[Ed note: In the coming weeks, Contemplative Corner will be adding some new voices to our regular contributors. This week, Saralou Hendrickson joins the fold!]

“I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states…. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.  We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.  Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.”
 
This contemplative writer, in this famous letter, quotes St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Paul Tillich and Martin Buber.

But what makes a contemplative?  Father Richard Rohr says that it is contemplative prayer, a “daily practice of deep listening to better connect with ourselves and divine love. Contemplative prayer is the way we work out the experience that words elude, how we learn from and bravely allow ourselves to be transformed by them, even when our normal modes of thinking can’t make sense of them.”

Did this contemplative writer have a daily contemplative prayer practice?  I don’t know.  But he certainly had the sense of unity of all creation that Thomas Merton speaks of when he says “In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers.” (From Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander)

And who was the contemplative writer who is quoted in the first paragraph?  Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail, August 1963!