HE THOUGHT OF HOWARD THURMAN
T
Howard Thurman was one of the most influential thinkers in the African American
community of the 20th century. Together with people like W.E.B. Dubois, Cornel
West, Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King, Jr.
and others, Thurman put forth ideas that helped to shape the course of the
African American struggle for a place of equality and freedom in American
society. Thurman was also an important figure in the movement towards interfaith
understanding. Few religious or civil rights leaders were unacquainted with
Howard Thurman who, in his later years, was regarded with awe. Indeed Martin
Marty referred to him as a saint, someone whose search for the Good Life, the
God-Life was so profoundly honest, so profoundly worthwhile, so profoundly clear
that people of any and every religious understanding could draw strength and
wisdom from his life and his thought, even though they were couched in the
particular language of his own tradition, Christianity. In these opening days
of the 21st century we have need of all the wisdom we can discover if we are to
confront and overcome the many problems of our society, not least of which is
the enduring American dilemma of race.
Thurman's ideas are found in 23 books, hundreds of articles and essays, and many
sermons and meditations published in numerous magazines and journals. The best
short collection of this material is the Beacon Press book of two years ago, A
STRANGE FREEDOM: THE BEST OF HOWARD THURMAN ON RELIGIOUS
EXPERIENCE AND PUBLIC LIFE, edited by Walter Earl Fluker and Catherine Tumber.
The sub-title of A STRANGE FREEDOM points to one of the central ideas in Thurman's view of the world, namely that religious experience and public life need each other. For
either to be a worthy experience, it must be intertwined with the other and
interact with it in vital and continuous ways.
In an article written in 1939 on 'Mysticism and Social Change," Thurman points
out that mystics must be social activists. The mystic, the individual who seeks
a personal experience of the Ultimate, of God, must return from that experience
into society. The mystic must bring back to social life a sense of the unity of
all things, for social life is always fragmented. "Society", says Thurman,
"ensnares the human spirit in a maze of particulars so that the One cannot be
sensed nor the good realized."
Never to retreat and seek out a vision of the good leaves us prey to the tyranny
of little things, the details of life which we all know can keep us forever busy
and distracted so that we never seek and certainly never understand what the
good might truly be.
By the same token, whatever vision of unity and goodness is experienced by the
mystic, it is of little value unless the mystic is willing to risk that vision
in trying to realize it among other human beings. As Thurman notes, "there is a
profound element of anarchy in all spiritually motivated behavior. The
temptation to pride, arrogance, self-righteousness, is ever present." We must
burn these spiritual flaws out of our system in the fires of social reality as
we seek to realize the good we have glimpsed in our vision.
Thurman wrote of mystics, but he was surely talking of each one of us. The
vision of the good comes not just in top of the mountain or middle of the
wilderness experiences. It also comes from the discipline of prayer and
meditation, from thoughtful reflection, from worship or celebration, experiences
available to all men and women.
His point was that both religious experience and public life are important and
they must feed each other. Religious experience gives us the vision. Public life
gives us the opportunity. We must not exhaust ourselves in public life but
retreat in order to refresh ourselves. Likewise we must not hide out in mystical
life but return from our religious experiencing to bring our visions into
contact with the real world.
We must both seek a vision of the good and try to make that vision real in human
life. This understanding is at the heart of Thurman's life and thought.
It is important to make this assertion at the beginning because there are many
who regard Thurman as too mystical to be of value in the struggles of daily life
and of trying to cope with injustice. Nothing could be further from the truth.
He was a man deeply rooted in various spiritual traditions which taught him the
value of both religious experience and social activism- the black church
experience with its awareness of suffering and its rich tradition of hope, the
meditative disciplines of the Quakers but also their social activism, the
theological inclusiveness of the Hindu tradition and the principle of non-
violence as a guide to social action taught to Thurman by Gandhi, to name
several of the primary sources of his faith and thinking.
Most important of all was the tradition of Jesus, which he felt was often not
the tradition of Christianity. Thurman rejected what he felt was an all too
common understanding of Jesus as an object of worship. Having Jesus as an object
of worship led to contempt for those who did not worship him and to a dangerous
exclusiveness that was characteristic of Christianity and a dagger in its heart
where it appeared. To Thurman, Jesus represented the quintessential religious
person seeking a vision of moral community and personal dignity.
In his book, JESUS AND THE DISINHERITED, a book which Martin Luther King. Jr.
carried with him throughout his years as a civil rights leader, Thurman speaks
of Jesus as a Jew, as a disinherited and poor Jew, as a Jew living under Roman
oppression. He sees in Jesus' response to these conditions a way for his fellow
Negroes to work their way out of the oppressive conditions in which they lived
at the time (1949). Certainly it was wrong to acquiesce, but equally wrong to
resist violently the might of the oppressors.
The way of Jesus, what became Thurman's way, what became King's way as well, was
to learn to love oneself by realizing that the kingdom of heaven is within us.
