Howard Thurman: The Twenty-First Century and Beyond
THE HOWARD THURMAN LECTURE
September 18, 2002
PROGRAM OF BLACK CHURCH STUDIES
CANDLER SCHOOL OF THEOLOGY
EMORY UNIVERSITY
Title: Howard Thurman: The Twenty-First Century and Beyond
What shall we do with Howard Thurman in this twenty-first century? He was born near the close of the nineteenth century. He lived through most of the twentieth century. But my contention is that his life and thought belong to the twenty-first century and beyond. At a seminar held at the World Methodist Council in Brighton, England, July, 2001, titled "Spirituality and the 21st Century," Steve Harper pointed to the significant difference between 1901 and 2001 as having to do with the question today of, "How do I live my faith and share my faith with my neighbor, that is, people from all over the world?" A significant concern today may be whether to read the Bible or surf the Internet, etc., he asserted, noting the vast technological divide between the two eras. He suggested that perhaps we don't begin at any of those points but, rather, with the human heart. For despite all our differences we all share one thing-hunger in the heart for God. He characterized us in this century as seeking to satisfy that hunger in some way, and suggested that our hunger for God today will define our spirituality. He returned us to the often-quoted Augustinian phrase, ""We are restless until we rest in God." In our attempt to find ourselves in that journey of faith, Harper stated that the Church needs some visionaries like Leonard Sweet (Post-Modern Pilgrims, Nashville: Broadman-Holman Press, 2000). Interestingly enough, Leonard Sweet and I were both at Colgate Rochester Divinity School at the same time in the 1970's, the nurturing ground of Howard Thurman and where Thurman came during our student days to deliver the Walter Rauschenbusch Lecture. Leonard Sweet probably had some Thurmanic influence on his way to becoming prophetic genius of the super technological age.
Twelve years ago, I had the privilege of hosting and directing a Howard Thurman Convocation at the University of South Florida, with the help of my Department, Religious Studies, and a number of other components of the University. The theme of that three-day Convocation was "The Human Search: Howard Thurman and the Quest for Freedom"; the proceedings were published by Peter Lang Publishers in a volume by that title. A number of well-known scholars and critics were participants, including Charles H. Long, James H. Cone, Lerone Bennett Jr., Alton Pollard, III, Luther E. Smith, Walter L. Fluker, and others. The third and final section of the conference focused on Thurman and contemporary quests for freedom, "Insights for the Future of Human Life." Of course, we had in mind the coming new millennium upon which we are presently embarked. It is this final section I want to use as a springboard for this present discussion: "Howard Thurman: The 21st Century and Beyond."
Those few twelve years, 1990 to the present, seem like a vast stretch of time really. So much has transpired since then, so many journeys and quests on the parts of those who were participants and others of us: for that's what it's all about, isn't it? Journeying, questing? Those whom Thurman affected with his mystic dynamism, his infectious enthusiasm for life's pathway, they were and are known to embark on their own particular journeys. So in that vast stretch of twelve years much has caught the dreams and fancy and led many in various directions. St. Sue, that is, Sue Bailey Thurman, who was our honored guest and interpreter at that convocation, St. Sue took the final steps of her journey on this side and crossed over and graced the other side with the charm and beauty of her spirit.
Those who have continued journeying on this side have pursued ways of becoming of greater use and benefit to the natural, human, and spiritual enterprise. We have written creative and scholarly articles and books. We have designed and taught courses coming out of our deepest commitments and life goals. We have shifted and/or expanded our academic and religious positions to where we could do the greatest good and realize our best potentials. We have traveled nationally and internationally and broadened and deepened our relations and commitments to the human project. And the Howard Thurman Educational Trust and Papers Project have done quite a bit of shifting, as well, thanks to the innovativeness and efforts of Walter Fluker and the generous favors and grants of educational institutions and foundations.
So the time span has seemed vast, for the changes and transitions have been great and phenomenal, not the least of which and the most astonishing and revealing of which has been and is September 11, 2001-the world's Millennial Mesmerism.
