“Almost always, the creative minority has made the world better. Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred,” Martin Luther King Jr. said.
These words, among many, were spoken in the spirit of MLK through an interfaith prayer service to honor him and his works. This event was sponsored by the Office of the Chaplain and was held during Elizabethtown College’s MLK Week. The service featured words from MLK and those who worked with him and inspired him throughout his journey.
This is the second time the College has offered this event as part of MLK Week. As part of the service, attendees received a program with prayers and words from King and a few of his colleagues and inspirations, such as Mahatma Gandhi, Thich Nhat Hanh and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. To start with the service, Assistant Chaplain Amy Shorner-Johnson began the service by asking those in attendance what prayer meant to them. Later in the service, quotes from these inspirational men were read.
King’s stance on interreligious dialogue has always been deeply rooted in his ideologies, a fact that most people may not know. Shorner-Johnson spoke on this aspect of King. “You see a lot of his work on race relationships,” she said. “This is one of the things where we educate people on what he actually did. You really have to get more in-depth into his world and who he studied and know more than just his famous speeches.”
Heschel marched alongside King during a protest from Selma to Montgomery, Ala.; Gandhi inspired King’s stance on a nonviolent revolution, and Thich Nhat Hanh was a friend of King’s and inspired his protest of the Vietnam War. Through these influential men, King’s own ideologies were positively affected without altering his faith. “King himself was an interfaith worker,” Shorner-Johnson said. “When he went to seminary, he was reading about Gandhi and was inspired, despite Gandhi’s not being a Christian, through his nonviolence.”
During King’s march from Selma to Montgomery, both he and Heschel formed an interreligious alliance to cross religious borders. Heschel was quoted as saying, “When I marched in Selma, my legs were praying.” Through walking with King and sharing their beliefs in this relationship and friendship, both of their religious horizons broadened greatly. “Martin Luther King Jr.’s ideologies were very much inspired by these relationships,” Shorner-Johnson said. “He was a Baptist minister and nothing was going to take that away from him, but he found the beauty and respected the practices of so many people. Wholeheartedly, this is what we are trying to accomplish by this service; to expose people to other faiths, to help understand their own faiths while recognizing the beauty in the things that we can do in service and outreach. We all have a lot to learn from one another.”
Despite King’s reputation for being a devout Baptist, he also believed in interreligious dialogue. Shorner-Johnson agreed with King’s need for religious conversation. “For me personally, I have learned so much about what I believe and what beautiful things that I, as a Christian, can contribute to the world,” she said. “Also, we need to learn what other beautiful things other people can contribute to the world.” In the words of Heschel, “All it takes is one person … and another … and another … and another … to start a movement.”
Shorner-Johnson stated that, through religious dialogue, a person’s own faith can be strengthened and broadened through conversation, a belief that the Office of the Chaplain strongly believes. “I have high respect for my Muslim friends and my Jewish friends and what they bring,” she said. “There are certain pieces in their beliefs that I will never be able to say that ‘this is what I believe’, but I don’t expect them to always believe in everything that I believe either. To have honest dialogue about what we believe is where the beauty of our conversations can come together and I love learning from them.”