Do not, in other words, allow an oppressor to determine the quality of my inner
life. Let love flow inward and outward until the oppressor is overwhelmed by
love and ceases to be an oppressor. "Hatred is destructive to hated and hater
alike. Love your enemy, that you may be children of your Father who is in
heaven...The Kingdom of God is within."
Unlike many of his fellow Christians then and now, Thurman believed that many
could and would come to the same place as Jesus, the place of Love, without any
attachment to or perhaps even knowledge of Jesus. To Howard Thurman this was of
no consequence. The reason is something he often pointed out: "What is true in
any religion is in the religion because it is true; it is not true because it is
in the religion." Thurman was not disturbed by the fact that human beings speak
many different religious languages. What matters is Love. Whoever teaches it is
worthy of being followed. Thurman followed Jesus, but respected and honored
those who followed different people and different paths.
That respect for others' ways grows also out of a sense of the importance of
freedom. White Americans have historically resonated to the word liberty, for
that was the word used in colonial times to signify our release from the chains
Great Britain imposed upon us. But for the African American historically the
word has been freedom, freedom from slavery, freedom once slavery was ended from
the numerous legal and economic and social bonds that restricted the life of the
African American. But freedom is something more, and it is this part of freedom
that Thurman stresses.
To Thurman there was a fundamental distinction between liberty and freedom.
Liberty was part of the social contract, related to external activities and
subject to restriction and removal. Freedom "is a quality of being. It cannot
be given and it cannot be taken away...Freedom is the process by which, standing
in my place where I am, I can so act in that place as to influence, order,
alter, or change the future...life is not so fixed that it cannot respond to my
own will, my own inner processes...(Freedom) is the private, intimate, primary
exercise of a profound and unique sense of alternatives...freedom is the sense
of option. Mark you, I do not say freedom is the exercise of option. That may
not be possible. But freedom is the sense of option, the sense of alternatives
which only I can affect. And this is the thing that threatens all dictatorships,
all tyrants, because there is not any way which the external forces in the
environment can reach inside and cause the individual human spirit to relax and
give up its sense of option."
Freedom is ultimately "a discipline of the mind and of the emotions." Freedom
enables us to develop a purpose, a plan, and thus to know when we have strayed
from the plan and are lost. It becomes what Thurman called "a principle of
orderedness" and this in turn helps to guide our behaviour and our action by
teaching us when we are on the right path and when we are not. Freedom is a
quality of the human spirit without which our humanity is significantly
diminished.
One of the essential elements in the success of the civil rights movement was
that those who participated-who marched and were beaten and who went to jail and
lost jobs but who never gave in and who never retaliated-were people who first
learned about freedom and took it into their souls. There is no other way those
people could have withstood fire hoses and vicious dogs, terrifying threats and
economic pressures, the naked face of hatred and violence looking at and working
upon them. But they did, and they changed the destiny of this nation by doing
so. Thurman's understanding of freedom was directly involved in the work of
civil rights leaders and indirectly involved in every person who joined in those
heroic actions.
In his book, THE INWARD JOURNEY, Thurman writes that "it is a strange freedom to
be adrift in the world of men without a sense of anchor anywhere. Always there
is the need of mooring, the need for the firm grip on something that is rooted
and will not give. The urge to be accountable to someone, to know that beyond
the individual himself there is an answer that must be given, cannot be
denied...To be known, to be called by one's name, is to find one's place and
hold it against the hordes of hell. This is to know one's value, for one's self
alone. It is to honor an act as one's very own, it is to live a life that is
one's very own, it is to bow before an altar that is one's very own...It is a
strange freedom."
In this short passage is found Thurman's appreciation for freedom and also
further clues to his understanding of what freedom really is. A brief discussion
of each of these will help to broaden our understanding of the thought of Howard
Thurman.
The first of these is character. Character is about our inner life, our
integrity, our understanding of, commitment to, and willingness to abide by the
highest moral authority we can discover or imagine. In a wonderful sermon on a
passage in Jeremiah, Thurman tells his listeners that the power of the prophets
lies not in their birth nor their education and certainly not in their self-
righteousness. The power of the prophets lies in their faith. "In the last
analysis," he says, "the only thing to which a man may appeal for basic security
is the high quality of his dedication and the supreme worth of that to which he
is dedicated. If a man dedicates his life to the highest that he knows, that
dedication gives to his life added worth and significance." Such dedication is
truly the measure of the individual.
Again unlike so many of his contemporaries in the Christian ministry, Thurman
made clear in this sermon that belief in a particular God as representative of
that "supreme worth" was not important. Indeed he condemns vigorously those who
speak the words of dedication to God but then act as though there is no God,
while he praises those who call themselves atheists but who live out a life of
full commitment to noble ideals. Living in love, striving for justice, avoiding
arrogance and self-righteousness, keeping our eyes focused on the worthiest
ideals-these are the signs of character and integrity that can turn our "strange
freedom" into strength and joy.
