Dreaming Vision

Web Posted: Jan. 10, 2004

Where there is no vision, the people perish.”  (Proverbs 29:18 KJV)

This coming weekend, our nation will reflect upon the life and legacy of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  For most,  he is best remembered for his speech, “I Have a Dream”–an address judged by a jury of rhetoricians as the most important speech given in the U.S. during the 20th century.  Yet King’s dream is often more invoked than understood.

King enunciated a vision of what he called “the Beloved Community,” a society marked by of radical inclusion, authentic justice, and all-embracing love.  His dream, in the beginning, was concerned with dismantling the structures of racial injustice and exclusion in this country (a daunting task that is still unfinished).  By the end of his life, King’s dream had expanded to include all the earth’s peoples.  His deeper vision led to a struggle against what he called the “triple interrelated evils” of racial division, economic deprivation, and military imperialism.  Shortly before the end of his life, he expressed his vision as follows: “We have inherited a great world house, in which we have to live together–black and white, Easterner and Westerner, Gentile and Jew, Catholic and Protestant, Moslem and Hindu–a family unduly separated in ideas, cultures and interests, who, because we can never live again apart, must learn somehow to live with each other in peace.”

The intense opposition that King endured, the public vilification he suffered, and his premature death by an assassin’s bullet testify to the resistance encountered and demands entailed in realizing his vision.  A mere “dream” is not worthy of, nor can it inspire, the sacrifices he endured.  King himself testified that his Beloved Community was nothing other than the social achievement of the Kingdom of God; no other vision would be worth the cost.

It is tempting today to dismiss King as an naive idealist and to regard his dream as a noble fantasy.  After all, doesn’t every dream shatter against the collision with reality?  But King’s “dream” was and is something more.  It is a compelling vision–and visions have the power to change reality.  Visions illumine possibilities that are overlooked, paths not yet taken, potentials that lie dormant, and capacities not yet developed.  Unlike a mere dream, a vision has the power to transform even recalcitrant realities . . . if we have the will and the courage to struggle for their realization.

King’s memory causes me to reflect upon the mission of a Catholic university in the ongoing struggle against the evils of racism, poverty and war.  If a “faith that does justice” is at the heart of what it means to be a Jesuit university, then King reminds us that a Jesuit university must be a place where alternative social futures, rooted in the Divine’s expansive vision, are imagined and pursued.  So often, the enemies of social justice are a failure of imagination and a sense of futility in struggling against unjust situations that seem impervious and unbending.  King challenges a university to be not only a site of teaching and research, but a place where dreams are nourished that inspire the struggle for the fuller realization of the Reign of God.  For without a vision, the people perish.

— Fr. Bryan Massingale