e live in a world of broken people, violence, conflicts, war, inequality, injustice, hatred and rancor. It takes courage and tenacity to dream about resolving all conflicts. Martin Luther King Jr. had courage and tenacity to dream about it in his time. King’s time was the period of extremist and racist organizations such as Ku Klux Klan, The White Citizens Councils, and Black Power movement. So, it was a time of serious devastating conflicts.
Considering King’s life and reading his books you can see how his vision of resolving conflicts through nonviolence grew. First of all he simply began struggling for integration between blacks and whites in the South. Then his civil rights struggle passed to reach the national level. And with the Vietnam War he struggled for an international cause. Finally speaking about World House, King reached a universal dimension, a universal love aimed to resolve conflicts.
Vision of World House
This notion of World House sounds like our Xaverian slogan: make of the world a single family. In king’s World House vision, he committed himself to global struggle against the evils of racism, poverty, and war. These evils do not allow humankind to build up the world house. In the last years of his life, King dreamed a revolution of love in order to build up a new world where reconciliation, peace, justice, love, solidarity and togetherness would reign.
Martin Luther King Jr. outlined three ways of resolving conflict:
1. Look within yourself to realize that you are not perfect, and something you have done might have sparked the conflict,
2. Discover the element of good in your enemy,
3. When the opportunity presents itself for you to defeat your opponent, that is the time that you must not do it.
He begins to explain what the World House is using a metaphor: “A widely separated family inherits a house in which they have to live together. We have inherited a large house, a great world house in which we have to live together – black and white, Easterner and Westerner, Gentile and Jew, Catholic and Protestant, Moslem, Buddhist and Hindu – a family unduly separated in ideas, culture and interest, who, because we can never again live apart, must learn somehow to live with each other in peace… Together we must learn to live as sisters and brothers or together we will be forced to perish as fools.”
In King’s vision all human beings are interdependent and all life is interrelated. “Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.” However King is able to make a clear difference between what is global and what is individual. “A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical…”
For King, unconditional love is the only key capable of promoting interdependence and erasing hate. The king of love King was talking about was not the affectionate type, but instead the type that meant “understanding, redeeming good will for all people.” For king, love is justice. It is a matter of visible actions and not only interior feelings or good words. It is self-determination to do good and always the highest good possible. It is the love of God operating in the human heart.
According to King, we can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil.
(From InterMission - The Xaverian Way)