Character is also about what we do in a time of suffering. If we endlessly ask
ourselves why we are made to suffer, we learn nothing from our suffering and
advance in no way towards ending that suffering. Thurman believed that suffering
could be a powerful reminder of our mortality. Suffering tells us that we shall
die, that the universe is not structured around our desires and convenience,
that because we are free we shall sometimes make mistakes and bring woe down
upon our heads. All this is to be human.
Whiners learn nothing from suffering, but the person of character learns much:
that always there is someone suffering and in need of what we can offer to them
of our resources; that sometimes on the road to a noble goal there will be rough
places but that this does not make the journey futile, only difficult. Even if
we do not arrive at journey's end, someone will, and we will have made a
contribution to their doing so. Character is built in moments of suffering, or
it is revealed as being too feeble to withstand hardship.
One last aspect of character is written of in Thurman's book on Jesus where he
speaks of the importance of truth-telling. He is talking of those who are
disinherited and the dreadful burdens they must carry. He asks what can they do
and responds with several answers. The oppressed can lie and cheat and deceive
because they feel that all that matters is ultimate victory over those who rule
over them. They can make compromises as a means of surviving. But Thurman looks
to Gandhi's example of speaking truth to power as the right way to act.
"Be simply, directly truthful, whatever may be the cost in life, limb, or
security. For the individual who accepts this, there may be quick and speedy
judgment with attendant loss. There must always be the confidence that the
effect of truthfulness can be realized in the mind of the oppressor as well as
the oppressed." Such a sincere faith in the power of truth rests in the
sincerity of our belief in the transcendent ideals to which we have committed
ourselves. Thurman's understanding of this aspect of character is grounded for
himself in a belief in God, but he recognizes that that was one man's view. He
says that "sincerity in human relations is equal to, and the same as, sincerity
to God." Then he quotes from Matthew 25 where Jesus tells his disciples that the
ultimate judgment of history will rest favorably on those who have visited the
sick and gone to the prisons and fed the hungry and clothed the naked, for in
doing so they have indeed honored God.
Part of Thurman's understanding of freedom is strength of character. This is
built around a deep faith in the highest and best we can know or imagine, a
willingness to suffer for the ideals to which we are attached, and a willingness
at all times to speak truth even in the face of overweening power. Freedom
requires character.
Civility. Civility is grounded in humility. Humility arises out of our awareness
that we are very limited creatures, limited by the frailty of our bodies and the
weakness of our minds. Rather than build ourselves up with a false pride, we
must recognize that every human being is like us. There is a bond of commonality
that crosses every barrier between us natural and artificial. Here is the first
step in learning the importance of civility: that every human being with whom I
engage is sister/brother to me.
Civility also arises out of a sense of gratitude for all that I have been given.
From the wonders of a beautifully structured world to the wonders of human
society with all its interdependent parts, I rely on that which is outside
myself to sustain me. From weather that does not boil me alive as would happen
to me on the planet Mercury to weather that does not instantly freeze my blood
as would happen on the planet Pluto, I am part of a system for which I am not
responsible but that gives me life and sustains me in it. From those who operate
the schools where I was educated and the businesses from whom I purchase needed
goods and the other institutions of society that provide for a wide network of
important events and programs and systems I have received and continue to
receive an abundance of opportunities for living and enjoying and growing.
Civility is a natural outgrowth of gratitude.
Civility arises as well out of our awareness of the need for us to be reconciled
with one another. In his book, DISCIPLINES OF THE SPIRIT, Thurman writes of our
need for reconciliation. "The concern for reconciliation finds expression in
the simple human desire to understand others and to be understood by others."
Clearly such reconciliation cannot take place in the midst of anger, hatred,
violence, and segregation from one another. Thurman writes feelingly of how his
trip to India in the 1930's clarified the horrors of segregation against black
people in America. For he encountered person after person who told him that as a
Christian he had no moral standing in India much less in his own land.
Christianity was the religion of the imperial rulers of the Indian sub-
continent. Christianity, his hosts told him, was the religion, which in America,
allowed people to interrupt a church service to go lynch a black man, then
resume that service. Reconciliation between abused and abuser is possible but it
is very hard, it takes a very long time, and it must begin with civility.
Civility means mutual respect. It means that people listen to each other and do
not try to shout one another down. Civility is gentle, understanding, courteous,
fair. Between friends it is natural. Between those who are hostile to one
another, for whatever reasons, it is the necessary technique and attitude by
which reconciliation can be effected. Civility opens up the possibility that
people who are at odds will not take the next step down the road of hatred,
whose end point is always violence, but at least pause on that road, and maybe
look back.
Perhaps there can even be someday a commitment to nonviolence, which is a vital
part of civility. Violence of a physical or verbal kind keeps us distanced from
one another when our need-Thurman called it a hunger-is precisely to draw close
to each other. "How indescribably wonderful and healing it is to encounter
another human being who listens not only to our words, but manages, somehow, to
listen to us. Everyone needs this and everyone needs to give it as well-thus we
come full circle in love." When we live in love, we will be civil to all whom we
meet.