How many of us have had to fall back upon sources in our lives like Thurman in order to recover balance and sanity from that staggering moment in time? One source that strikes me is from Thurman's book The Search for Common Ground (Harper and Row, 1971):
In the conflicts between man and man, between group and group, nation and nation, the loneliness of the seeker for community is sometimes unendurable....There is a spirit in man and in the world working always against the thing that destroys and lays waste. Always he must know that the contradictions of life are not final or ultimate; he must distinguish between failure and a many-sided awareness so that he will not mistake conformity for harmony, uniformity for synthesis. He will know that for all men to be alike is the death of life in man, and yet perceive the harmony that transcends all diversity and in which diversity finds its richness and significance (p. 6).
These insights land us right where we are in our millennial quagmire. These words ring true, yet we must ponder these things over and over in our minds.
First, in my discussion I refer to our authors of that final chapter of the Convocation volume (The Human Search) for their projections as to how Thurman relates to this stunning advent of the new millennium and beyond. Alton Pollard, John Cartwright, and Darrell Fasching each discerned a Thurman who has inestimable value for this age in an ongoing timeless sense.
Each author/scholar interprets Thurman's significance with respect to his own area of academic and social or religious concern. Pollard`s analysis is from the standpoint of the sociology of religion. As with his book on Thurman (Mysticism and Social Change, Peter Lang, 1992), he focuses on the social witness of Howard Thurman. He effectively answers those social activists who were and are unduly critical of Thurman for not taking what they considered a definite and clear stand in the "movement" of the times of the 1950's and 1960's, those who failed to see the unique contributions Thurman was actually making according to the "grain in his wood." Thus, Pollard perceptively and successfully discerns and communicates the vision of Thurman in light of the failures and successes and the future of African American religion, civil rights, and Black consciousness ("The Future of African-American Religion: Howard Thurman, Civil Rights and Black Consciousness," pp. 145-163 in The Human Search, Peter Lang, 1992).
Thurman was and is the steadying force behind those in the heat of the action; he is the stabilizer, the spiritual guide, the mind behind the "movement" movers and shakers. As Pollard says, Thurman reminds those in the thick of things of how to connect "empirical conditions" with "cosmic concerns." He reminds them how "the incentive for nonviolent strategy" in the movement must "issue from a spiritual base and...out of a profound sense of one's personal and cultural deep-rootedness." Pollard accurately perceives the vitality of Thurman's vision from the sociological standpoint, as he states:
Crucial insights are always to be gained from the political and intellectual spheres - culture, church, history, the social order, and so forth-but the compelling vantage point, finally, must be inclusive of and beyond the particular, even long-lived social concern. Without this holistic uniting of the objective and subjective, the inner and the outer, Thurman believed it impossible for any movement to maintain the necessary increment for incentive-social or otherwise. Any line of reasoning that is void of Presence and dogmatically self-protecting prohibits persons and groups, African-American, Native American, Hispanic, Euro-American or whoever, from fully investing in their potential (p.155).
This is insightful discernment of Thurman's vision, his wisdom for all times, and it ties in with what others see from other perspectives. And as does everything else from Thurman's thinking, Thurman draws it directly from his own experience. Pollard appreciates what so many others failed to grasp, the true method of this mystic thinker: "Thurman, remaining true to the essential resources of his own life, consistently and actively engaged society through the transforming experience of mystic encounter"(p. 161). This use of the "transforming experience of mystic encounter" is a refreshing way of approaching the stuff of life, the value of which is not readily apparent to traditionalist or one-dimensional thinking, if I may use those terms.
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd lamented the occurrence of the opposite circumstance in our present religious/social/political crisis in a recent article. She quoted what she called the "chillingly profound words " scribbled on a wall in Washington: "Dear God, save us from the people who believe in you." She goes on to express deep fears and regrets regarding the failures of our religions in today's society.
The atrocities and brutalities and repressions committed in the name of God fill us with a greater need for God, or some spiritual solace. Dark days-New York, Washington, Central Asia, the Middle East, the Archdiocese of Boston-make us look inward and affirm the power of faith to make the unbearable slightly more bearable. Beyond Prozac and Paxil, religion should be able to step into the breach. But there's the rub. At precisely the moment when religion should have a calming influence, it has a dispiriting influence. Just when people need religion to bring them peace, it brings them war or crisis or abuse or just plain pain. As the need for spirituality is growing, the credibility of various faiths is waning. Instead of addressing itself to the angels in our nature, religion seems to be inspiring the demons in our nature ("Faiths are failing us in a time of need," St. Petersburg Times, 9 April 2002, p. 11A).
