Beatitudes Blog

Connecting Jesus and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Submitted by Nora Gallagher on January 20, 2008 - 10:10pm.

Isaiah: “I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”

He was 5” 6 ½” tall. When he was 26, he weighed 166 pounds. That year, 1955, in early December, Martin Luther King Jr. gave the speech that turned out to be a sermon at the Holt Street Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, calling for a boycott of the Montgomery buses. It put him on the map. He had only twelve years and a few short months longer to live.

Toward the end of that speech, he hit the cadence that would make him a famous orator:

“And we are not wrong; we are not wrong in what we are doing. If we are wrong, the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong. If we are wrong, Jesus of Nazareth was merely a utopian dreamer that never came down to Earth. If we are wrong, justice is a lie, love has no meaning. And we are determined here in Montgomery to work and fight until justice runs down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

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The human particular

Submitted by Nora Gallagher on February 19, 2007 - 5:46pm.

As some of you know,

I have written two memoirs, Things Seen and Unseen and Practicing Resurrection. They are about my own wrestling with faith inside and outside the Episcopal church. In writing these memoirs, I discovered that there are aspects of the memoir that are like the novel: you must have "characters," you must have a "plot." I learned the arc of a three-part plot from the Greeks: things get bad, things get worse, things are resolved.

I learned the hard way that a memoir must be about something more than the author's life, as of course the novel must be about more than the sum of its characters. Moby Dick is not "about" whale hunting. Whale hunting is the circumstance of Moby Dick; the novel is about obsession. Lucy Grealy's great memoir Autobiography of a Face, is the story of woman disfigured from repeated cancer treatments to her jaw. That's the circumstance. What is it about? A human person coming to terms with who she is. We have all read memoirs that were like awful, narcissistic train wrecks in which the writer never figured out that the subject of a memoir cannot be the writer himself, and we have also read memoir that divulged the most secret and painful things about a life that were not at all embarrassing but instead connected us more deeply to the human condition.

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How I Came to Write "Changing Light"

Submitted by Nora Gallagher on November 22, 2006 - 9:02am.

We are pleased to welcome to the roster of Beatitudes Bloggers author Nora Gallagher. She is the author of Things Seen and Unseen: A Year Lived in Faith and Practicing Resurrection: A Memoir of Work, Doubt, Discernment, and Moments of Grace. An astute observer of faith and culture, Nora's writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, and beliefnet.com. For a fine example of her compelling witness to faith in our time, read her Memorial Day sermon about the complicity of silence around war. Her next book is a novel, and her words about this story give us the promise of a book written in the spirit of the Beatitudes. Blessed is this peacemaker.

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