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“That one indeed is a man who, today, dedicateth himself to the service of the entire human race. The Great Being saith: Blessed and happy is he that ariseth to promote the best interests of the peoples and kindreds of the earth.”
-Baha'u'llah This essay was written for (and won) an annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day contest sponsored by the Cleveland Area National Service Coalition. It is meant to respond to the question "How does community service encourage respect and appreciation for diversity within our community?" Although not specifically Baha'i, I'd like to think that everything I do has a rather Baha'i take on things. I was thinking about 'Abdu'l-Baha as I wrote the paragraph on service. I hope it will serve as a reminder to others, as it has to me, of why we must continually serve with our whole hearts. It's such a beautiful thing! The Beloved Community “The end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the beloved community.” So said Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at a victory rally 45 years ago. The beloved community. It is the end we seek. It is the ideal we envision. It was the driving purpose behind the lifetime of service we come together to celebrate on the third Monday in January each year. It is time we realized, though, that the works of one man, however great, are not enough. M.L.K. gave us a dream to dream, a foundation to build upon, but the responsibility is ours. We must be the dreamers now. “But how?” the heart asks. “Our busses, our schools are open to all. Our children are free to play together, work together, marry. Everything that was fought for has been won, but still we yearn for the creation of the beloved community. How can this be?” “The end is reconciliation; the end is redemption …” Our laws are changed, but our hearts are not. Our doors are open, but our minds are closed. It is only through coming to know each other in a place where all are truly equal that we can create the beloved community where it matters most: within ourselves. This is where the need for service becomes the most vital issue in preserving the very fiber of our society: the fiber of justice. We cannot yet create the beloved community in the workplace, where a woman makes only 75 cents for every dollar earned by a man. We cannot yet create the beloved community through academics while education remains biased in favor of the cultural status quo. We cannot yet even create the beloved community through our government. If democracy truly offers equal footing to all, why has every president in our history been a Christian, Caucasian male? No, there is clearly only one arena in which we can come to know each other as fellow members of the human family. “Everybody can be great,” Dr. King tells us, “because everybody can serve.” In service, we all strive to humble ourselves before one another. This is what it means to serve. Your Ph.D. means nothing when you’re holding a ladder for an elementary student. The yard you’re raking doesn’t look any neater if you’re a Muslim, an atheist, or a Zoroastrian. And everyone, no matter what shade of pink, yellow, or brown, looks kind of silly when they get paint on their nose. “The end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the beloved community.” But it is not just the end; it is also the beginning. It is the creation, in each of our hearts, of the knowledge that we are one. It is the erasing, slowly, of every dividing line we never realized we had drawn. It is the fostering through service of “a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.” When you serve your neighbor, you serve your world.
Welcome to the beloved community.
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