JANUARY 13, 2008

"Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, free at last!" These are the stirring words of one of the greatest men of our era, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., a martyr to the cause of human rights. His rhetoric and spirituality and hard work were largely responsible for a long overdue revolution in our civil laws and public practices in this country that were founded on the principles of human equality, but often ran counter to those principles in action.

When Dr. King preached about freedom in the sixties, he mostly spoke about freedom from: freedom from discriminatory laws that denied certain living areas to certain people; freedom from agreements in institutions of learning that denied knowledge; freedom from rules that excluded social and cultural opportunities on the basis of race; freedom from conspiracies that prevented skilled and talented people from earning a living through honest labor because of the color of their skin. In short, he preached about freedom from the institutionalized abuses that prejudice and bigotry had made a way of life among people to the harm and hurt of their brothers and sisters.

Dr. King was killed in the midst of his crusade against these enslaving conditions, but in large part, through legal actions and changes in society's practices, freedom from these things has become the law of the land. But his words are not yet a complete reality, because there is another dimension to freedom, the freedom to: the freedom to develop each individual as a unique child of God; the freedom to allow skill, talent and intelligence to be used to their fullest for the common good of everyone; the freedom to respect, defend and accept all people as family, including the most vulnerable - the unborn, the elderly, the handicapped, the poor, the lonely; the freedom to embrace everything that this earthly life offers, and to which all of us are called, regardless of incidental human accidents such as race, nationality, sex, creed.

God the Father initiated our path to freedom in creating each and everyone of us; God the Son showed us the way by becoming one of us and dying for our freedom; God the Holy Spirit daily nourishes us and our hope and courage as we work for that freedom. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and others died so that we might experience that freedom. It is up to all of us to live our individual lives to establish forever that freedom, to and from, so that all might be "free at last."