d affairs, and seems to either not know the difference between truth and a lie, or does not care. And still – I hope he surprises us and turns out to be a good president, or at least one who does not do too much damage.
The other day Hillary Clinton said, “We must accept this result and then look to the future. Donald Trump is going to be our president. We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead.”
President Obama called on Americans to move forward with the presumption of good faith in our fellow citizens. “Sometimes you lose an argument, sometimes you lose an election. But the path this country has taken has never been a straight line. We zig and zag,” said Obama.
Finite disappointment ~
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who faced disappointment time after time, said, “We must accept finite disappointment but must never lose infinite hope.” Let’s say that again: “We must accept finite disappointment but must never lose infinite hope.”
What did he mean? He was saying that we cannot lose hope because disappointment is not forever. We have infinite hope because justice will come some day. Infinite hope, especially for those with religious convictions, is the antidote to overcoming temporary disappointment and hindrances to one’s important goals. Rev. Dr. King’s infinite hope, based on his religious beliefs, was not merely an emotional “pie in the sky” hope. King was a preacher, a liberal Christian, and had faith that somehow some day God would guide historical events to bring about justice in this world. And so he held to infinite hope for an eventual successful outcome for the Civil Rights Movement, despite the many temporary setbacks.
During the struggle to end racial Apartheid in South Africa, Archbishop Desmond Tutu frequently told those in power, “We have already won! You think you are in charge, but you are not. You can delay justice for a while, but we have already won. And because our victory is real, the best thing you can do is to join the struggle now for a new South Africa.”
Archbishop Tutu and Rev. Dr. King had faith in the inevitability of God’s justice, but they also had faith in the ultimate justice of the people. People’s rights cannot be denied forever. Eventually
people will agitate for freedom and for justice, and will build a movement that will prevail.
Of course, there are competing visions of justice. White Southerners in the United States, and white South Africans, often had a different idea of what they thought was just. In the modern era we have seen very long and very difficult struggles to achieve the vote for women, to end slavery and racial segregation, and for anti-discrimination protections and the freedom to marry for gays and lesbians, to name a few. We Americans often disagree with one another. And, amidst many disappointments, justice doesn’t always seem inevitable.
The moral arc ~
In our long national struggle to end slavery, Rev. Theodore Parker, a Unitarian minister who served in West Roxbury and then in Boston, was one of the outstanding abolitionists of his time. Parker led public demonstrations that were nearly riots, protesting the Fugitive Slave Act that mandated the arrest and return to slavery of black men and women who had freed themselves and had moved to the North. Parker’s direct public actions, his organization of public protests, were so effective that Massachusetts stopped trying to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act.v
In a sermon published in 1853, Theodore Parker said, “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.”
Years later someone anonymously made the statement more concise, rephrasing it as, “The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King repeated this phrase many times, sometimes putting it in quotation marks, sometimes attributing it to Theodore Parker. But the phrase became associated wi