Martin Luther King, Jr., in his final book, titled his last chapter “The World House.” King explained that this metaphorical house expanded the plot of a story that a deceased novelist had not lived to write: “A widely separated family inherits a house in which they have to live together.” This story, King wrote, represented the great problem that now confronted humanity.

The human dilemma arose from the diversity of our “widely separated family” that, King reminded his readers, included Jew, Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Hindu, Black, and white. Separated by ideas, cultures, and economic interests but recognizing that it lived in the same house, it was a family “who, because we can never again live apart, must learn somehow to live with each other in peace.”

As a Christian minister, Martin Luther King may well have been thinking of the Gospel of John, which portrays Jesus declaring that “in my Father’s house,” are “many mansions” or “many dwelling places” (John 14:2). In John’s image, separate dwellings were within an encompassing house, perhaps sharing a central courtyard or gathering place. This architectural image of diverse people within a single house has appeared across the centuries in many religious traditions, the symbol of a shared community of commitment that realizes its own identity through identification with humanity, with all living things, with nature, with a Creation.

Jalal ad-Din Mohammad Rumi was a Muslim poet, theologian, and mystic who lived in Persia 800 years ago. Today, his poetry has been translated into many languages and is influential around the world. As a religious thinker, Rumi emphasized two ideas: first, the unity of all being and, second, the very different ways persons experience that unity. Rumi’s poetry represented those two ideas through images drawn from everyday life: individual jugs of water being poured into a huge basin, or people taking their separate seats at a long table and seeing the sunlight fall on each wall of the dining room.

Sunlight looks a little different on this wall
Than it does on that wall
And a lot different on this other one,
But it is still one light.

Beyond the diversity that individuals and communities bring to “the world house,” King emphasized that we share, today, responsibility for the house we have “inherited.” This will require, King wrote, a revolution of values. “We must rapidly begin the shift from a ‘thing’-oriented society to a ‘person’-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered. A civilization can flounder as readily in the face of moral and spiritual bankruptcy as it can through financial bankruptcy.” King concluded the chapter by underscoring “the fierce urgency of now.” Both the United States and every other nation dwelling in “the world house” must confront the fact that “in this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late.”

In her beautifully written book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (Random House, 2020), Isabel Wilkerson returns—after 53 years—to a metaphor that parallels the world house of Martin Luther King. Wilkerson carefully inspects the inherited property and acknowledges that “not one of us was here when this house was built. Our immediate ancestors may have had nothing to do with it, but here we are, the current occupants of a property with stress cracks and bowed walls and fissures built into the foundation. We are the heirs to whatever is right or wrong with it. We did not erect the uneven pillars or joists, but they are ours to deal with now” (p. 16).

Fifty-three years after King’s warning that “there is such a thing as being too late,” we still have the shared responsibility to repair and maintain the world house we inherited. We still confront the question that served as the title of Martin Luther King’s last book: Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?