Loving Like a King
“All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. “–Martin Luther King, Jr.
This quote is from one of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s sermons and was cited by Coretta Scott King in the foreword to his book, Strength to Love. It would have been great to have planned to read King’s book today, in honor of his memory and legacy. But, unfortunately, coming across his book on the exact date of his holiday was but a mere happy coincidence.
On my day off, I just so happened to call an old friend from law school that I haven’t spoken to in well over a year for reasons that no longer matter. While regaling each other with tales of our misadventures over the past year or so, I came to tell her about the book I was writing on love. She suggested two books to me that I am sure will help me in my research on love and its practical application, one of which was King’s Strength to Love.
I retrieved and began reading King’s book very shortly after that wonderful conversation (God bless you, lady!!). I couldn’t get past the foreword, however, because the above-quoted sentence shook me so heavily: “All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” Besides being beautifully crafted, it also had the privilege of being true.
I began my research on love by studying the Bible, and admittedly, was confused by the command to “love your neighbor as yourself.” In fact, I thought, with the way most people treat themselves, I would hate to be loved the way most love themselves. It sounded like pure agony and torture, to me. But after reading this one sentence from King, I was suddenly struck with clarity. I had been missing the essential element of duty that served as the underpinning of that verse. Because we are inextricably linked to one another, we are obligated to treat ourselves well, be great, and live up to our potential, because someone else’s greatness and potential depends on it. It is the ultimate understanding of community and duty, to accept that our lives are truly not our own. It was not just an artful sentence for King, it was the way he lived his life. He shouldered the burden of becoming great because he believed it would free us to also be great. And, in many ways, it has.
That is the true manifestation of Christ’s love. Christ lived to be an example for us and chose to die solely for our benefit. Had He not done so, we would be drowning in our sins and mistakes and our human nature. But He would not let us fall. He sacrificed His life to save us from ourselves. Everyday that we wake up, we are given new life, new charge, new chances, and a clean slate, yet another opportunity to be great, to be the person God purposed for us to be.
This is why it is so important to not only have a relationship with God, but to know, based on that relationship, what your purpose on this earth is: the whole world is depending on it. We are all that major! Because of that, I must perfect my craft and finish my book because someone needs to read it. I must study and pass this inconvenient Bar because someone needs my skills. I must get healthy because someone needs my life and strength. Someone needs to see me move beyond failure towards success so that person can move on, too.
That is what “I am because we are” means. That is what it means to “love your neighbor as yourself.” The ultimate example of empathy and compassion and love is to be able to look at another human being and find yourself in that person. We must try our very best to never hurt that person and to always give that person our best because every person’s life touches another life. Our lives are little more than a series of human collisions and we are consistently making and breaking each other. If you harm one person, the effects can ripple across space and time beyond your wildest intentions. We have an unfathomable amount of power over each other’s lives, and with that power comes a duty to acknowledge it and respect it and to use it for our collective good.
Because we cannot ever be great until we see ourselves in our neighbor’s struggle with health and bills due to a lack of affordable health care; we cannot ever be great until it is our reflection we see in the homeless that stretch out at the feet of our nation’s capital; we cannot ever be great until we realize that our future hangs in the balance as long as our children are miseducated and robbed of fair chances. And we can never be great at the expense of our sister’s greatness.
It is only when we realize that there is but one reality, that we are all “food for food” and all connected through Jesus Christ, that we can be who we were born to be. And only then can we begin to understand what it means to love.