Of course, this tendency in religion is not new. In fact, we know it as a part of the history of religions in the world. The Crusades, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the Inquisition, slavery and colonialism, are only some of the most outstanding examples of religion becoming the tool of evil human ventures. Aware of all of this, Thurman spoke to the individual human spirit, which has the power and capacity to subvert such evils.
Beverly J. Lanzetta includes Thurman in a chapter in her book which she devotes to what she refers to as social mystics who may be able to point us in the right direction toward the solution of our problems (The Other Side of Nothingness: Toward a Theology of Radical Openness, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001). Some of those among whom she places Thurman in Chapter Seven ("Seeing with God's Eye: Depth Theology") are Abraham Joshua Heschel, Mohandas Gandhi, Thomas Merton, and Martin Luther King Jr.
I want to inculcate briefly what she sees in each of these mystics individually and what she sees them contributing collectively toward the salvation of twenty-first century humanity. I think her perspective of seeing Thurman within this context contributes tremendously to the understanding of the social significance of Thurman put forward by Alton Pollard and others. Also, her work is a signal example of how Thurman may be viewed and made use of in our attempts to come to terms with what we are facing in this new time. She has here a Jewish Rabbi, a Hindu holy man, a Catholic Christian, and two Protestant Christians, whose thinking grows out of their own traditions, is unique within their own perspectives, yet merges at some point within a similar vision of life and hope as she sees it.
Lanzetta cites Heschel's devotion of his life to interreligious cooperation and social justice that transcended any narrow sectarianism, his marching alongside Martin L. King Jr., in the Civil Rights, Movement, and his call for a healing of religious differences based on his understanding of the biblical command to mercy and humility. She states, "He wanted to uncover those unifying principles that make a person more compassionate, loving, and holy, and elevate us to our own true selves. His mystical gaze was fixed on God. He understood something there: religions are not greater than God, dogmas cannot circumscribe faith. In the hidden chamber where God and the soul are one, each and every person exceeds religion" (pp. 95 and 96).
She sees Gandhi as forging a similar road, and she cites his life's devotion to the pursuit of seeing God face-to-face in the complexity of India's suffering masses. She refers to oneness of creation as being for Gandhi "an essential reality of the highest order that pierced the core of his heart and inspired extreme acts of generosity, solidarity, and sacrifice." She interprets further that, "Gandhi became convinced that the divinity of each person must be the basis of political and social reform" (p. 99).
Lanzetta cites also Dorothy Day, the American Catholic activist along with Martin Luther King Jr., as having similar experiences as Gandhi of mystical connection with pain and injustice. She cites Day's identification with the desolation of poverty, destitution, sickness and sin all over the world. She cites King's Beloved Community ideal, his World House, his "call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one's tribe, race, class and nation," a "call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men" (p. 100).
In a summary interpretation, Lanzetta states, God is One. In and through everything that separates we are One. The power of this mystical insight inspired the liberatory, interfaith theology of Heschel, Gandhi, King, Howard Thurman, Thomas Merton and others. In comtemplative silence, these social mystics were able to offer their religion up to the pyre of a universal vision. They did not do this blindly, but out of love. Having found the contemplative source of meaning, they understood that religious truth must be shared, even let-go, because it will always be renewed (pp. 96-97).
She sees in these mystics' spiritual witness six states of consciousness that serve as a guideline to what she senses as a depth theology: oneness of all life, the experimental nature of truth, self-suffering, nonviolence of the heart, theological openness, and the necessity for interreligious cooperation and peace (p. 97).
The theological openness of Gandhi, Merton, and Thurman are especially cited. A "theology of radical openness" is the theme of Lanzetta's book The Other Side of Nothingness, which is a beginning, a grasping for a way for peace in our religious wilderness today. She is concerned with the ethical value of mysticism, defining her task as being to show that "in the intimacy of the mystical encounters the soul experiences a new mode of consciousness that heals the roots of spiritual oppression" she sees in the exclusive claims of any one religious tradition (pp. vii and vii). Using Meister Eckhart as a model in his "Desert of the Godhead" and "God beyond God" imagery, she explores the possibilities this paradigm has for healing the religious ills of our time. She declares, "Those who have experienced crossing the threshold to divine nothingness return bearing a dimension of consciousness capable of holding the paradox of embodiment: divine-human, infinite-finite, one-many. This state of consciousness is one in which seemingly contradictory conceptual claims are resolved in a higher nondualism" (pp. 4-5). The "social mystics" tend to best represent this reality today.
