“Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness.” Martin Luther King Jr.

The title to my book Dangerous Love has its origins in a conversation that changed my
life 25 years ago.

I was a first-year law student at Georgetown Law school and struggling to figure out what to do with my life. I knew I wanted to do conflict resolution, but my desire to work outside of the court system, with everyday people, wasn’t really aligning with what I was learning in law school. A mediator recommended I meet with Wallace Warfield, a professor at George Mason University’s Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, so I skipped class and took a train to Fairfax to see if he had any advice for me.

Wallace was a master mediator who had worked at a grassroots level doing conflict work for decades. I waited several hours outside his office to meet him. When I finally got into his office and told him what I wanted to do for a while. He paused for what seemed like an eternity before asking, “What do you know about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.?”

I thought it was an easy question. I unloaded all the knowledge I had picked up about King through the years. He was a hero of mine. Wallace didn’t seem impressed.

“What I’m really asking is, what do you know about how Dr. King did what he did? His inspiration? His motivation? His strategies? He was a brilliant man. But he also had a brilliant plan.”

Wallace then slid a copy of the book Strength to Love by King across his desk and told me to read it.

“If you’re still interested when you’re done, come back and see me,” Wallace said.

I walked down the stairs, went outside, found a shady tree and read, cover-to-cover, the 
entire book.

The book was a collection of sermons King had delivered during the Civil Rights Movement. King brilliantly wove together non-violent philosophy and his Christian faith in a way that brought new, powerful meaning to stories I had read and listened to in church since I was a kid.

At the heart of King’s book was the idea that loving your enemy isn’t easy. Turning the other cheek is scary. Putting yourself in harm’s way to stand up for justice may go against our self-preservation instinct. It takes strength to really love. It requires 
sacrifice, forgiveness a sort of dangerous unselfishness.

But it is love, not hate, that would ultimately transform the conflict that had plagued America since 1619 when the first slaves from Africa arrived on American shores.

Wrote King: “In a real sense all life is interrelated. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be…”

Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction.”

Changing America would require choosing love over fear. Returning hate with love. That was the genius of King.

Several hours later I was knocking on Wallace’s door again. Nothing in my life would ever be the same. That next fall I was enrolled as a Master’s student at the Institute of Conflict Analysis and Resolution. Wallace was my mediation teacher. I keep a copy of Strength to Love next to my bed and read from it regularly to remind me of what it will take to change the world.

It will take changing me. Changing my heart toward the people my heart is at war with. It will take strength. Dangerous love.

Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Dr. King. You changed the course of a country and changed my life and so many others for good. I will keep loving strong and dangerously.