Last week, America remembered the fiftieth anniversary of the assassiination of Martin Luther King, Jr.  I will never forget the moment, the moment on that day in long ago 1968, on which I got the news.  I was shocked, terribly shocked:  why?  Why did people hate King so much?  Why did people want to see him dead?
     Worse, I fear I could find, even today, people who continue to be happy that King died on that day in 1968.  On the other hand, I am thankful for the progress America has made in reducing racial discrimination and injustice.  So much has happened, so much good, so much gain.  Unfortunately, however, we still have a long way to go.


     Like Mahatma Gandhi, whose work he studied (along with the Bible), King was convinced that addressing and eliminating injustice must be a spiritual activity.  God, he believed, is the author of freedom, and God, he asserted, must be the progenitor of anything we do to achieve it.  Hence, we are commanded, he concluded, to at all times use nonviolence to realize our objectives.
    And it worked.  We rightly admire King today, admire him for many things.  What we might admire most is his desire and ability to frame his work in the aegis of love, love of the world, love of humanity, love of God.
     For as Paul reminds us in the thirteenth chapter of his first letter to the Corinthian church, in the end, only love, the love of God for you, the love of God for me, will endure.