Marianne Williamson considers what Martin Luther King, Jr. would be challenging us, as spiritual beings, to do regarding our political system if he were alive today. A transcribed excerpt from this inspired lecture, recorded live as part of Williamson's L.A. Lecture Series, follows:
I think if Martin Luther King were alive today, he would not only be challenging and holding our feet to the fire about political establishments, but our religious establishments as well. When you read the biographies of Martin Luther King, they talk about what happened one Sunday in January of 1960 when by all accounts and according to all historians it seems that Martin Luther King went from being a preacher with a kind of political conversation as a harmonic to a movement leader who had a spiritual conversation as his harmonic. Let me read to you this quote from Martin Luther King in his book, Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story.
He said, “Nonviolence in the truest sense is not a strategy that one uses simply because it is expedient at the moment. Nonviolence is ultimately a way of life that men live by because of the sheer morality of its claim.
It is not a method of stagnant passivity. The phrase passive resistance often gives the false impression that this is a do nothing method in which the resistor quietly and passively accepts evil. But nothing is further from the truth. For while the nonviolent resistor is passive in the sense that he is not physically aggressive toward his opponent, his mind and emotions are always active. Constantly seeking to persuade his opponent that he is wrong. The method is passive physically but strongly active spiritually. It is not passive non-resistance to evil. It is active nonviolent resistance to evil.”
I have often talked about the fact that those of us who are involved in a spiritual journey in our own lives, those of us who know anything about personal growth, those who know anything about recovery, those who know anything about the laws of consciousness, those of us who know anything about any of those things because we know whatever we might have gleaned of what it takes to actually change. And remember all that a society is, all that a nation is, is a collective of individuals. So if a law is what changes an individual, that same law is what changes a country, and that is why people who are involved in a spiritual journey are not the ones who should be turned off to politics, turned off to the dominant status “political conversation” in America today, you bet. But turned off to the larger political conversation, we should be the most sober and sobering, responsible, and conscious kick-ass adults in this country.
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