On Monday the nation returned to its annual remembrance of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy — peaceful resistance to grave and sometimes violent injustice.
Racism and violence have led too many news reports during the last year — both locally and nationally — for us to give a cursory nod toward the civil rights leader this year.
Two children — an 8-year-old boy and a 15-year-old boy — died last week in West Louisville. They were the latest victims of gun violence in Louisville, a city that by late last year saw its highest homicide rate in three decades.
News report after news report tell us one thing — what we’re doing isn’t working.
There are a multitude of things that must change if we want to see real reform, real justice, real equality. But many of those things are bogged down in politics and special interests.
Quality education must be more accessible to disadvantaged children; guns ought to be harder to acquire and easier to control. President Barack Obama’s executive orders issued earlier this month may help curtail gun access.
But these problems won’t change overnight.
We must, as a community and a nation, wrestle with the topic of racism and find a path away from division — one that recognizes the dignity of each human person.
That won’t happen overnight, either.
What we can change today, at this very moment, is our own part in the tragedy.
The change begins with mercy. On Dec. 8, Pope Francis opened the jubilee Year of Mercy — a period of time when the church and all its members are supposed to both seek God’s mercy in their own lives and share his mercy with those around them. To be clear, this should always happen, not just in the jubilee year. But this Holy Year is a time to place renewed emphasis on the practice of mercy.
It’s hard sometimes to discern exactly what is meant by mercy — a word whose definition exceeds three inches in an old unabridged Webster’s Dictionary.
Archbishop Joseph E. Kurtz shed some new light on the term last weekend at the Memorial Mass for Life. And it’s worth repeating.
Record reporter Jessica Able writes that the archbishop described mercy as the result of a meeting between Christ’s love and human misery.
“Any time that love, true love, meets human misery, the result is mercy,” he said. “Throughout all of sacred Scripture and especially the Gospel passages … when the love of Christ touches and meets human misery … mercy results.”
This allegorical image provides unmistakable guidance.
When the faithful encounter violence, racism, a mother in crisis or the other social ills that weaken our community, we must respond with love first.
David Winkler, a member of St. Raphael Church, seems to know this.
He attended a celebration of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. at the Cathedral of the Assumption last weekend, and told Record reporter Ruby Thomas that the Rev. King “freed blacks and whites” from being in an unhealthy relationship with one another.
Winkler said the slain civil rights leader “knew every time he went out that he might not return home. He did it for the others, for them to get to a place he wasn’t going to get to.”
This is the kind of love, the sort of mercy, to which we should all aspire. It is selfless and it places the common good before all else. And it’s the only way we can ever expect change to begin.
MARNIE McALLISTER
Record Editor