The "radical openness" she finds well-presented in Thurman's openness of the heart metaphor (e.g., his "Keep Open the Doors of Thy Heart," in Strange Freedom, ed. By Walter Fluker and Catherine Tumber, Boston: Beacon Press, 1998). She takes this to suggest that the door of the heart opens so that the "truth of another religion can find its way in." She states: "This openness of heart gives us the courage to approach and approximate Truth, and thus God, through experimenting and testing." Drawing on Gandhi's ahimsa concept also, Lanzetta states, "Since the principle of ahimsa is quite subtle it covers all aspects of one's behavior. Truth is harmed by evil thoughts, by undue haste, by lying, by hatred, and by wishing ill. Ahimsa in her thinking means we may not offend other religions; we may not harbor a superiority of revelation; we must be silent in confrontation with other truths rather than demand conversion or harm another's faith" (p. 104).
Interpreting Thomas Merton from the perspective of interreligious dialogue, Lanzetta notes his deep reverential solitude and his contention of the possibility of one's remaining faithful to a Christian and Western monastic commitment, and yet learn "in depth from, say, a Buddhist or Hindu discipline and experience" (pp.106-107). She elaborates upon this Mertonian perspective further:
Then we know what compassion means and the manner of our devotion. Then we live at the heart of reality, free from any specific theological belief. We are aware that we stand before God was God; we are in the uncreated purity of being. We are unborn. And being unborn we realize that all forms, even our most cherished religions, are but passing waves on the ocean of divinity. Struck by this sight of impermanence, we discover a deeper compassion and a deeper freedom that liberates us from attachment to theological forms. Like Merton, gazing upon the immense Buddha figures in Polonnaruwa, we can say, "Looking at these figures I was suddenly, almost forcibly, jerked clean out of the habitual, half-tied vision of things, and an inner clearness, clarity, as if exploding from the rocks themselves, became evident and obvious....I know and have seen what I was obscurely looking for" (p. 107, quotation from Merton taken from Naomi Burton, Brother Patrick Hart, and James Laughlin, eds., The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton, New York: New Directions, 1973, pp. 233-36).
Certainly, Thurman agrees with Lanzetta, as do the other "social mystics" she examines, when she says that "We need the manyness of religious forms not only to hold a fuller picture of divinity and ourselves, but to humble our hearts. The Divine has chosen to reveal itself in pluralism, in the splendor and beauty of multiple dimensions of the sacred....We must insist upon loyalty to the treasures of each other's traditions and at the same time hold in our hearts the mystical desert that is greater than any religion" (p.110).
John Cartwright in his "Howard Thurman: Insights for the Future of Human Life and Wholeness" (Human Search, pp. 165-190) and Darrell Fasching in his "Howard Thurman: Holy Man for the Coming Millennium" (Human Search, pp. 191-203) would certainly ruminate with Lanzetta and her interpretation of Thurman within this perspective of radical openness and inclusiveness. They each look closely at Thurman within the perspective of religious and social ethics. Cartwright focuses on Thurman's dream of the unity of all life and pursues it to its ultimate significance for the personal and social salvation of the world. He states, "His dream transcends time and continues to grow and develop as we and others continue to explore his thought and find ever more creative dimensions" (p.165). Cartwright stresses Thurman's timeless pursuit of common ground, seeking to "break through the barriers that separate the human family-barriers that create suspicion, hatred, violence and death." In the process, Cartwright notes, Thurman led men and women to the God within, where they too could discover, as he himself did, the miracle of the religious life in the emerging awareness "that all levels of discord are related to and answerable by the one experience of unity, the experience of God" (Ibid.). We might note what Thurman meant by "God." His meaning approximates Eckhart's designation "God beyond God." It is not the God of any particular religious tradition as such, as noted by Beverly Lanzetta. It is beyond all saying and naming, the "other side of nothingness." As Thurman says, God bottoms existence, and that is where the unity is found.
