weeks in January. If you would like to read along, you can purchase a copy here.
Go to schedule and see all notes.
Week 2: Chapters V-VIII
“An Inescapable Network of Mutuality”
This week’s reading contains one of my favorite passages from the Rev. Dr. King:
In a real sense, all life is interrelated. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality. (72)
This paragraph sits inside King’s sermon, “The Man Who Was a Fool.” In it, he relays Jesus’s Parable of the Rich Fool (Luke 12:13-21), which is a caution against materialism, individualism, and hoarding. With these words, King preaches a path that links us all together.
This path, according to King, leads to beloved community, where our mutuality will bear the full fruit of liberation. In the words of King’s fellow Civil Rights hero Fannie Lou Hamer, “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.” Decades later, on the other side of the world, Aboriginal elder Lilla Watson put it like this:
If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. If you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together. —Lilla Watson
So, our mutuality is two-fold. First, our very survival is inextricably bound with every other human. In America, this is counter to the dominant frame of individualism—and calls us into a challenging cultural shift. It also lifts a practical burden on us to care for one another. We need one another. We literally can not dress for work or drink our morning coffee without relying on this web.
Whether we realize it or not, each of us is eternally “in the red.” We are everlasting debtors to known and unknown men and women. We do not finish breakfast without being dependent on more than half of the world. When we arise in the morning, we go into the bathroom where we reach for a sponge which is provided to us by a Pacific Islander. We reach for soap that is created for us by a Frenchman…Before we leave for our jobs we are beholden to more than half the world. (72)
Second, our liberation is “bound up” in a “single garment of destiny.” This is the exciting part. King offers a constructive vision of justice and love, which will be personally meaningful to each of us. Just think how beautiful life could be if we embraced our interconnection with one another.
Sadly, we remain a far distance from this in our lived experiences. We get in our own way when we try to “think practically” and sever justice from love. So, following his religion (Christian, Baptist), King asks us to do the impractical thing and love our enemies—not with a blind eye to life’s difficulty, but rather because the other way simply hasn’t worked.
My friends, we have followed the so-called practical way for too long a time now, and it has led inexorably to deeper confusion and chaos. 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. (56)
Take heed, however, because loving enemies does not mean ignoring injustice. In fact, because we are interconnected, we must love some of our neighbors by actively working to counter them when they embody unjust ways. The important thing is that we do so with a keen sense of their humanity and our equal place in the human story.
This does not mean that we abandon our righteous efforts. With every ounce of our energy we must continue to rid this nation of the incubus of segregation. But we shall not in the process relinquish our privilege and our obligation to love. While abhorring segregation, we shall love the segregationist. This is the only way to create the beloved community. (56)
To love this way honors all others. It is also how we claim our own humanity. This, ”our privilege and our obligation,” is “the most durable power in the world…the most potent instrument available in mankind’s quest for peace and security.” (56)
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