Friday Reflection Part I: Frederick Denison Maurice and Martin Luther King, Jr.
What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? Micah 6:8
By the time you read these Friday Reflections, we will be two days away from Passion/Palm Sunday and the beginning of Holy Week. At the same time we at Saint Stephen’s will conclude a week of commemorating a remarkable group of Holy Persons, which includes Frederick Denison Maurice (1805-1872) on April 1 and Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968) on April 6; it is these two figures I wish to write about this week.
In a horrible time such as this one, the siege of COVID-19, as people of faith we often look for models of guidance and inspiration from within our own traditions on how we are to live our lives, often from a clergy person. The two figures here are both clergy persons, Frederick Denison Maurice, an Anglican priest and Martin Luther King Jr. a Baptist minister. But both Maurice and King are much more than clergy persons in that they created and sustained a full engagement with the world, an engagement that was grounded in their calling.
Click below for Maurice’s biography from A Great Cloud of Witnesses
I should begin this short reflection by saying that Frederick Denison Maurice was a very complicated soul who lived and worked in different worlds and, as a result, was often neither understood nor accepted by his church and fellow priests or by his colleagues outside of the church. There is, however, evidence that he was trusted by his students, whether in London or in Cambridge. Maurice was an Anglican priest, but he was also a radical “Christian Socialist” who called for a palpable expression of the renewal of “faith in a God who has redeemed mankind.” Throughout his professional life, Maurice was priest and chaplain, ecumenist, intellectual, academic, and professor who founded two colleges, a practicing theologian and writer, a renowned preacher, a husband and father, and a deeply committed Christian Socialist and a founder of the Christian Socialist Movement in England. Maurice believed education, in concert with a life in God, was a necessary and critical component in the lives of the poor. After Maurice was dismissed by King’s College London, where he was professor of English, History, and Theology, for his leadership in the Christian Socialist Movement and for the alleged unorthodoxy of his book, Theological Essays, he founded first Queen’s College (1848) and in 1854, after the demise of the Christian Socialist Movement, the Working Men’s College for which he became the principal. His theological and philosophical writing argued in different ways that “political and economic righteousness” must be a demand and that “moral edification” was essential. Further, Maurice believed strongly that “Christianity rather than secularist doctrines was the only sound foundation for social reconstruction,” one of the primary reasons he founded both colleges.
To further complicate matters, Maurice was in many ways a contemplative who lived in what Thomas Merton called “a world of action.” The tension was there, always. His time in London (1836—1866) was grounded in his advocacy of the poor and under-privileged. That urban social engagement was in conflict with his contemplative spirit though, as Maurice saw it, not with his priesthood and chaplaincies. Because he was a social liberal on the one hand and orthodox in matters of the church and the Anglican Tradition on the other hand, he was easily misunderstood and often criticized by his fellow clergy. But Maurice also had a very nontraditional view of the priesthood. In London, Maurice was seen as mostly an outlier because much of what he did and was good at doing, was perceived as having nothing to do with what it meant to be a priest. It is worth noting that when Maurice became a chaplain at Guy’s Hospital in London in 1836 was when he began his commitment to the advocacy for the care of the poor.
When Maurice was called to a professorship at Cambridge in the Fall of 1866, he returned to his contemplative life where tensions were fewer and he could exercise his commitment to social justice and mercy in a different way; in his teaching, his work with his students, his parish ministry and his allegiance to social action in London from afar. Perhaps the most apt description of Frederick Denison Maurice is that he was always a man of God, on the basis of which he shaped his life to live justly in everything he did. For me, the clearest examples of this were in his teaching and preaching, in his founding of the Worker’s Men College and serving as principal even as he moved to Cambridge, and his service on The Royal Commission dealing with the Contagious Diseases Act of 1871, a time when Maurice was in very poor health. Nevertheless, he went to London for the meetings and in doing so accelerated his death. Maurice is said to have “awakened Anglicanism to the need for concern with the problems of society,” for social justice.
Click below for King’s biography from A Great Cloud of Witnesses
I’ve discovered that it is easier to write about MLK, Jr. because we know so much more about him as Civil Rights Leader and Martyr, as one called to justice and service with a deeply personal and public commitment to the equality of race, color and creed and the dignity of all persons in the eyes of God. Like Frederick Denison Maurice, Martin Luther King began his call to justice in 1955 as a pastor of a church in Montgomery, Alabama and, from that point forward, became more and more of a huge presence in the moral fabric of this country, and continued to expand his “portfolio of justice” on behalf of African Americans, and the poor and disenfranchised, until his assassination in 1968, when he became even more significant and his presence even greater in the fabric of American life. Since then, King’s life and work have been comprehensively documented.
Living 100 years after Frederick Denison Maurice, Martin Luther King could do and be everything that Maurice could not be (including being a martyr). Two different times and cultures, 18th Century England and 20th Century America and two different clergypersons with two different ways of living justly.
Perhaps we can end as we began--with the verse from Micah-- knowing that we have encountered two practitioners of a just life in service. In Part II, we will encounter Saint Stephen’s clergy and parishioners who practiced the same justice, compassion, and kindness and sought to do so walking in humility. So we move into Holy Week remembering Maurice and King and the community of Saint Stephen’s and ask them join us as we journey to Jerusalem with the Lord. Our map? The words from prophet Micah with which we began: What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God?
—Father Peter Kountz
About Friday Reflections:
Every Friday, Father Peter and Suzanne Glover Lindsay share written reflections highlighting a particular theme. This week's Friday Reflection explores the topic Living Justly.