Civility grows out of humility, out of gratitude, out of our need for
reconciliation. It is necessary for freedom because it helps us to appreciate
the limits of our freedom and the ways in which our freedom is bound up with
that of others.
The final aspect of freedom I will discuss is community, what Thurman liked to
refer to as "the beloved community." Community was the essential element of
human life and of nature. Thurman liked to say that pantheism was appealing to
him in the sense that all nature is divine and thus it is a kind of holy
community of trees and plants and birds and insects and horses and humans. It
was the human collective, of course, that drew his most careful scrutiny and his
deepest praise.
In an essay on prayer, he comments that at first glance human relations seem to
be quite messy and chaotic. "It cannot be denied that a part of the fact of
human society is the will to destroy, to lay waste, and to spend...The bloody
carnage of fratricide is a part of the sorry human tale. And yet always against
this, something struggles. ...Always there is some voice that rises up against
what is destructive, calling attention to an alternative, another way. It is a
matter of more than passing significance that the racial memory as embodied in
the myths of creation, as well as in the dream of prophet and seer, points ever
to the intent to community as the purpose of life...There must be community."
He goes on to say in other essays that while we must not make an "idol of
togetherness," we suffer when we do not appreciate how much we need each other.
"The human spirit cannot abide the enforced loneliness of isolation. We
literally feed on each other; where this nourishment is not available, the human
spirit and the human body-both-sicken and die...The safeguards by which
individuals or groups of men establish the boundaries of intimate and collective
belonging are meant ultimately to guarantee self-nourishment...Life feeds on
life; life is nourished by life." When we thwart this mutual nourishment, we
thwart ourselves. That is why freedom is bound up with community, not at the
opposite pole from it. We nourish each other or we wither.
Thurman believed the American experience was essentially an experience of
community, community hoped for, community partly realized, community denied. We
began our existence as a nation on the basis of a community pulled together by a
common commitment that developed out of a common crisis. We embedded in our
founding documents-the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the
Bill of Rights-- our hopes for this community. We were geographically isolated
and blessed with abundant resources. We made two ghastly mistakes: to enslave
Africans and bring them forcibly here and to pretend that the people already
here did not matter.
The opportunity of genuine community across remarkably different lines of
thought and culture and experience has always been with us. Thurman speaks of
our being provided "the opportunity, not the necessity, mark my word, but the
opportunity, for growth in relatedness, for primary face-to-face discovery of
the secret of life far removed from one's own background and culture...It was as
if the Creator of existence wanted to discover whether or not a certain ideal
could be realized in time and space." That ideal was neighborliness, another
word for community, a willingness to get along with people different in so many
ways from us, to grow in the experience so that new understandings of community
might be developed.
Thurman spent a decade intentionally involved in an experiment to test these
ideas. From 1944-1953 he was co-pastor with a white Presbyterian clergyman of
The Fellowship Church of All Peoples in San Francisco. This was a unique effort
to create both an interracial and an intercultural congregation that would be
open to all branches and varieties of Christianity as well as people from other
religious traditions. Not only was the church founded with black and white
members-almost unheard of 60 years ago-but in the midst of a bitter war against
Japan this church also included Japanese Americans. This kind of religious
venture, crossing so many of the lines that at that time actively divided
people, is what Thurman meant when he spoke of the beloved community.
In the 1945 statement of commitment to the church which those who joined were
asked to affirm, there is this sentence: "I desire to share in the spiritual
growth and awareness of men and women of varied national, cultural, racial, and
creedal heritage united in a religious fellowship." This to Thurman was the
promise of America at its finest and the potential within all human beings and
human collectives.
Community is essential to freedom, for without it we expend huge quantities of
our time and energy hiding behind walls, living in fear, resisting what is most
natural and needed in us, to love and be loved by other human beings. Within
community, because we know where we belong and that we are cared for and that
what we have to offer is appreciated, there is freedom to learn and to grow and
to be all that it is within us to be.
The course of a sermon is far too brief to do justice to the treasury of ideas
that Howard Thurman left behind him when he died in 1981 at the age of 82. These
were the core ideas of his life, expressed in words and deed.
Mystics must sometimes be social activists and social activists must sometimes
be mystics; there needs to be a constant interplay between the ideal and the
real.
Jesus was at the heart of his religious understanding, but whatever form of
spirituality helps us to experience Love and to live in Love, follow that
whatever the words be.
Freedom is a necessary part of the good life, a freedom that is an inward sense
of option that is shaped and strengthened by a discipline of the mind and
emotions. Freedom is grounded in character, civility, and community.
The voice of Howard Thurman is a moral voice. It is an intelligent voice. It is
a voice we need to hear in the 21st century, a voice that was saying more than
70 years ago not to put our trust in things but in each other and in the spirit
of goodness that is the only sure path to a better world. May the spirit of
Howard Thurman be a part of our lives as we move into this challenging century
of opportunity for the human race.
