Remembering Hope

I was barely a year old when the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. My family, although not the same now, was certainly not one to mourn his death. They wouldn’t have been happy, but their genteel brand of racism would’ve acknowledged a troublesome man now gone from the scene.

In the many ways I differ from my family, this has been one of the most profound. I never shared in that bias and discrimination. That’s not to say that I’m not racist. As the Avenue Q song so correctly puts it, we’re all a little bit racist. But I always instinctively felt it was wrong. I suppose that’s a result of always knowing that I was different. Always sensing that difference and knowing that they sensed it in me.

In college, Dr. King became a hero for me. I was a freshman when the King holiday came into being. It generated plenty of discussion at my religious and conservative university. And I found myself staunchly in favor of such an overdue day of remembrance and honor for a man who fought for the things the founder of our religion advocated. The acceptance and love of all God’s children, equally and without distinction.

Dr. King’s message, his passionate call for justice, remains just as valid today. We continue to live in a society, a nation, a world, that devalues people and makes some of us second-class. He understood that the call to build consensus, to wait, to go slowly, really never results in equality.

In spite of the obstacles and set-backs, the voice of hope, the call for justice, the demand for equality continues to be heard. I often find myself losing hope that change will ever come. I despair that I will always be a second-class person, in my country and in my church. But then something happens to give me reason to remember my hope. Something pulls me into hope in the way the Eucharist mysteriously pulls me into Jesus. I am reminded that despair is the ultimate sin, the act of forgetting that God is God.

Tomorrow, as Barack Hussein Obama becomes President of the United States, I will see a part of that hope come to fruition, and feel more confidence that one day all of that hope shall come to pass and justice shall indeed be for all.

-David