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By Kenneth H. Carter Jr.
Uited Methodist News Service

Three years ago, in January 2003, I was at the Scarritt-Bennett Center in Nashville, Tenn., for a conference of United Methodist leaders. One morning in the dining hall, a couple invited me to join them for breakfast: James and Eunice Mathews.

The Mathews seemed vaguely familiar to me. He was a retired bishop, and they were known for their commitment to missions. (I note this now with an honest embarrassment.) They shared some of their life together that morning.

Eunice was the daughter of E. Stanley Jones, who served in India as a missionary/evangelist for 40 years and whose books were translated into 18 languages, selling in the millions. James Mathews had been elected a bishop in 1960, without his knowledge (he was in India at the time) and apart from his ambition.

Eunice told me this story: When Martin Luther King Jr. was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, a reception was held for him at United Methodist-related Boston University, where he had received his doctorate. James Mathews was the bishop of Boston at the time, and he and Eunice joined in the line of people to congratulate him.

When King met Eunice, he pointed his finger at her and said, 'It was your father?s biography of Gandhi that changed my life and convinced me of the necessity of nonviolence.'

In Jones? biography of Mahatma Gandhi, the author noted that Gandhi became convinced that nonviolence was a strategy not of the weak but of the strong. In the margin of his copy, King had written, 'This is it!'

James and Eunice Mathews gave me a copy of that biography, and I asked them to sign it, which they did. They also underlined the sentence: 'Nonviolence is the method of the strong, and the only method of the strong.'

If you visit the King Center in Atlanta today, you can see his copy of the biography of Gandhi, opened to page 88, with the words in the margin, 'This is it!'

Each year at about this time, I remember Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi, E. Stanley Jones, and James and Eunice Mathews. And then, as I pray for strength and peace, I am drawn once again to these questions, and to the truth of that single sentence that so inspired a movement.