Donald Trump or John Lewis – who is poor in spirit?

Donald Trump or John Lewis – who is poor in spirit?  That surely depends on what I mean by spirit.  In one regard, I can think of no one in his position that’s ever had more spirit.  However, in another way, I find spirit pretty much absent.  So which one am I asking about?  Well, this site is about religion, specifically Christianity.  Which “spirit” do you think I’m talking about?

Donald Trump or John Lewis - who is poor in spirit?The image at the right kind of gives a clue. 

We do need to take away from the connotations of the pawn and king, just a bit.  Keep it at the concept of the size of our ego.  For a Christian, it should be small.  But in the image, we see someone as they are, looking into the mirror and seeing themselves in a very inflated manner.

In other words – a huge ego.  Few people, if any, would fail to see the significance of that image as far as Trump is concerned.

But let me give you a few more clues, just in case they’re needed.

John Lewis – was he poor in spirit?

Here’s an excerpt from something published by AARP:

Lewis was born Feb. 21, 1940, near Troy, Alabama, and attended segregated schools. He graduated from American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, Tennessee, and also earned a bachelor’s degree in religion and philosophy from Fisk University in Nashville.

He was one of the original 13 Freedom Riders, six black and seven white activists who rode buses starting in 1961 into the segregated South to call attention to states’ disregard for U.S. Supreme Court decisions on public bus desegregation. That same year, at age 21, he suffered his first attack: He was punched in the face and kicked in the ribs for his activism when he tried to enter a whites-only bus waiting room in Rock Hill, South Carolina.

Forty-eight years later, one of the men who attacked him, a former Ku Klux Klansman named Elwin Wilson, apologized to Lewis on ABC-TV’s Good Morning America. Wilson died four years later.

“I hold no grudge,” Lewis said in 2009. “Hate is too heavy a burden to bear. … Dr. King taught us to love and forgive, and a lot of people are proud of you. You are leading the way for a lot of people.”

Before Lewis’ election as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in 1963, he had been arrested two dozen times for his nonviolent protests as part of the civil rights movement. That included incarceration for 37 days in the Mississippi State Penitentiary — for entering a whites-only area of a bus station in that state.


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