When We Love One Another

Today we celebrate the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. who said “Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.” As we honor this man with this Federal holiday in America and celebrations around the world for freedom of all human beings ‘we must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.” He felt that “life’s most persistent and urgent question is: What are you doing for others?” As Christians we should be following his example that “an individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns, to the broader concerns of all humanity.” Wow, powerful stuff!

This past year we also celebrated the life of another man who had many of these same virtues, Nelson Mandela, whose release from prison in 1990 and the passage in South Africa in 1992 of a referendum ending Apartheid, was history making around the world. Many of us in the Episcopal Church in the Northwest did not realize at the time that we were a part of it, but we were?

In the summer of 1983, my wife Doreen and I were fortunate to attend a family camp at Ascension Summer School, Cove, Oregon in the Episcopal Diocese of Eastern Oregon. The featured speaker was unadvertised and was Desmond Tutu of South Africa and our lives were probably changed forever. His message was loud and clear. “Each of us carries a piece of God’s heart within us. And when we love one another, the pieces of God’s heart are made whole.”

Little did we know when we went to family camp in 1985, that then Bishop of Hawaii, Edmond Browning, and wife Patty, would touch our lives. He and Bishop Rustin Kimsey (a personal friend) of the Diocese of Eastern Oregon baptized our two oldest granddaughters at that time. Presiding Bishop Edmund Lee Browning and “No Outcasts” were to be a part of lives forever.

In 1986 Bishop Kimsey and P.B. Browning went to South Africa to attend Bishop Tutu’s enthronement as Archbishop of Cape Town and were an important part of the Episcopal Church’s strong influence in the sanctions against South Africa that led to the 1992 referendum. Bishop Stephen F. Bayne, Jr. of the Diocese of Olympia and his spirit of “Mutual Responsibility and Interdependence in the Body of Christ” were important to Ed Browning.

We met the Brownings again at Ascension Summer School at Cove when Bishop Browning was retiring as P.B.. They ended up retiring in Hood River, Oregon, attending St. Mark’s Episcopal Church where I was Baptized and Confirmed and in youth groups 1946-1953. Ed Browning is a champion of our present Bishop Greg Rickel. What a small world it is indeed!


Chuck

P.S. I would be remiss on this date, as my wife and I are 12th-man fans for 38 years and were at Super Bowl XL in Detroit in 2006, if I didn’t say: “GO HAWKS”!!
Amen