Tags
American History, Christianity, Conquering Self-Centeredness, Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Ego, Jesus, Karl Barth, Love, Loyalty, Martin Luther King Jr., MLK Jr., Perspective, Philosophy, preaching, religion, Self-Centeredness, Selfishness, Sermon
“I look at my little daughter every day and she wants certain things — and when she wants them, she wants them. And she almost cries out, ‘I want what I want when I want it!’ She is not concerned about what I think about it or what Mrs. King thinks about it. She wants it. She’s a child, and that’s very natural and normal for a child. She is inevitably self-centered because she’s a child. But when one matures, when one rises above the early years of childhood, he begins to love people for their own sake. He turns himself to higher loyalties. He gives himself to something outside of himself. He gives himself to causes that he lives for and sometimes will even die for. He comes to the point that now he can rise above his individualistic concerns, and he understands then what Jesus meant when he says, ‘He who finds his life shall lose it; he who loses his life for my sake, shall find it.’ In other words, he who finds his ego shall lose his ego, but he who loseth his ego for my sake, shall find it. And so you see people who are apparently selfish; it isn’t merely an ethical issue but it is a psychological issue. They are the victims of arrested development, and they are still children. They haven’t grown up. And like a modern novelist says about one of his characters, ‘Edith is a little country, bounded on the east and the west, on the north and the south, by Edith.’ And so many people are little countries, bounded all around by themselves and they never quite get out of themselves…
And the way to solve this problem is not to drown out the ego but to find your sense of importance in something outside of the self… This is the way to go through life with a balance, with the proper perspective because you’ve given yourself to something greater than self. Sometimes it’s friends, sometimes it’s family, sometimes it’s a great cause, it’s a great loyalty, but give yourself to that something and life becomes meaningful.”
__________
From the sermon “Conquering Self-Centeredness”, delivered by Martin Luther King, Jr. at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama in 1957. Dr. King was assassinated on this day in 1968.
More MLK:
- King’s beautiful and hauntingly prophetic final sermon, given the night before his death
- King describes the moral imperative to oppose the Vietnam war
- King tells us when and how we should break the law
(I couldn’t help posting my favorite King picture. Below: King and Karl Barth outside the Princeton University chapel. On a Sunday in April 1962, King preached the morning service and Barth taught the evening’s small group. Not a bad day’s line-up.)
navigator1965 said:
I owe you an Ultimat vodka martini or two for this one, J.R. In my 2nd (sequel) in-progress book dealing with a unified construct of gender narcissism, I intend to consider select Biblical elements from the perspective of them effectively being an injunction against narcissistic behaviour. The classic example being, of course, the New Testament Pharisees.
That King had already thought along these lines adds legitimacy to such an interpretation. I regret that I am not familiar with King’s work, a deficiency that I shall have to remedy.
You might be interested to note King’s observation that some people’s egocentric behaviour appeared to suggest psychological arrested development. This mirrors (forgive the narcissism pun) the position of narcissism theorist Heinz Kohut, as opposed to Otto Kernberg’s position that narcissism was an issue of pathological personality development.
I’ll be arguing that they were both correct.
jrbenjamin said:
A lot to comment on here. I like the mirror pun, first, by the way, as it brings to mind Gore Vidal’s ridiculous epigram: “A ‘narcissist’ is someone better looking than you are.” Easy for one of the most gargantuan narcissists of the past few generations to say. Similar to how Dylan Thomas, a notorious boozehound, remarked that, “An ‘alcoholic’ is someone you don’t like, who drinks as much as you do.” (I’ll take that martini any day, by the way.)
I would recommend you read the rest of King’s sermon, the entirety of which is linked to in the post. It’s not an earth-shattering message by any means, but his references are tight and may lead you down some rewarding paths of further intellectual exploration. (Among other references, he cites the psychological theories of Adler, Freud, and Jung in order to drill down into the issue of what is man’s most fundamental need.)
Apart from that, you lost me with Kohut and Kernberg, two figures whose work I am utterly unacquainted with. That said, you seem to be on to something, and I trust that your book is going to be a very interesting read. Where can I find a copy? It sounds very academic — is it?
As always, cheers for the comment.
alastair gordon said:
Thank you for the ML King posts – very interesting!
My father, Rev. Ernest Gordon (Dean of the PU Chapel) was the one who invited King and Barth to preach/teach on the same day at Princeton.
I wish I had been aware of the importance of that meeting
then–two moral giants of the 20th century: one standing up to Hitler, the other standing up to American racism–but I was only 9 yrs old. I think it was the first and only time that the two met. If I’m not mistaken, King wrote his thesis on Barth. I remember King very well–he stayed with us more than once–but only have a vague memory of Barth as an old man with white hairs curling out of his ears.
Warm Regards,
Alastair Gordon