Both Cartwright and Lanzetta are supported in their interpretations by Thurman's own words on the film, Conversations with Howard Thurman (Landrum Bolling, Host, 1978):
The deeper down I go, the more into Him I find myself. None of the categories of classifications-of faith, belief, etc.-have any standing in the presence of this transcendent experience, because I think that whether I'm Black, White, Presbyterian, Baptist, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, that in the presence of God, all these categories by which we relate to each other fade away and have no significance whatsoever. For in his presence I am a part of Him being revealed to Him.
Cartwright elaborates on the moral and ethical significance and application of this discovery and dream of Thurman, as relates to the natural environment as well as the society of humans. The quest for community lies at the heart of the search for common ground. And the community is both natural and human. "If community is to be established, love must be the prevailing ethos of relationships. Unity-in-love is characterized by its ability to allow both persons and nature to realize their potential" (pp. 172-173). This community ideal of Thurman is to be realized historically, not in a far off paradise. :"It can be both an inner individual experience of becoming aware within oneself of the reality and oneness of life, as well as an interpersonal and intergroup outward reality of isolated and apathetic lives transformed into related and caring ones. Community, finally, is the only destiny that can bring fulfillment to the creative spirit that permeates the whole world" (p. 175).
Concentrating on the social change aspect of Thurman's thinking, Cartwright notes how Thurman showed that community-potential can become community-actual. For him social change was fundamentally a problem of the inner life of individuals. "Though he acknowledges the power of social structures to determine the quality of existence in material terms, the individual spirit is still perceived as the key to remaking the individual life. The major problem is the 'poverty of spirit.' This is an affliction of both the poor and the wealthy" (p.176). Finally, in Thurman's analysis and interpretation of the life of Jesus in light of historical Christian interpretation and practice, Cartwright notes the discrepancy pinpointed and Thurman's insight into the value of Jesus' own life and teachings for the healing of human division and brokenness in the society.
The discrepancy is in the religion of Jesus and the religion about Jesus. "The religion of Jesus-as opposed to the religion about Jesus which has been exclusive, divisive, and shameful-encompasses an identification with the disinherited and a challenge to them to overcome the poverty of the spirit that dogs the heels of the disinherited at all points in history. Fear, deception, and hate are the sure symptoms of such poverty. They promote cowardice, hypocrisy, and isolation. Jesus substituted love for all of these....Love presupposes that all individuals are within what may be called the ethical field and that even the oppressor possesses a common humanity." Here Cartwright notes the affinities between Thurman and his younger contemporary, and I dare say, protŽgŽ, Martin Luther King Jr. (pp. 176-77).
The transformative powers of Jesus' life and teachings, and those of religious leaders of other religious traditions such as Siddhartha Gautama, Gandhi, Mohammad, were demonstrated in the experimental efforts of the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples in San Francisco cofounded by Howard Thurman. This church was a religious and not simply a social experiment. "However, the adequacy of the Fellowship experience would have to be verified by more than just the feelings of the members. There would have to be, in Thurman's thought, an alteration in the social relations of the members that reflected spiritual growth and development." This happened through fellowship and caring among the membership, as well as through the social transformation activities of individual members in the community. "Thurman's vision did not call for direct involvement of Fellowship Church, as an institution, in the politics of society; rather, his aim was to empower individuals to address economic, political, and social needs" (pp. 179-80).
Darrell Fasching's essay is a response to the essays of Alton Pollard and John Cartwright. Within his ethical perspective, he sees Thurman,
Not only as a holy man but also as a prophet who is preparing the way for the coming millennium-a millennium in which we, as world citizens, will either rejoice in the unity found in our diversity or else destroy each other in some final nuclear apocalypse. The choice for the coming millennium as I see it is either apocalypse or utopia. Thurman belongs to the avant guard who are attempting to tip the balance of history away from apocalyptic terror and toward the utopian possibility of creating a new city where, for all our diversity, we are (as Paul of Tarsus would put it) "members of one another" (p.192).
Here Fasching specifically relates Thurman to the twenty-first century, as our title suggests. He sees him as being among those who provide the answer to the dilemmas of our present time.
