Times of crisis can lead to goodwill and healing

The heart flag is ubiquitous throughout the city.[i]  It is a symbol of hope in difficult times.

So was the Silent Minute.  Instituted by Wellesley Tudor Pole during the Dunkirk evacuation, it gained millions of participants as the Second World War continued, particularly during the Blitz when the BBC drew attention to one minute’s silence when Big Ben sounded at 9 p.m.[ii]=

Different eras also have symbols of horror.  The Holocaust extermination camps are one example.  The recent public “execution” of George Floyd, the handcuffed black man forcibly held on the ground by three Minneapolis police officers, one of whom pressed his knee down on Floyd’s neck for more than eight minutes, is another.[iii]

Although George Floyd was not a well-known figure like Martin Luther King, Jr., his death reminds me of that of the civil rights leader on April 4, 1968.  

Senator Robert Kennedy broke the news of King’s assassination to a largely black audience in Indianapolis.  He quoted Aeschylus’s Agamemnon: “And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget, / falls drop by drop upon the heart, / and in our despair, / against our will, / comes wisdom by the awful grace of God.”

Despite being moved by those lines, for a long time I was unable to accept the word awful as an adjective for grace and I quarralled with the notion of wisdom coming against our will.  But I found resolution in an even more remarkable speech, the one King gave the night before he was killed, and in which he intimated that he knew he was soon to die.

“We’ve got some difficult days ahead,” he intoned.  “But it doesn’t really matter with me now because I’ve been to the mountaintop.  I don’t mind.  Like anybody, I would like to live a long life; longevity has its place.  But I’m not concerned about that now.  I just want to do God’s will.”

Tudor Pole, who died six months after King, has been called a spiritual “master.”  On April 19, 1968, he wrote to a friend that King “was told about his imminent departure and accepted it.”[iv]

Although King’s murder was devastating, it elevated his moral example and leadership and enshrined them for all time.  But the initial means to these ends, what are they if not the awful grace of God?

Like the circumstances of King’s death, a similar stunning clarity attends George Floyd’s “lynching.”  Was it another occasion of the awful grace of God?  

The repeated acts of violent racism and resulting rioting and looting recall Robert Graves’ evocative line: “Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud, hatch out.”[v]  But the far larger meaning lies in the enormous, worldwide, peaceful “Black Lives Matter” protests.

There was rioting in 110 cities after King’s assassination but not in Indianapolis.  The audience that heard Kennedy speak heeded his call to avoid division and hatred, violence and lawlessness, and to pursue instead love, wisdom, compassion, and justice.[vi]  In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, it appears wider and deeper positive repercussions are occurring.

We are challenged to see with new eyes in 2020.  We might consider that God—whether we believe or not; whether God is just a notion or ultimate reality—can also be viewed as a symbol of humanity’s common interests.  As with those ubiquitous heart flags and their message of gratitude, good will and hoped-for healing, it is up to us how we make use of that symbol.

It is God’s law, Aeschylus tells us, “that he who learns must suffer.”[vii]  Humanity is certainly suffering now.  May we also be learning.

Author/historian Patrick Wolfe has an abiding interest in grace and the mystic.  Essays on “Wellesley Tudor Pole and the Big Ben Silent Minute” and “Robert Kennedy’s warning 50 years after his death” can be found on his web site: https://patrickswolfe.com/