LEWISTON — People of all faiths and backgrounds braved the weather to attend the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. interfaith service Sunday evening at Gomes Chapel, where attendees were encouraged to become more radical.
In an opening musical offering, Divyamaan Sahoo and Duncan Reehl played “Strange Fruit,” a song written by Jewish teacher Abel Meeropol in 1937 about a lynching of two black men.
Acting Multifaith Chaplain Emily Wright-Magoon read from the lyrics, “Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze, strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
“That lynching is still happening in many ways,” Wright-Magoon said. “The devaluing of black bodies, of trans bodies, of female bodies, of LBGT bodies.”
Students of varying faith backgrounds came forward to make declarations within their own traditions pertaining to nonviolent dissent.
In a reading from the Baha’I faith, Brett Emmons said, “It is the peace element in religion that blends mankind and makes for unity.”
Emmons said, “We must forget all imaginary causes of difference and consider humankind as one family — the surface of the Earth as one nationality and all races as one humanity.”
A Buddhist reading from Joseph Marques went, “A leaky basin — if we do evil and try to plug the leak by doing good, it’s like plugging the leak in the bottom of a pot by pouring water in it.”
Marques said, “If you pour water in it, it all seeps out and the basin goes dry,” Marques continued, “even if you pour water all day, it still seeps out bit by bit and eventually there’s no water left — you don’t gain the benefits you wanted.”
The evening’s address was from Najeeba Syeed-Miller, assistant professor of inter-religious education at Claremont School of Theology in California and director of the Center for Global Peacebuilding.
Syeed-Miller’s message for the evening was “Engaging with Dr. King’s Example and Reradicalizing Dr. King.”
“Not that he needs to be radicalized,” she said, “but the messages and the way that we talk about him are often so sanitized that those deep messages, his work and his life are something we don’t often get the deepest lessons from.
“To lift his one voice — his one image, as if one man as framing, forming, creating a movement — is to erase the stories of a communal ethos that broke down the evil of segregation,” Syeed-Miller said.
“What we need is a process of reradicalizing the stories that follow one singular savior narrative,” Syeed-Miller said, “that push us to reanimate history and the course of its change that one man — his hands and body alone — were responsible.”
Syeed-Miller said she didn’t advocate diminishing King but that not including the many other faces, stories and people involved creates “a caricature of a movement, of a leader and of a moment in history.”
“No one person can live up to the impossibility of a single, charismatic hero and we are left waiting and wanting for another invisible savior to free us,” Syeed-Miller said.
Syeed-Miller said King would want his story told within the context of the complexity of all of the otherwise marginalized figures of the movement.
Syeed-Miller told the crowd that King said colonialism and oppression were synonymous. She said King drew parallels between the struggles in the U.S. and abroad and saw the movement at home to be connected in a worldwide struggle for human rights.
In articulating King’s vision, Syeed-Miller said that people of all backgrounds must have the courage to spend time face-to-face with those we disagree with, even violently disagree with, in order to find empathy.
Drawing upon her own faith, Syeed-Miller quoted Mohamed: “Be merciful to those on Earth and the one above in the heavens will have mercy on you.”
In closing, Syeed-Miller called upon all to be “Radical, radical, radical in love.”
dmcintire@sunjournal.com
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