Blogger Hamden Rice’s 2011 essay Most of You Have No Idea What Martin Luther King Actually Did has become an underground classic that rightly resurfaces around King Day events.

On Monday, President Obama — America’s first Black president — will be sworn in for his second term. He will swear his oath of office on a bible used by President Lincoln and a bible used by Martin Luther King Jr.

Let that sink in.

I like to watch TV and video clips of Obama without the sound. As much as I appreciate his oratory, my experience is that he communicates deeper meanings visually. He sends visual coded messages to signal those watching carefully what’s he sees at the crux of a particular issue, problem, conundrum — what are the essential values he’s holding in tension.

With these two bibles he marries the deepest meaning of America’s democratic struggle. He may be signaling to us that there is a cold civil war raging between the American states that he’s been elected to govern. Like the Republican Lincoln, he is negotiating some very dangerous waters.

He may also be telling us that Martin King’s bible was his power generator. That bible contained the blueprint for African-American freedom from enslavement and fear. Obama knows what that bible is and what it means — even if he’s constrained in how he can act on it.

But King’s bible is our Bible. We can act on it. What did Martin read there that empowered him to do what he actually did?

Hamden Rice writes:

“… I was having this argument with my father about Martin Luther King and how his message was too conservative compared to Malcolm X’s message. My father got really angry at me. It wasn’t that he disliked Malcolm X, but his point was that Malcolm X hadn’t accomplished anything as Dr. King had.

I was kind of sarcastic and asked something like, so what did Martin Luther King accomplish other than giving his “I have a dream speech.”

Before I tell you what my father told me, I want to digress. Because at this point in our amnesiac national existence, my question pretty much reflects the national civic religion view of what Dr. King accomplished. He gave this great speech. Or some people say, “he marched.” I was so angry at Mrs. Clinton during the primaries when she said that Dr. King marched, but it was LBJ who delivered the Civil Rights Act.

At this point, I would like to remind everyone exactly what Martin Luther King did, and it wasn’t that he “marched” or gave a great speech.

My father told me with a sort of cold fury, “Dr. King ended the terror of living in the south. …”

For white Americans, Rice’s summation is the necessary icy plunge needed to shock us out of privileged complacency.

For all Americans Monday’s inaugural events should deliver us a similar icy shock — waking us up to the terrors that U.S. policies –especially foreign policies — are visiting on people today. When we read the Bible–Lincoln’s or King’s–which side are we on? Which side is God on?

Rose Marie Berger, author of Who Killed Donte Manning? (available at store.sojo.net), is a Catholic peace activist and a Sojourners associate editor.

“Go light-footed through life. There is a deer in me—made for running, for scampering while the rest of the world around me walks. I am made to find and drink from foreign streams. I am meant to go light-footed through life. So what am I doing in “stability” and “community,” in a lifetime of “Rules” and hierarchy and patriarchy masking as “a woman’s lifestyle”?

But then, on the other hand, how can anyone move freely unless they are rooted in a worldview that is stable and a community that is empowering and a discipline that is strengthening? Disciplined, meaning stretched beyond ourselves to the best of ourselves. Like the well-trained Olympian, like the well-schooled scholar, like the well-formed soul.

It’s easy to bounce through life—going here, trying that, tasting this. What is difficult is trying to figure out what we are supposed to do with what we find, or learn from where we go that will make life even richer. For ourselves, of course. But for the rest of the world, as well.

Don’t be fooled: Deer run, yes, but they never run very far away from the stream at which they drink. The problem with running through life is that it’s possible to outrun our spiritual nourishment. Then we become an empty person in an even emptier place. “The sea is only beautiful,” Patrick Field writes, “if there is a shore.”–Joan Chittister, OSB

From The Art of Life by Joan Chittister (Twenty-Third Publications)

“There is a child in each of us waiting to be born again. It is to those looking for life that the figure of the Christ, a child, beckons. Christmas is not for children. It is for those who refuse to give up and grow old, for those to whom life comes newly and with purpose each and every day, for those who can let yesterday go so that life can be full of new possibility always, for those who are agitated with newness whatever their age. Life is for the living, for those in whom Christmas is a feast without finish, a celebration of the constancy of change, a call to begin once more the journey to human joy and holy meaning.

Let the soldiers stomp through life. Let the cold winds blow. Let the birth points of all our lives be drowned in obscurity. Let the days seem mundane and fruitless. The crib in Bethlehem justifies them all. Jesus has been here before us. Bring on the days of our lives. We have a God who has already walked them and found them holy making.”–Joan Chittister, OSB

–from In Search of Belief by Joan Chittister (Liguori)