Howard Thurman was one of the most influential thinkers in the African American
community of the 20th century. Together with people like W.E.B. Dubois, Cornel
West, Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King, Jr.
and others, Thurman put forth ideas that helped to shape the course of the
African American struggle for a place of equality and freedom in American
society. Thurman was also an important figure in the movement towards interfaith
understanding. Few religious or civil rights leaders were unacquainted with
Howard Thurman who, in his later years, was regarded with awe. Indeed Martin
Marty referred to him as a saint, someone whose search for the Good Life, the
God-Life was so profoundly honest, so profoundly worthwhile, so profoundly clear
that people of any and every religious understanding could draw strength and
wisdom from his life and his thought, even though they were couched in the
particular language of his own tradition, Christianity. In these opening days
of the 21st century we have need of all the wisdom we can discover if we are to
confront and overcome the many problems of our society, not least of which is
the enduring American dilemma of race.
Thurman's ideas are found in 23 books, hundreds of articles and essays, and many
sermons and meditations published in numerous magazines and journals. The best
short collection of this material is the Beacon Press book of two years ago, A
STRANGE FREEDOM: THE BEST OF HOWARD THURMAN ON RELIGIOUS
EXPERIENCE AND PUBLIC LIFE, edited by Walter Earl Fluker and Catherine Tumber.
The sub-title of A STRANGE FREEDOM points to one of the central ideas in Thurman's view of the world, namely that religious experience and public life need each other. For
either to be a worthy experience, it must be intertwined with the other and
interact with it in vital and continuous ways.
In an article written in 1939 on 'Mysticism and Social Change," Thurman points
out that mystics must be social activists. The mystic, the individual who seeks
a personal experience of the Ultimate, of God, must return from that experience
into society. The mystic must bring back to social life a sense of the unity of
all things, for social life is always fragmented. "Society", says Thurman,
"ensnares the human spirit in a maze of particulars so that the One cannot be
sensed nor the good realized."
Never to retreat and seek out a vision of the good leaves us prey to the tyranny
of little things, the details of life which we all know can keep us forever busy
and distracted so that we never seek and certainly never understand what the
good might truly be.
By the same token, whatever vision of unity and goodness is experienced by the
mystic, it is of little value unless the mystic is willing to risk that vision
in trying to realize it among other human beings. As Thurman notes, "there is a
profound element of anarchy in all spiritually motivated behavior. The
temptation to pride, arrogance, self-righteousness, is ever present." We must
burn these spiritual flaws out of our system in the fires of social reality as
we seek to realize the good we have glimpsed in our vision.
Thurman wrote of mystics, but he was surely talking of each one of us. The
vision of the good comes not just in top of the mountain or middle of the
wilderness experiences. It also comes from the discipline of prayer and
meditation, from thoughtful reflection, from worship or celebration, experiences
available to all men and women.
His point was that both religious experience and public life are important and
they must feed each other. Religious experience gives us the vision. Public life
gives us the opportunity. We must not exhaust ourselves in public life but
retreat in order to refresh ourselves. Likewise we must not hide out in mystical
life but return from our religious experiencing to bring our visions into
contact with the real world.
We must both seek a vision of the good and try to make that vision real in human
life. This understanding is at the heart of Thurman's life and thought.
It is important to make this assertion at the beginning because there are many
who regard Thurman as too mystical to be of value in the struggles of daily life
and of trying to cope with injustice. Nothing could be further from the truth.
He was a man deeply rooted in various spiritual traditions which taught him the
value of both religious experience and social activism- the black church
experience with its awareness of suffering and its rich tradition of hope, the
meditative disciplines of the Quakers but also their social activism, the
theological inclusiveness of the Hindu tradition and the principle of non-
violence as a guide to social action taught to Thurman by Gandhi, to name
several of the primary sources of his faith and thinking.
Most important of all was the tradition of Jesus, which he felt was often not
the tradition of Christianity. Thurman rejected what he felt was an all too
common understanding of Jesus as an object of worship. Having Jesus as an object
of worship led to contempt for those who did not worship him and to a dangerous
exclusiveness that was characteristic of Christianity and a dagger in its heart
where it appeared. To Thurman, Jesus represented the quintessential religious
person seeking a vision of moral community and personal dignity.
In his book, JESUS AND THE DISINHERITED, a book which Martin Luther King. Jr.
carried with him throughout his years as a civil rights leader, Thurman speaks
of Jesus as a Jew, as a disinherited and poor Jew, as a Jew living under Roman
oppression. He sees in Jesus' response to these conditions a way for his fellow
Negroes to work their way out of the oppressive conditions in which they lived
at the time (1949). Certainly it was wrong to acquiesce, but equally wrong to
resist violently the might of the oppressors.
The way of Jesus, what became Thurman's way, what became King's way as well, was
to learn to love oneself by realizing that the kingdom of heaven is within us.
