One Man's Dream, All of Our Dreams

Greetings to all of you on this day. Today, across this country, across the fields which lie fallow in their winter rest and across the bustling city streets, we are called to join together in remembrance of one of our nation’s greatest leaders and spiritual warriors. We are called to spend one day reflecting upon the message and the life of a man who had been to the mountain top and brought a message of justice and peace to us, the people in the valley. This is a day that we are all called to gather our strength, a strength that all too often lies silent most of the year. We are called to uncover this strength and bring it out of its passive solitude and into the active world. What is the strength that we all carry and that I speak of? It is the strength that the honorable and beautiful Martin Luther King carried into the streets of injustice the strength that flowed from his lips unto the masses who stopped to listen. It is the strength of a justice that does not live in our courts, but lives in each of our hearts. It is a strength that we so often forget, that we cover with misguided ambitions, illusory fears, and destructive actions upon our brethren.

Today I pray that we all spend a moment to surrender to the greater strength that Martin Luther King Jr. embodied and which he reminded all of us that we too embody. It was not only Martin Luther King Jr. who had a dream. I know that I too have a dream, and that you have a dream, and that all of our dreams center on the hope of a better world, a world of mutual respect, a world of honor, and a world where compassion outshines anger and hatred, where no person is judged by the color of their skin, or their choice of religious practice, or their political party affiliation, or the quality of their clothing, or their ability to speak English, Spanish, Pashti, but that all beings are judged “by the quality of their character.” May you all find a moment of peace today and may you rediscover your strength of heart today, and may it carry all of us tomorrow and beyond.