These were my thoughts and prayers going into the MLK Retreat on January 19, 2025 in Benicia, CA:
We have all come to this lovely place from different parts of the Bay Area and country, and we all bring different thoughts, feelings, prayers and people we are holding within us. We may carry a well of emotions over the destruction of the Los Angeles fires, the war and conflicts in the Middle East, the presidential inauguration and personal concerns such as loved ones who are sick and hurting.
There is no need to set all those things aside. All of who we are is welcomed here. Because all of who we are is what will be engaging Scripture, these important words from MLK, and each other at this retreat. To discern our prophetic task as gospel friends authentically will involve our whole selves.
After leaving the retreat on January 21, I didn’t realize the courage it would take to engage in this retreat authentically with our whole selves.
There were hard, important truths from MLK that I learned, such as:
America still has broad racism.
It is easier to integrate a lunch counter than it is to guarantee genuine equality in education, jobs and healthcare.
Blacks still suffer from being “thing-ified.”
We will not have racial justice until we have political and economic restructuring. This restructuring cannot happen as as the White, Protestant, upper-class holds onto the power and privilege.
Christians need to have a “revolution of values.” We have to recognize that our past has generated a theology that justified colonization, slavery, land-grabbing, war, and genocide. This theology was what America was founded on.
All of us are living with this unnamed suffering and unwitnessed trauma.
These were not just painful truths about injustice to be thought about and discussed at an intellectual level. I felt this “unnamed suffering and unwitnessed trauma” bubbling up in the retreat space filled with Asian, Native, White, Black, and Hispanic Christians. We were all committed believers in Jesus Christ who had come together to discern our prophetic task as gospel friends, but I don’t think many of us realized that some of our gospel friends live with this suffering and trauma in their very bodies and souls. Some of them live with the pain that their whole selves are not always welcomed in certain spaces in their own country or even in the church.
MLK, his colleague, Vincent Harding, and his mentor, Howard Thurman, said that we all need the healing that can come by “Building Beloved Community.” Instead of living as “us” and “them”, we are challenged to acknowledge that there are lines of differences that often separate us, but we need to have the courage and humility to reach across those lines of differences and practice:
Confession
Repentance
Repair
Reconciliation
Sometimes we want to jump to the reconciliation before we have actually confessed. I felt challenged to listen to the stories of those who are different from me and bear witness to those souls who hold stories that have been hidden in the shadows. I want to follow Jesus and to allow those stories to break my heart and lead me to confession and repentance, so that opportunities for repair and reconciliation can arise and bring healing and freedom. I want to be a part of building this Beloved Community.