Welcoming words I wrote for our Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Birthday Celebration banquet at Charles Horn Terrace:
Dr. King’s birthday is an opportunity for reflection on many fronts: respect and gratitude for his vision, grief for the nature of his passing, renewed conviction to carry his message forward. We are privileged to live in a community that lets us put Dr. King’s message into practice in our daily lives, our dealings with others, and our own visions for the future. When our history is written, how often will the scribe take note of our welcoming practices and our willingness to learn from one another? How often, sadly, will we be observed as cruel and intolerant, wrapped in false pride or mesmerized by the allure of power? Will we be seen as showing our wounds to passersby, begging for alms, pleading for scraps from the tables of the more fortunate? Or will we learn to bring Dr. King’s dream to our realities. In his words, “… everybody can be great, because everybody can serve…. You only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love…” We are blessed with a great storehouse of possibility here, coming as we do from so many walks of life. We have our hard days, when sickness takes our strength; but we also have one another and our lives are surely not long enough to exhaust the love we can have in our everyday relations. I believe this is Dr. King’s faith in action. Our differences become our strength as we learn from one another and together find ways to realize our hopes. We help ourselves when we do this, and by our example, we help others as well. If there is an enemy among us it is intolerance and every day brings us to moments of choice. We can close ourselves off and judge others accordingly or we can embrace Dr. King’s message of humility and let go of that pretension. This is true charity, as many religions show us, and in the life of Martin Luther King we see how to bring such love into our personal lives. Fred Markus, President, Horn Terrace Resident Council, Ward Ten, in the Lyndale Neighborhood --- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.449 / Virus Database: 251 - Release Date: 1/27/2003 TEMPORARY REMINDER: 1. Send all posts in plain-text format. 2. Cut as much of the post you're responding to as possible. ________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A City-focused Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
