Perspective Celebrating an elder in Kings
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By ARTHUR JONES
Had she lived another couple of
weeks, 86-year-old Jane Emerson would have stood at one end of Christ the King
Church in San Diego on Sunday, Jan. 20 giving a reading, while acknowledging
the portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. at the other end of the church.
But she was buried the Tuesday before.
That gave the pastor, Jesuit Fr. Eduardo Samaniego, the
opportunity during the festive, two-hour long King celebratory Mass, to make
the connection between what we see as heroic lives of extraordinary people like
King and committed ordinary lives like Emersons. For decades, this mother
of 12, grandmother of 32, great-grandmother of 20 had been the primary force
behind most things done by the Catholic Worker in the city (NCR,
Nov. 13, 1998).
Samaniego suggested that such lives are not so different, for they
have the same commitment in common.
With the Caribbean-hued Jesus on the altar wall behind him, the
20-plus-voice choirs phrase, Lord I am available to you, and
the trumpets, sax, drums and piano still echoing, Samaniego took the days
readings down Kings and Emersons Christian-commitment road. It is
the road all Catholics, all Christians welcome and dread -- the Way that
unflinchingly leads from answering the call, to feeling driven, to becoming
destined, to finally letting go in order to be freely carried along to wherever
and whatever the Word and will of God leads.
What a torturing way. What an agonizing yes. What a severe
mercy.
I have seen hate, said Samaniego, quoting King.
Do what you will to us. We will still love you. We will tire you out with
our capacity to suffer.
That was King, and the courageous souls around him.
But what about us -- as chosen? the pastor asked.
Have we the confidence to speak out against injustice? Are we blessed
with a vision? Jane Emerson said Here I am, Lord.
Samaniego said the Isaiah reading for the day (49: 3, 5 and 6)
skipped a verse, and hed looked it up. It was, I have toiled in
vain, I have exhausted myself for nothing. To be certain were not
toiling in vain, he said, we need to pray for the gift of
discernment. Discernment helps us decide, he said, whether we move into
action or quiet service. Either way, the same requirements remain: commitment
and humility.
We need humility in order to be transparent before God,
transparent to one another, said Samaniego. We ask why do we do
what we do? And the answer reveals who we are.
It is at this point, the who we are, that Martin and
Jane -- and other committed Christians -- have the most in common. King did not
want to lead, did not see himself as extraordinary. King biographer David
Garrow wrote recently that Kings reluctance to be a leader
was coupled with a lifelong ambivalence toward praise and honors.
Those traits, Garrow wrote, shaped a most remarkable and commendable
man.
Similarly, Jane Emerson would bristle if anyone referred to her as
the parish radical. To her, it was elementary, not radical, that to be Catholic
means caring about the poor; elementary that the church has to risk alienating
people, including its own.
Probably a third to a half of all Americans alive today were born
after Kings 1968 assassination. Emersons death is a reminder that
in the next couple of decades those with the active memory of Kings life
will be gone.
How then, does the memory, the work, the reality live on?
King and Emerson themselves provided the answer. As they developed
in their missions and vision they were able to talk -- King about Gandhi
particularly, Emerson about Dorothy Day particularly -- about the continuing
human linkages of the vision that, for both of them, began with Jesus
words.
King, following on Gandhi, became a reference point and a starting
point for justice in this and other countries. Emerson, in a far smaller
setting, is a reference point, too, for all those younger people in the Christ
the King faith community who remember the elderly white woman with the
close-cropped hair.
King was one of the martyrs.
Emerson was one of the elders, said Samaniego.
They knew her, they saw her, and they understand what she did and
why.
It is sufficient.
Arthur Jones is NCR editor-at-large.
National Catholic Reporter, February 1,
2002
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