Quoting from his speeches
hose who love may suffer at the hands of injustice, but injustice cannot destroy the love of God, which is always redemptive. Martin Luther King Jr. believed that unearned suffering has tremendous educational and transforming possibilities. He was convinced that suffering has the power to convert the enemy when reason fails. King justified nonviolent resistance to evil by an appeal to that king of suffering. The following extract clearly shows his firm determination to love his opponent accepting suffering:
“We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will and we will still love you. We cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws and abide by the unjust system, because non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good, and so throw us in jail and we still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and, as difficult as it is, we will still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities at the midnight hour and drag us out on some wayside road and leave us half dead as you beat us, and we will still love you. Send your propaganda agents around the country, and make it appear that we are not fit, culturally and otherwise, for integration, and we’ll still love you. But be assured that we’ll wear you down by our capacity to suffer, and one day we will win our freedom. We will not only win our freedom for ourselves; we will so appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory.”
I’d like to finished this article with King’s warning about his vision of the World House: “We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation. This may well be mankind’s last chance to choose between chaos and community.”
Community, for Martin Luther King Jr., is an inclusive human community where all are accepted; a community where difference is not a cause for fear, but a source of celebration. It is people of every race, language, creed, and way of life living in shalom-reconciliation, freedom, hope, justice, peace and equality. World House vision and spirituality of nonviolence are not a total solution for all problems, conflicts, and enmity of life. But they make them seem more tolerable, with optimism and hope (we remember King’s dream).
(From InterMission - The Xaverian Way)