“Now is the time.” “I have a dream.” “Let freedom ring.” “Free at last.”

These words, used as refrains by Martin Luther King, Jr. in his famous “I Have a Deam” speech at the Lincoln Memorial, continue to resound 40 years later. While recently watching a videotape of the event, I was again moved, not only by his eloquence but by the beautiful spirituality that animated his vision.

As we prepare to celebrate King’s birthday tomorrow, it is appropriate to emphasize the spiritual dimensions of this speech.

Only a person steeped in the Bible could have spoken the way Dr. King did to the 150,000 gathered in Washington D. C. on that famous day. And only a person who had absorbed the message of Jesus could have offered his particular vision of freedom, bodily and spiritual.

“Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice” Dr. King tells the huge audience of people assembled before him, eager to hear his every word.

“I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” he informs his listeners in Washington and around the country.

“Let freedom ring from every hill and every molehill of Mississippi” he proclaims. And he utters the same wish for every other part of America.

“Free at last,” he cries out in ringing final words, “thank God Almighty, we are free at last. Five years later, this quotation from a Negro spiritual would be applied to his terrible assassination.

Throughout, Dr. King saw himself as calling America to be its own best self. That was the new nation whose Declaration of Independence and Constitution promised freedom to every person. The words of those documents Dr. King described as magnificent but their promise was yet to be fulfilled.

It was one hundred years previously that Abraham Lincoln had freed the slaves. But, as the speaker saw clearly, “the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land.”

Dr. King’s appreciation of the brotherhood of all people is another factor that gives spiritual power to his vision. He envisions the day when people of every sort can sit down at the same table as brothers and sisters. This is the banquet spoken of in the great biblical tradition in which he grew up.

He speaks like the prophets in the Hebrew Bible who nourished his soul. “We will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream,” he says, using the words of Isaiah to express his people’s thirst for their rights, human and civil.

Then, in describing his own dream, he alludes to John the Baptist, himself echoing Isaiah:  “I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.”

Dr. King’s commitment to nonviolence forms another precious part of his spirituality. Witnesses who attended the huge rally 40 years ago recall the fear that gripped many people in Washington that day.. “The atmosphere was very tense,” says black leader, Roger Wilkins. Some white people fled the city because of the violence they expected.

They need not have worried, however, because Dr. King insisted that the struggle he led was one based in spiritual power, not violent action. Here is the way he put it: “Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.”

Of course, that would involve suffering. But Dr. King’s faith had room for that. “Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive,” he told his people as he drew upon the spiritual legacy of Jesus. The speaker believed that good would eventually come from the trials that his people had to endure unjustly.

Dr. King gave profound expression to the spiritual gifts that occupied a central place in his own life. Faith, hope, and charity were to hold decisive importance in the great struggle that he led for his people and for the whole nation.

Richard Griffin