Do not, in other words, allow an oppressor to determine the quality of my inner
life. Let love flow inward and outward until the oppressor is overwhelmed by
love and ceases to be an oppressor. "Hatred is destructive to hated and hater
alike. Love your enemy, that you may be children of your Father who is in
heaven...The Kingdom of God is within."
Unlike many of his fellow Christians then and now, Thurman believed that many
could and would come to the same place as Jesus, the place of Love, without any
attachment to or perhaps even knowledge of Jesus. To Howard Thurman this was of
no consequence. The reason is something he often pointed out: "What is true in
any religion is in the religion because it is true; it is not true because it is
in the religion." Thurman was not disturbed by the fact that human beings speak
many different religious languages. What matters is Love. Whoever teaches it is
worthy of being followed. Thurman followed Jesus, but respected and honored
those who followed different people and different paths.
That respect for others' ways grows also out of a sense of the importance of
freedom. White Americans have historically resonated to the word liberty, for
that was the word used in colonial times to signify our release from the chains
Great Britain imposed upon us. But for the African American historically the
word has been freedom, freedom from slavery, freedom once slavery was ended from
the numerous legal and economic and social bonds that restricted the life of the
African American. But freedom is something more, and it is this part of freedom
that Thurman stresses.
To Thurman there was a fundamental distinction between liberty and freedom.
Liberty was part of the social contract, related to external activities and
subject to restriction and removal. Freedom "is a quality of being. It cannot
be given and it cannot be taken away...Freedom is the process by which, standing
in my place where I am, I can so act in that place as to influence, order,
alter, or change the future...life is not so fixed that it cannot respond to my
own will, my own inner processes...(Freedom) is the private, intimate, primary
exercise of a profound and unique sense of alternatives...freedom is the sense
of option. Mark you, I do not say freedom is the exercise of option. That may
not be possible. But freedom is the sense of option, the sense of alternatives
which only I can affect. And this is the thing that threatens all dictatorships,
all tyrants, because there is not any way which the external forces in the
environment can reach inside and cause the individual human spirit to relax and
give up its sense of option."
Freedom is ultimately "a discipline of the mind and of the emotions." Freedom
enables us to develop a purpose, a plan, and thus to know when we have strayed
from the plan and are lost. It becomes what Thurman called "a principle of
orderedness" and this in turn helps to guide our behaviour and our action by
teaching us when we are on the right path and when we are not. Freedom is a
quality of the human spirit without which our humanity is significantly
diminished.
One of the essential elements in the success of the civil rights movement was
that those who participated-who marched and were beaten and who went to jail and
lost jobs but who never gave in and who never retaliated-were people who first
learned about freedom and took it into their souls. There is no other way those
people could have withstood fire hoses and vicious dogs, terrifying threats and
economic pressures, the naked face of hatred and violence looking at and working
upon them. But they did, and they changed the destiny of this nation by doing
so. Thurman's understanding of freedom was directly involved in the work of
civil rights leaders and indirectly involved in every person who joined in those
heroic actions.
In his book, THE INWARD JOURNEY, Thurman writes that "it is a strange freedom to
be adrift in the world of men without a sense of anchor anywhere. Always there
is the need of mooring, the need for the firm grip on something that is rooted
and will not give. The urge to be accountable to someone, to know that beyond
the individual himself there is an answer that must be given, cannot be
denied...To be known, to be called by one's name, is to find one's place and
hold it against the hordes of hell. This is to know one's value, for one's self
alone. It is to honor an act as one's very own, it is to live a life that is
one's very own, it is to bow before an altar that is one's very own...It is a
strange freedom."
In this short passage is found Thurman's appreciation for freedom and also
further clues to his understanding of what freedom really is. A brief discussion
of each of these will help to broaden our understanding of the thought of Howard
Thurman.
The first of these is character. Character is about our inner life, our
integrity, our understanding of, commitment to, and willingness to abide by the
highest moral authority we can discover or imagine. In a wonderful sermon on a
passage in Jeremiah, Thurman tells his listeners that the power of the prophets
lies not in their birth nor their education and certainly not in their self-
righteousness. The power of the prophets lies in their faith. "In the last
analysis," he says, "the only thing to which a man may appeal for basic security
is the high quality of his dedication and the supreme worth of that to which he
is dedicated. If a man dedicates his life to the highest that he knows, that
dedication gives to his life added worth and significance." Such dedication is
truly the measure of the individual.
Again unlike so many of his contemporaries in the Christian ministry, Thurman
made clear in this sermon that belief in a particular God as representative of
that "supreme worth" was not important. Indeed he condemns vigorously those who
speak the words of dedication to God but then act as though there is no God,
while he praises those who call themselves atheists but who live out a life of
full commitment to noble ideals. Living in love, striving for justice, avoiding
arrogance and self-righteousness, keeping our eyes focused on the worthiest
ideals-these are the signs of character and integrity that can turn our "strange
freedom" into strength and joy.
