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The truth of the matter is that Martin Luther King was Martin Luther King until the day he died…. He
struggled with anger and depression and sexual excess all his life. Like the rest of us in our own
struggles, he never totally conquered any of them apparently. He saw evil and too deeply abhorred it;
he was faced with frustration after frustration and was too often bowed down by it; he lived with
human deprivation after deprivation and too often gave into it. No, King’s conversion was not as simple
as a change of behavior. His conversion involved something far more difficult than that: King had to find
out that God was not only in him but in his enemy as well.

King followed a light, saw a star, felt a pulse, was consumed by a vision that few of us ever see. He may
have had to grapple with his own inner discipline, but he was deeply and consistently converted from
the “way things are” to the ways of the will of God for us, and in his concentration on the things of
God he converted us all. Though angry, he was also committed to nonviolence. Though depressed, he
was also awash in hope. Though struggling with the pressures of sensuality, he was also loving beyond
measure. King knew that sin was not as simple as a lack of personal discipline and that sanctity was not
as simple as the gauge of personal control.

…until the day he was assassinated, Martin Luther King waged one long, unending campaign for the soul
of the century. He molded the black church into a center for resistance. He targeted one situation
after another for black reaction—segregated lunch counters, white educational systems, the labor
disputes of black workers, urban housing settlements, voting registration abuses, and finally he focused
in on the relationship between business, militarism, and racism everywhere. And he did it all with love
of the enemy and passive resistance that changed a nation without leaving a residue of incurable and
unforgettable bitterness.

It was an irresistible, irrefutable, and immovable combination. People of conscience everywhere
watched their televisions in horror as children were attacked by police dogs and unarmed blacks were
clubbed into senselessness and polite marchers were hosed into exhaustion. They saw the brutality of
a system that purported to be divinely ordained for the sake of human order. Martin Luther King, Jr.,
showed us the evil in ourselves, and conscience-struck whites joined courageous blacks everywhere to
bring the country back from the brink of its own destruction.

But King paid the price. He struggled constantly with a feeling of inadequacy, a too-young awareness of
death, pressures from within the black community, and hysterical hostility from whites. The whole
world, it seemed, was conspiring to stop him. He was stabbed three times, physically attacked three
more times, bombed in his home three times, and jailed fourteen times before, finally, he was shot to
death.

But, in the end, he did not simply save the U.S. black; he saved the very moral fiber of the country, and
the hope of oppressed people everywhere. He changed a nation and gave notice to the world that the
powerless are not powerless after all. He left humankind with a higher notion of humanity.

-- from A Passion for Life by Joan Chittister (Orbis)