Doug Thorpe

Blog # 1, January 21, 2008. MLK day, driving onto campus listening to King’s "Beyond Vietnam" speech on KUOW, Seattle’s NPR, one of the great prophetic speeches ever delivered in this country. Delivered at the Riverside Church in Harlem, New York, on April 4rth, 1967 — exactly one year before he was assasinated — and moving far beyond the particular issues of civil rights and beyond the particulars of Vietnam to the deepest questions that still confront us: the loss of our country’s soul.

Does a country have a soul? I believe so. I believe we are knit together as a nation; it is part of our human and creaturely identity, just as the salmon are part of our identity in the northwest, or cedar or douglas fir. It is not our ultimate identity but it is part of who we are — and we are all accountable for that soul and to that soul.

And King named our crisis: a spiritual failure, a failure to live into the truth we are called to, whether that’s as Christians, Buddhists, Jews, Muslims, atheists. We are called to truth –together, with each other, and with creation itself.

and we fail daily and deeply.

I needed those words this summer, and appreciate still the vision that King brought to us — a man who died at 39! Astonishing what still might have been had he been supported.