Character is also about what we do in a time of suffering. If we endlessly ask
ourselves why we are made to suffer, we learn nothing from our suffering and
advance in no way towards ending that suffering. Thurman believed that suffering
could be a powerful reminder of our mortality. Suffering tells us that we shall
die, that the universe is not structured around our desires and convenience,
that because we are free we shall sometimes make mistakes and bring woe down
upon our heads. All this is to be human.
Whiners learn nothing from suffering, but the person of character learns much:
that always there is someone suffering and in need of what we can offer to them
of our resources; that sometimes on the road to a noble goal there will be rough
places but that this does not make the journey futile, only difficult. Even if
we do not arrive at journey's end, someone will, and we will have made a
contribution to their doing so. Character is built in moments of suffering, or
it is revealed as being too feeble to withstand hardship.
One last aspect of character is written of in Thurman's book on Jesus where he
speaks of the importance of truth-telling. He is talking of those who are
disinherited and the dreadful burdens they must carry. He asks what can they do
and responds with several answers. The oppressed can lie and cheat and deceive
because they feel that all that matters is ultimate victory over those who rule
over them. They can make compromises as a means of surviving. But Thurman looks
to Gandhi's example of speaking truth to power as the right way to act.
"Be simply, directly truthful, whatever may be the cost in life, limb, or
security. For the individual who accepts this, there may be quick and speedy
judgment with attendant loss. There must always be the confidence that the
effect of truthfulness can be realized in the mind of the oppressor as well as
the oppressed." Such a sincere faith in the power of truth rests in the
sincerity of our belief in the transcendent ideals to which we have committed
ourselves. Thurman's understanding of this aspect of character is grounded for
himself in a belief in God, but he recognizes that that was one man's view. He
says that "sincerity in human relations is equal to, and the same as, sincerity
to God." Then he quotes from Matthew 25 where Jesus tells his disciples that the
ultimate judgment of history will rest favorably on those who have visited the
sick and gone to the prisons and fed the hungry and clothed the naked, for in
doing so they have indeed honored God.
Part of Thurman's understanding of freedom is strength of character. This is
built around a deep faith in the highest and best we can know or imagine, a
willingness to suffer for the ideals to which we are attached, and a willingness
at all times to speak truth even in the face of overweening power. Freedom
requires character.
Civility. Civility is grounded in humility. Humility arises out of our awareness
that we are very limited creatures, limited by the frailty of our bodies and the
weakness of our minds. Rather than build ourselves up with a false pride, we
must recognize that every human being is like us. There is a bond of commonality
that crosses every barrier between us natural and artificial. Here is the first
step in learning the importance of civility: that every human being with whom I
engage is sister/brother to me.
Civility also arises out of a sense of gratitude for all that I have been given.
From the wonders of a beautifully structured world to the wonders of human
society with all its interdependent parts, I rely on that which is outside
myself to sustain me. From weather that does not boil me alive as would happen
to me on the planet Mercury to weather that does not instantly freeze my blood
as would happen on the planet Pluto, I am part of a system for which I am not
responsible but that gives me life and sustains me in it. From those who operate
the schools where I was educated and the businesses from whom I purchase needed
goods and the other institutions of society that provide for a wide network of
important events and programs and systems I have received and continue to
receive an abundance of opportunities for living and enjoying and growing.
Civility is a natural outgrowth of gratitude.
Civility arises as well out of our awareness of the need for us to be reconciled
with one another. In his book, DISCIPLINES OF THE SPIRIT, Thurman writes of our
need for reconciliation. "The concern for reconciliation finds expression in
the simple human desire to understand others and to be understood by others."
Clearly such reconciliation cannot take place in the midst of anger, hatred,
violence, and segregation from one another. Thurman writes feelingly of how his
trip to India in the 1930's clarified the horrors of segregation against black
people in America. For he encountered person after person who told him that as a
Christian he had no moral standing in India much less in his own land.
Christianity was the religion of the imperial rulers of the Indian sub-
continent. Christianity, his hosts told him, was the religion, which in America,
allowed people to interrupt a church service to go lynch a black man, then
resume that service. Reconciliation between abused and abuser is possible but it
is very hard, it takes a very long time, and it must begin with civility.
Civility means mutual respect. It means that people listen to each other and do
not try to shout one another down. Civility is gentle, understanding, courteous,
fair. Between friends it is natural. Between those who are hostile to one
another, for whatever reasons, it is the necessary technique and attitude by
which reconciliation can be effected. Civility opens up the possibility that
people who are at odds will not take the next step down the road of hatred,
whose end point is always violence, but at least pause on that road, and maybe
look back.
Perhaps there can even be someday a commitment to nonviolence, which is a vital
part of civility. Violence of a physical or verbal kind keeps us distanced from
one another when our need-Thurman called it a hunger-is precisely to draw close
to each other. "How indescribably wonderful and healing it is to encounter
another human being who listens not only to our words, but manages, somehow, to
listen to us. Everyone needs this and everyone needs to give it as well-thus we
come full circle in love." When we live in love, we will be civil to all whom we
meet.
