As far as historians know, three giants of the civil rights and social justice struggles of the twentieth century were never all in the same room at once. Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-1972), Pauli Murray (1910-1985), and Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968) shared guiding principles and beliefs. Heschel and King marched arm-in-arm at Selma. Murray and King worked together for the 1963 March on Washington. All three built on and echoed each other’s thoughts. Yet we know of no time when all three were together in the same room. Some of this may have been a result of the male-centric movement that Murray critiqued.
As your church board meets in these twenty-first century days of horrific violence, discordant readings of reality, and national instability, we want to encourage you to invite these three leaders into your board room all at once and interact with them.
Pauli Murray, in her Dark Testament and Other Poems (1970), writes:
When my brothers try to draw a circle to exclude me,
I shall draw a larger circle to include them.
But I shall not draw it small,
Nor shall I draw it tight.
I shall draw it wide enough
To hold them and me together—
And leave room for the truth.
In his Man is Not Alone (1951), Abraham Joshua Heschel writes:
Authentic faith is more than an echo of a tradition. It is a creative situation, an event. For God is not always silent, and man is not always blind. In every man’s life there are moments when there is a lifting of the veil at the horizon of the known, opening a sight of the eternal. Each of us has at least once in his life experienced the momentous reality of God. Each of us has once caught a glimpse of the beauty, peace and power that flow through the souls of those who are devoted to Him. But such experiences or inspirations are rare events. To some people they are like shooting stars, passing and unremembered. In others they kindle a light that is never quenched. The remembrance of that experience and the loyalty to the response of that moment are the forces that sustain our faith. In this sense, faith is faithfulness, loyalty to an event, loyalty to our response.
In 1957, at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered a sermon titled “Love Which Enemies.” In it, he preached:
Jesus was very serious when he gave this command; he wasn’t playing. He realized that it’s hard to love your enemies. He realized that it’s difficult to love those persons who seek to defeat you, those persons who say evil things about you. He realized that it was painfully hard, pressingly hard. But he wasn’t playing. And we cannot dismiss this passage as just another example of Oriental hyperbole, just a sort of exaggeration to get over the point. This is a basic philosophy of all that we hear coming from the lips of our Master. Because Jesus wasn’t playing; because he was serious. We have the Christian and moral responsibility to seek to discover the meaning of these words, and to discover how we can live out this command, and why we should live by this command.
All three voices call church boards to move beyond reactive postures into a mode of response that we might call “holy expansion”—not a naive openness, but a disciplined spiritual practice of widening the frame when violence and contested narratives tempt us to close ranks.
Murray’s widening circle isn’t about passive tolerance—it’s about active geometrical effort. Notice her verbs: “I shall draw… I shall not draw it small.” She’s not erasing boundaries; she’s redesigning them to “leave room for the truth.” That phrase is crucial for boards navigating the current strife in congregations where some may be feeling in complete possession of the truth.
Heschel helps us understand why this response feels so difficult: in the moment we are often working from memory, not fresh encounter. “Authentic faith is more than an echo of a tradition”—it requires what Heschel calls “loyalty to an event.” For boards, this means the hard work of returning to their own “lifting of the veil” moments when God broke through their certainties, so that they can better respond faithfully to what is happening now.
King crystallizes the cost. He doesn’t sugarcoat it—”painfully hard, pressingly hard”—but insists Jesus “wasn’t playing.” For boards, this means there is no escape hatch. Not into political tribalism, and certainly not into both-sides-ism.
The command—to love those persons who seek to defeat you, and to leave room beyond ourselves for the truth—still stands.
What does Murray seem to be saying about the nature of truth? Why do we need to “leave room for it?
How do you understand Heschel’s claim that “faith is faithfulness, loyalty to an event, loyalty to our response”? What is it we are fundamentally responding to, in his view?
Why do you think King keeps emphasizing that Jesus was not playing, that he was serious? What is King countering in us, and what is he calling us to, in emphasizing that seriousness?
Taken individually, what kind of response to the current crisis of violence and division does Murray… or Heschel…or King … call us to? Encountered together, how does their call to us change?
If your board could, for one evening, gather these three together with you, what would you ask them?
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