The Bullet

continued

I looked at this twenty-nine-year-old man - a year younger than me - at his little daughter Yoki, just turned three, at thirteen-month-old Martin Luther King III, and wondered where such serenity came from.

As I followed Dr. King's successful battles over the next ten years, I'd think of Grandfather's unavailing appeals for racial justice, of my own failed struggles at Northwestern, and wonder what his secret was.

"Like anybody else I'd like to live a long life," he said in Memphis the night before he was shot. "But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will."

That he was a fallible human being, he knew all too well. But that didn't concern him either. His hope was not in himself. "I want to hear a voice saying to me one day," he declared in that same fateful address on the eve of his assassination, '''I take you in and bless you because you tried.'''

We are ... heirs, through hope, of thy everlasting kingdom.
                                            Book of Common Prayer

For Dr. King, the hope of being "taken in" to a realm of eternal blessing was the anchor that held him steady. How I wish I'd been a believer when I had a chance to talk to him about heaven! How I'd like to have asked over the collard greens how he envisioned that future existence.

I didn't ask, though. All I'm sure of is that he did envisage it. Unknowable though the real heaven is, and far short as all human conceptions of it must fall, we cannot hope for something we can't imagine at all.

In November, 1972, a young man from a writing class I'd taught in Uganda came to New York on a journalism internship. Concerned about how Kiloto would handle the cold, I'd bought and borrowed a winter wardrobe for him.

But cold, it turned out, was not the problem. The problem was Kiloto's reaction to gray skies and bare-branched trees. Uganda is a land of year-round color - vibrant flowers, jewel-like birds.

"I cannot remain in your country," he would say. "I cannot live in such a place."

"This is temporary!" John and I kept telling him. "Soon everything will be different. Trees will leaf out. Flowers will bloom."

Kiloto could not conceive of such a transformation. Mental images of the beauty-to-be, so clear to us, were absent for him. Kiloto had never seen an apple tree in blossom. He went home in January.

No anchor held for him.

Hope needs images, needs to know about apple blossoms. I discovered this for myself a couple of years after Kiloto's experience when I visited my sister in Indonesia, where her husband worked with the Agricultural Development Council. Caroline and Alan had planned a wonderful car trip for me. 'The Puncak!" they told me excitedly. "Imogiri! Yogyakarta! Ujung Pandang!"

I looked at them blankly. The unpronounceable names told me nothing.

Then we set out through the most beautiful countryside I'd ever seen. Temples, rice paddies, terraced green hillsides. At our first overnight stop, the bougainvillea at my window framed the symmetrical purple cone of a volcano. It was so breathtakingly lovely that I pleaded to stay on.

Caroline shut her suitcase and carried it to the car. "You'll enjoy Borobudur even more," she said.

I was sure I wouldn't. But of course that colossal ninth-century Buddhist temple rising from the plain like the many-leveled mountain of Dante's heaven is one of the vivid memories of my life.

And so it went at each stopover. Me hating to depart. "Oh, do we have to leave?" Caroline and Alan practically dragging me away, to take me over my protests to a still more wondrous place.

I've wondered if the departure called death isn't a little like this. Do I have to go so soon? Can't I stay just a while longer? These places, these people, this beauty, I know. Of heaven I have formed no picture.