Civility grows out of humility, out of gratitude, out of our need for
reconciliation. It is necessary for freedom because it helps us to appreciate
the limits of our freedom and the ways in which our freedom is bound up with
that of others.
The final aspect of freedom I will discuss is community, what Thurman liked to
refer to as "the beloved community." Community was the essential element of
human life and of nature. Thurman liked to say that pantheism was appealing to
him in the sense that all nature is divine and thus it is a kind of holy
community of trees and plants and birds and insects and horses and humans. It
was the human collective, of course, that drew his most careful scrutiny and his
deepest praise.
In an essay on prayer, he comments that at first glance human relations seem to
be quite messy and chaotic. "It cannot be denied that a part of the fact of
human society is the will to destroy, to lay waste, and to spend...The bloody
carnage of fratricide is a part of the sorry human tale. And yet always against
this, something struggles. ...Always there is some voice that rises up against
what is destructive, calling attention to an alternative, another way. It is a
matter of more than passing significance that the racial memory as embodied in
the myths of creation, as well as in the dream of prophet and seer, points ever
to the intent to community as the purpose of life...There must be community."
He goes on to say in other essays that while we must not make an "idol of
togetherness," we suffer when we do not appreciate how much we need each other.
"The human spirit cannot abide the enforced loneliness of isolation. We
literally feed on each other; where this nourishment is not available, the human
spirit and the human body-both-sicken and die...The safeguards by which
individuals or groups of men establish the boundaries of intimate and collective
belonging are meant ultimately to guarantee self-nourishment...Life feeds on
life; life is nourished by life." When we thwart this mutual nourishment, we
thwart ourselves. That is why freedom is bound up with community, not at the
opposite pole from it. We nourish each other or we wither.
Thurman believed the American experience was essentially an experience of
community, community hoped for, community partly realized, community denied. We
began our existence as a nation on the basis of a community pulled together by a
common commitment that developed out of a common crisis. We embedded in our
founding documents-the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the
Bill of Rights-- our hopes for this community. We were geographically isolated
and blessed with abundant resources. We made two ghastly mistakes: to enslave
Africans and bring them forcibly here and to pretend that the people already
here did not matter.
The opportunity of genuine community across remarkably different lines of
thought and culture and experience has always been with us. Thurman speaks of
our being provided "the opportunity, not the necessity, mark my word, but the
opportunity, for growth in relatedness, for primary face-to-face discovery of
the secret of life far removed from one's own background and culture...It was as
if the Creator of existence wanted to discover whether or not a certain ideal
could be realized in time and space." That ideal was neighborliness, another
word for community, a willingness to get along with people different in so many
ways from us, to grow in the experience so that new understandings of community
might be developed.
Thurman spent a decade intentionally involved in an experiment to test these
ideas. From 1944-1953 he was co-pastor with a white Presbyterian clergyman of
The Fellowship Church of All Peoples in San Francisco. This was a unique effort
to create both an interracial and an intercultural congregation that would be
open to all branches and varieties of Christianity as well as people from other
religious traditions. Not only was the church founded with black and white
members-almost unheard of 60 years ago-but in the midst of a bitter war against
Japan this church also included Japanese Americans. This kind of religious
venture, crossing so many of the lines that at that time actively divided
people, is what Thurman meant when he spoke of the beloved community.
In the 1945 statement of commitment to the church which those who joined were
asked to affirm, there is this sentence: "I desire to share in the spiritual
growth and awareness of men and women of varied national, cultural, racial, and
creedal heritage united in a religious fellowship." This to Thurman was the
promise of America at its finest and the potential within all human beings and
human collectives.
Community is essential to freedom, for without it we expend huge quantities of
our time and energy hiding behind walls, living in fear, resisting what is most
natural and needed in us, to love and be loved by other human beings. Within
community, because we know where we belong and that we are cared for and that
what we have to offer is appreciated, there is freedom to learn and to grow and
to be all that it is within us to be.
The course of a sermon is far too brief to do justice to the treasury of ideas
that Howard Thurman left behind him when he died in 1981 at the age of 82. These
were the core ideas of his life, expressed in words and deed.
Mystics must sometimes be social activists and social activists must sometimes
be mystics; there needs to be a constant interplay between the ideal and the
real.
Jesus was at the heart of his religious understanding, but whatever form of
spirituality helps us to experience Love and to live in Love, follow that
whatever the words be.
Freedom is a necessary part of the good life, a freedom that is an inward sense
of option that is shaped and strengthened by a discipline of the mind and
emotions. Freedom is grounded in character, civility, and community.
The voice of Howard Thurman is a moral voice. It is an intelligent voice. It is
a voice we need to hear in the 21st century, a voice that was saying more than
70 years ago not to put our trust in things but in each other and in the spirit
of goodness that is the only sure path to a better world. May the spirit of
Howard Thurman be a part of our lives as we move into this challenging century
of opportunity for the human race.
