Seriously.

Years ago but it seems like yesterday, I lived on the south side of Chicago, studying to become a minister. (Hard to believe, I know.) One of my best friends was Al Pitcher, a tall, octogenarian minister and professor emeritus who had invited Martin Luther King Jr. to Chicago in the 1960s and had even been arrested with him. My girlfriend Cindy had a massive crush on him, which didn’t make me jealous because I had a guy-crush myself.

And no wonder. Al built gardens in the projects, shushed us when Gustav Mahler came on the radio, and asked me for career advice when I was 26 and he was 86. He told stories about Paul Tillich, my theologian-crush and reason for studying at the University of Chicago (Fun fact: Martin Luther King’s dissertation was on Tillich.) Al’s sermons addressed how society is split-men and women, gay and straight, white and black and brown, haves and have-nots, the made world and the natural-and how the inequity of these divisions should be called “sin.” (It’s petty piety that frets about curse words and sex while there are bigger fish to haul and fry.)

Last Thursday, watching the first episode of “Eyes on the Prize,” I thought about Al. The show focused on the Alabama bus boycotts and the authoritative appearance of Martin Luther King. He is only 26 and shorter than he looks in the iconic photos. He’s surrounded by others, one man in a community of activists. And when he speaks, there at the Holt Street Church in Montgomery, with weary boycotters who have been walking miles a day for months, there’s something about it. His cheeks and mouth look different, young, as if his embouchure doesn’t know yet what to do with a voice it hasn’t caught up to. His voice seems like something his body has to live up to, if that makes sense. Interviewed in the episode, he reflects a moment, and then that voice starts pouring from within, resonant and round. Sitting in Olin Hall, I thought of Al shushing us, turning up the volume on the radio.

Nowadays, I know, King seems tamed by institutionalization, someone the nation celebrates because of two or three speeches, someone less aggressive or intimidating than other civil rights leaders, who makes a nice figurehead for a civic holiday. Imagine Stokely Carmichael Day or Eldridge Cleaver Day! (This pleasantry doesn’t work if you don’t go google them or know who they are.) But I’ll take the young King and his community.

So I want to propose renaming MLK Day “Holt Street Church Day,” or “Write about Tillich Day,” or “Twenty-Something, Live Up to the Size of Your Voice Day,” but I know these suggestions will never leave committee.

Still, I like “Live Up to Your Voice Day.” It works for now as well as then. It makes me recall the young King, speaking his call and response. Personally, it also reminds me of something Al said to me in Chicago, something about the future (at 86, he was still thinking about vocation).

I was standing on the sidewalk, telling him I’d thought about going overseas after grad school; I could make loads teaching Business English. I thought he’d understand even if he didn’t approve. But he sat me down on a bench as if suddenly dizzy. He looked at me. He saw me. He shook his head.

“Mark,” he said. “What’s your understanding of history? What do you think is happening in the world? What’s your voice for?”

That’s the kind of story we could tell on “Live Up to Your Voice Day.” “What’s your understanding of history?” we could all answer, and “what’s your voice for?” talking about vocations and the future, and whether we’re in them for the worst reasons or the best, for mere mammon or each other, widening “each other” to heal the splits Al fought against, inequities that ravaged King’s world, and Al’s, and still, still, our own.