Pop 89: Manifest Mercy
By Madonna Hamel
Every morning I light a couple of candles on the old wagon wheel coffee table that came with my prairie apartment. The wheel has become an altar. I've been turning counters and coffee tables into altars ever since I was allowed to play with matches. Over the years, I've bedecked them with holy cards and images of the likes of Sitting Bull, my mom as a teen, standing near the old homestead, dad as a young man, fixing a tire, the Russian hermit monk Sergio of Radonezh feeding a bear. And, always, Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King died on my tenth birthday. That night, watching the news on our black-and-white TV, way up Northern B.C., far from the scene of the crime, I felt propelled, launched on a trajectory completely inspired and fired up by King's presence in the world. Twenty-three years later, that trajectory landed me in Memphis, TN.
I was accepted as an exchange student at the Memphis College of Art. My intention was to immerse myself in my favourite art form—folk Art, the art of folks, i.e., the vast majority of us who struggle to make a living, not a killing. In the early 90s, the "correct" term for "Folk Art" was "Outsider Art." I preferred the emerging term: "Blues Aesthetic."
When I told the dean of my college in Vancouver that I wanted to go to Memphis, he suggested I reconsider my choices- "You could go to Washington DC, Cardiff Wales, Melbourne Australia, and you choose Memphis? Why? Where's the art in Memphis?" I stood and leaned across his desk and informed him, in no uncertain terms: "The Blues."
I slept through most early morning classes due to late nights spent in blues bars on Beale Street, drinking beer, reading from a book of King's sermons I carried in my backpack. It's King's sermons I love best. While his urge toward justice and his gift for synthesizing all manner of poetry, literature, philosophy, psychology, song lyrics and scripture are all present in his talks and lectures, it's in his sermons you hear the no-holds-barred passion, spurred on by the "Amen!" s and "Preach it!" s of the congregation. It's in his sermons he answers his deepest calls and echoing the call in us all: to show some mercy. "To love the hell out of everyone."
My favourite of King's sermons is "Why Jesus Called A Man A Fool" because he reveals his own rock-bottom moment when he realized he had to have a deeply personal experience of God in order to have the courage to continue his prophetic mission. The God of seminary and of his parents would not do. And when that moment hit him, in the middle of a sleepless night, over a cup of coffee, he found the courage to carry on.
Through King's connection with his God and his dedication to mercy, he kept the social justice movement a social gospel movement, overseen by a power greater than that of two opposing forces, a power that may seem alien to us but was not to him, a man who reminded us that he was, first and foremost, a preacher.
The "social justice movement" of today often quotes King's words (paraphrased from a sermon entitled "Of Justice and the Conscience" by the abolitionist Unitarian preacher Theodore Parker): "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."
When I picture that arc bending toward justice, I think of an arrow being bent in a forge, and that forge I see as mercy. It was through King's connection to his God he found the courage to demand for mercy everyone made manifest through nonviolent action.
No doubt, the Episcopal bishop Mariann Edgar Budde found strength in her own connection to her God when she repeated the call for mercy at the recent inauguration. "We don't need to portray with a broadcloth in the harshest of terms some of the most vulnerable people in our society, who are, in fact, our neighbours, our friends, our children, our friends' children, and so forth."
The new president declares this the beginning of a Golden Age. From the looks of the dais of the world's richest tycoons seated at Caesar's right hand, it appears, rather, to be the dawning of another Gilded Age. The president also re-ushered in the doctrine of Manifest Destiny - a term he, no doubt, would be hard-pressed to define but loves the sound of because it expresses so well America's right to expand itself beyond its already obscene girth.
In contrast I quote from King's "The Birth of A New Age," written in 1956:
"We need leaders not in love with money, but in love with justice. Not in love with publicity, but in love with humanity. Leaders who can subject their particular egos to the pressing urgencies of the great cause of freedom."
Outsider Art, The Blues, or "The Reals," as some black artists call it, are art forms that both demand and elicit mercy. I would count King's sermons among them. Call it tenderness or compassion - real mercy has no blinders. It is what Theodore Parker assumed to be the raw material of a spiritual and conscientious life, the way physics is the raw material of the material world. But how do you feel mercy for the vulnerable among us if you depict them as "criminals" and "vermin"?
This new administration looks more like the players in a Greek tragedy than a populist gathering. Pre-Christian rulers of the Roman Empire handled the poor and the weak by sweeping them out of the way. Post-Christian rulers of the new American Empire have struck the same note. A truly Christian culture would nurture, as King preached, "The Strength to Love" with a "tough mind and a tender heart" and would invite everyone to the table, not just the well-connected and the overfed.