THESE STONE WALLS
I had a visit a few weeks ago from Emily, my 23 year old niece. I was struck by how happy and settled she is. We reminisced over coffee about family memories and the significant events of Emily's childhood growing up in my sister's home near Boston. We laughed and laughed at the quirks and quagmires of our family.
Emily had read my first post of Advent last month, "A Corner of the Veil," and spoke of how very moved she was. Emily revealed to me that it was she who took the celebrated photograph of my mother, her beloved grandmother, in Newfoundland, the photo that is described in that post. I had not known this, and it's an important element of that story for me.
For much of our visit, we also spoke of the last decade and its impact on Emily and her generation. I could see how very different Emily's adolescence was from my own. In my November 18 post, "The Day the Earth Stood Still," I wrote of the tumultuous decade from 1963-1973. It was the decade of my adolescence. The decade that both formed and transformed my conscience. The events of that decade are in the minds of those of us who lived it, linked in a sort of domino effect.
Those dominos began to fall, in my mind, with the 1963 assassination of President John. F Kennedy when I was ten. The stream of dominos seemed to end one decade later with the US Supreme's court's 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade when I was twenty.
There was so much that happened in the middle that entire volumes have been written to assess that decade's impact on American life and culture, and, for Catholics at least, what it now means to be a Catholic in America in a new millennium. That assessment is ongoing, and I cannot pretend to add anything to it. I can only comment on it.
Right in the middle of that decade, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. His life was taken in 1968, four years after being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his heroic commitment to social change through nonviolent recourse and discourse.
The April 2009 issue of First Things has some terrific photographs of Fr. Richard John Neuhaus marching alongside the Rev. Dr. King in a unity of purpose and mission. In a celebrated book published posthumously last year – American Babylon: Notes of A Christian Exile - Fr. Neuhaus wrote of the radical grace exemplified by Martin Luther King in his concept of "The Beloved Community," and described by Fr. Neuhaus as a new order…
Continue reading here: http://www.thesestonewalls.com/"… sought by all who know love grief in refusing to settle for a community of less than truth and justice uncompromised."
