This past Monday I was returning from the grocery store listening to NPR. It was Martin Luther King Jr. Day and the topic on the news magazine on the radio was of course all about the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement of the nineteen sixties. I could still hear echoing in my head , the tune of Lift Every Voice, the so-called Black National Anthem, which we sang as the post communion hymn the day before at All Saints. Pundit after pundit had their say, most of whom were young, and admitted that their knowledge of the great civil rights activist was second hand, the life and ministry of Dr. King occurring either before they were born, or before they could remember. Finally Andrew Young, former U.N. ambassador for the United States, and a high ranking participant in the civil rights movement, and close friend of Martin Luther King Jr. spoke up, and the banter of the guests hushed. He said that we must remember Dr. King, as we remember each of our heroes, those who changed for the better the course of history….we must remember Dr. King as a great tree among a great forest of trees….that movements, not individuals change history…not that there aren’t those who are leaders, but history is changed by the spirited movement of the many, he said.
If one were to observe a thousand acres on the side of a mountain of aspen trees, chances are the entire forest would technically be one organism. Aspens are stoloniferous….that is, they reproduce by producing shoots horizontal to the ground, and the shoots set down roots and then grow into a new tree…the entire forest then is intimately interdependent. All forests are interdependent, for pollination for seed bearing, for protection from disease. Forests, consummate metaphors for community. And finally in forests the living stand alongside the dead with equal dignity, in mysterious primevil communion…a cosmic metronomic pulse bringing death to make way for the living…the old making way for the new…the dead not lost but nurture for the young. We humans in truth are not so different: the wisdom of our ancestors still informing us along the way. We stand still together, the living and the dead, a great forest of souls.
I would say the same thing about Jesus of Nazareth, as Andrew Young said about Martin Luther King Jr. We must see him as a great tree among a great forest of trees. He the exemplar of the other trees of the forest. A great exemplar of same genus and species, remembered in our human lore. For us who follow him he is the pattern of what it means to be truly human…and we can only be truly human when we own the intimate interdependence for which we are made…all of us a part of the same living organism whose purpose is quite essentially to serve the good of the whole. Someone posted on Facebook one of Dr. King’s last speeches before he was assassinated. I didn’t listen to all of it, but I marvelled at its relevancy today. In the speech, which was actually a sermon in a Memphis church service, he quoted John Donne:
“No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as if a promontory were, as well as a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
Forests, trees, continents, clods, we humans of earth….we are all a part of the glorious Same.
