The end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the Beloved Community.
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr
at a victory rally following the announcement
of a favorable U.S. Supreme Court Decision
desegregating the seats on Montgomery’s buses.
Loving Community is probably best described through stories, art, music, dance, and other modalities that express things that are hard to put our finger on with words alone. For us, describing Loving Community is an on-going, unfolding journey where we learn a little more each day about how it looks and feels in diverse settings and communities.
Historically, Loving Community, or the Beloved Community, is a term that was coined by Josiah Royce, the founder of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, but developed most deeply by Dr. Martin Luther King. King’s sense of Beloved Community was rooted in a vision of total relatedness–the “inescapable web of mutuality.” We are all interconnected and how we treat one of our members impacts the whole. In this way, doing our own work to practice love ourselves is the most basic work there is to do.
King did not see Loving Community as a “pie in the sky” dream, but something that we could accomplish here and now in our communities and country. Loving Community was not a soft vision of sweetness, but a tough commitment to working out conflicts and differences in peace and respect. Loving Community was a commitment to the equitable distribution of wealth, to justice, to peace, and to the the wholeness of all people.
And perhaps most important of all for King, love was a powerful tool for social transformation. He believed that when we make love the motivation and expressing love the strategy, we can change the world. The practices of our faith, the scriptures and holy books of our faith, the power of the spirit that is connected with a deeper Source…these equip us to mobilize love for transformation.
It’s important to note that King’s ideas about love and the power of love to transform people and take on injustice, emerged from the teachings of a Hindu–Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi’s idea of satyagraha, or Soul Force, as a way of life. Satyagraha is a made-up word that joins two ideas–truth and insistence, or “The Force that is born of Truth and Love.”
We all have stories of Loving Community–times when conflicts were worked out creatively, when relationships thrived across diversity, when a simple act of kindness saved a life. We are working on a way to capture these stories and create a collage of how Loving Community is thriving in metropolitan Chicago. In the meantime, check out these links to see how others are naming and living it.
