Winter                                            Waxing Moon of the Cold Month

“Never regret. If it’s good, it’s wonderful. If it’s bad, it’s experience.” – Eleanor Hibbert

Ms. Hibbert, whoever she is, has it right; just the way life is.  And, by the way, I’ve had my share of experience.

Slept in my own bed last night.  Ahh.

Today is the tour of the Target Corporation’s art collection with lunch at Masa before the tour.  This one has been a bit problematic, partly because it came in when four other events also got organized.   However, the day has come at last.

Today will be the first day at home, a regular work day, when Kate does not go into the Allina Medical Clinic Coon Rapids.  She stayed up last night until 2:oo a.m. playing a word game on her Kindle.  Freedom.  A beautiful thing.   This is also the week of her party, Coming of Age:  The Art of Retirement.  On Thursday, January 20th, from 5-9 p.m. we will celebrate Kate and her medical career, but, with more inflection, Kate and the next years of her life.  If you read this, you’re invited to join us at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.  No gifts, just you and yours.

It’s also Martin Luther King day today.  My age cohort grew up during Dr. King’s rise to national prominence as the civil rights era took hold of the nation’s psyche.  The civil rights movement represents the US at its best and its worst.  Over the long haul since King’s leadership in 1955 the Montgomery Bus Boycott ignited by Rosa Parks to today cultural attitudes and practices have changed dramatically when it comes to people of color.   One way to note this is to consider the relative reputations of Dr. King and two of his chief opponents:  Lester Maddox and George Wallace.

Have we come all the way to a nation in which a person is judged “not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character?”  No.  Are matters demonstrably better?  Yes.  Can we stop working on the pernicious effects of prejudice and racism?  Of course not.  Can we celebrate a better day?  Yes, that’s what MLK day stands for.

All I’m saying is simply this, that all life is interrelated, that somehow we’re caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. You can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.

— Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

This perspective of King’s has its roots in the radical theology of Henry Nelson Weiman.  It was Weiman’s basic idea that god could only be found in relationship and, further, that god really was the mystical thread of connection between and among us all.  A fine idea, though a bit of a category mistake in my opinion.  Why call this mystical thread god?  Why not the mystical thread or deep relationship or interrelatedness?  In either form though it represents a distinct challenge both to American individualism and to the existentialist stance that I consider my own.

King and his intellectual mentor, Weiman, call to those of us who put our bold lettering under Individual to consider that there is an equally bold and distinct word, Related.  Martin Buber would approve.