Looking at Thurman through the prism of his thesis or paradigm of "welcoming the stranger," Fasching revisits the biblical story of the tower Babel in Genesis and reinterprets it in light of the stranger motif. "The traditional interpretation of the Babel story sees God's act of confusing human language as a punishment for the... arrogance of human beings who sought to attain heaven on their own, through their own technological skills....When placed within the canons of the biblical literature1 this story is no longer one which communicates a curse but rather a blessing." What they sought, transcendence, was not to be their own achievement but a gift from God, granted to them in the right way God intended, not in their wrongful way of achieving it. "The human quest for transcendence was misdirected toward technology and the tyranny of sameness-of a single language with a single story or world view. God, in an act of divine compassion, redirected human beings to where true transcendence can be found, namely, in welcoming the stranger" (p. 193).
Fasching makes an apt connection between promise of Babel and the problems of our time. "The promise of Babel is the gift of the stranger through whom God enters our life. To welcome the stranger is to wrestle with God (Genesis 32:23-32), to welcome angels (Hebrews 13:2) and even the Messiah (Matthew 25:35). The very otherness or differentness of the stranger who does not share my story, my religion, my culture and language, etc. mediates the presence of God as Wholly Other....The infinite shatters the tendency of all finite things to cling to their finitude in order to make all things Holy, that is, so as to keep all things open to their infinite possibilities" (p. 193). In Fasching's perspective, ours is a terrifying time, the time after Auschwitz and Hiroshima. And "Babel is a parable for our time, for we too have sought transcendence in a technological project which seems bent on eliminating religious and cultural pluralism and returning us to a time when everyone spoke the same language and told the same story" (p. 194). Our time is one which has the strong tendency in it to sacralize our finite cultural identities "which will allow no place for the stranger or the infinite-a sacralization which amounts to nothing less than a demonic inversion of the Holy" (p. 195).
Fasching sees us as seeking peace on earth "through a quest for domination through technical 'transcendence,'" in which case "the symbolic power of the demonic shall hold sway over our political and ethical imagination transforming our utopian hopes for a world civilization into apocalyptic nightmares"(p.197). What is needed, he asserts, is a reclaiming of the "symbols of the Holy as life-enhancing rather than life-destroying forces." In light of this he puts forward something similar to Beverly Lanzetta's "the other side of nothingness, a theology of radical openness." He says, "What is required is nothing less than an alienated theology, theology done as if one were a stranger to one's own tradition" (p.197). Thus, he interprets Thurman within this perspective.
Howard Thurman, to my mind, belongs to a small cadre of pioneers who have in our time and place introduced the possibility of alienated theology-the kind of theology absolutely essential if the coming of the millennium is to bring not the end of the earth but a new heaven and earth, hospitable to human life and human community. Thurman, like Gandhi or Thomas Merton, is one of those holy men who is opening up the path to a new spiritual adventure....Thurman, we could say, was a kind of mid-wife to social activists and as such he stands symbolically in a unique place in the unfolding drama of human religious history, namely at the crossroads to the future (p. 199).
Fasching expresses my view precisely, that Thurman marks the transition to the new century, the new millennium. As Augustine in his life and quest symbolized the crossing over to a new time, Thurman made the journey from the previous to the present age. He prepared us for it through his experience and articulation of the religious quest. He excited the intellect and imagination of so many thinkers like Fasching, Pollard, Cartwright, and others, especially young seeking minds. He has always had this propensity, to inspire, excite the young (of course, this is not limited to numerical age, the young at heart are included) to explore the inner truth and follow its leading (wherever it goes or takes them) to the real and genuine world of God and humanity and nature intertwined (community). I think of Rosemary Ruether, Alice Walker, Walter Fluker, Luther Smith, Maya Angelou, Joy Browne, Catherine Tumber, and countless others. In teaching Thurman to undergraduates today of all races and ethnic groups, one finds the same enthusiasm for him.
1 Fasching noted that , "Perhaps the story had such a meaning before it entered the Tanakh or Hebrew Bible. But such an interpretation is difficult to sustain within either the Jewish or Christian biblical canons with their central emphasis on welcoming the stranger. More than any other commandment the Torah commands the welcoming of the stranger and the New Testament is equally emphatic" (p. 193).