I would like to see Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” (1963) added to all new Bibles.
I don’t propose this lightly. Three times in the Bible, in three different places, listeners (and they wouldn’t have been readers) are exhorted not to add to, or take away, from specific books. One is about Revelation, one is specifically to the Israelites in Deuteronomy to listen to the law, and the other is in Proverbs: “Every word of God is true….do not add to his words, lest you be proved a liar.” I think it’s safe to say that I won’t propose adding any new words of God to the Bible. I’m advocating something less radical. If we can have letters from Paul, we can have letters from Martin.
The woman in the middle is Pat Rousseau and this past Sunday, she died. This photo was our first, with Mary Malone, and only meeting of the Sunday Afternoon Neon Movies Watching Group, called The Neon Nexus, which was going to be a summer long movie watching group. But Pat went in and out of the hospital for most of the summer, and then quite unexpectedly to me, and to many, she didn’t recover from this last trip. She’d come to me a month ago with her wishes for me to sing at her funeral, and I was appalled that she was talking like that, especially since she seemed fine after one of her hospital visits–but she said, “I just have a feeling.”
Bear Witness 