Sojourners know the necessity for companions who sustain along the way. Our spiritual pilgrimage requires others whose insights and encouragement empower us to respond to God's call upon our lives. In the writings of Howard Thurman, readers discover such a companion.
As expected for a mystic, Thurman's spiritual search is grounded in religious experience. But for Thurman, religious experience is more than the moment of an intense experience of God. He believes that God is experienced, and spiritual insights are discovered, in history. Thurman derives ultimate meaning from transitory events.
Another prominent theme in his speaking and books is the relatedness of the "universal" and "particular." Sacred meaning that has universal application is in particular expressions and experiences of life. Particularity is crucial to universal truth.
Early in his writing career he probed for insight in the particularity of his own heritage. Deep River, written in 1945, and The Negro Spiritual Speaks of Life and Death, in 1947, examine the theological perspectives of the slaves' songs. In the midst of their suffering, the slaves fashioned understandings of God and ultimate meaning that are major contributions to humanity's spiritual quest. Thurman concludes that the slaves' articulation of religious meaning places them "alongside the great creative religious thinkers of the human race."
In Jesus and the Disinherited, Thurman raises the question, what does the religion of Jesus have to say to those who "stand with their backs against the wall"? In this book he draws the analogy between Jesus as a disinherited Jew and blacks in America. The particular histories of oppression become the data for discerning God's universal liberating and reconciling power.
Thurman continues to focus upon race relations as a defining crucible for spiritual truth in The Luminous Darkness: A Personal Interpretation of the Anatomy of Segregation and the Ground of Hope. Again, his particularity and that of other black Americans is taken seriously as experience that discloses God's will and God's transforming activity.
READING HOWARD Thurman is not a pedantic exercise of plodding through a dense systematic theology. Thurman exposes us to life experience and asks questions that guide us in the creative task of forming a theological perspective. As readers, we begin to have increasing confidence in our own lives as a text and context of divine revelation, and in our theological abilities to clarify God's activity.
The experience of the "self" is primary as a source of spiritual disclosure. Thurman asks: "How can one believe that life has meaning, if his own life does not have meaning?" The individual personality is of infinite worth--both as a subject of God's love and as a means for discerning religious truth. His writing exemplifies this conviction. Discourse regarding a universal principle will be verified by an autobiographical reflection or an anecdote regarding someone else. Ideas are grounded in experience. The word is continually revealed in flesh.
Thurman's emphasis upon the self occurs within a passionate commitment to community. Community is the end purpose toward which all creation is groaning. The self, therefore, must be understood in relation to the dynamics of community. In The Search for Common Ground, he says: "From my childhood I have been on the scent of the tie that binds life at a level so deep the final privacy of the individual would be reinforced rather than threatened."
The ultimate significance of community is evident in all of Howard Thurman's writings, but three of his books shed distinctive lights upon his quest for community. The Creative Encounter is his most detailed interpretation of religious experience. As personal as such an encounter with God is, Thurman insists that "the individual must relate it to his total world of meaning." The religious experience that begins with the self will only be understood and fulfilled when it moves the individual toward community.
Footprints of a Dream chronicles the birth and life of the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples--the church he co-founded as one of the first fully integrated (in leadership and membership) interracial and intercultural churches in America. The book indicates how Thurman was motivated to test the vitality of religious experience within the context of a Christian structure (the church) that had traditionally been impotent in overcoming barriers of race and class. Here he demonstrated the ability to organize a church that attested to the compelling power of an inclusive community.
The Search for Common Ground is the most technical of Thurman's writings. He utilizes literature, biology, mythology, philosophy, and sociology to investigate life's urge for community. The teleology of existence is toward community. Even the pursuit of identity begins and ends with the affirmation of community.
Thurman's books have significantly shaped activists working on behalf of community. Jesus and the Disinherited was a major text for leaders in the civil rights movement who sought spiritual grounding for their social witness. Jesse Jackson listed Thurman as one of three black intellectuals whose work "blew away the philosophical underpinnings of racism and segregation."
James Cone, the eminent architect of black theology, says that he and his subsequent writing were significantly influenced by Thurman's Jesus and the Disinherited, Deep River, and The Negro Spiritual Speaks of Life and Death. He credits Thurman as the one "who opened my eyes to the theological value of black religion, not only for African Americans but for all persons who are searching for the universal, transcendent dimension of the human spirit."
THURMAN'S ATTENTION to history, the self, and community is always rooted in the sense of presence. The experience of God defines and discloses meaning. In The Creative Encounter, he writes that in the religious experience "the human spirit is exposed to the kind of experience that is capable of providing an ultimate clue to all levels of reality, to all the dimensions of time, and to all aspects of faith and the manifestations therein."
He speaks of God with such tones of intimacy that we feel invited into his relationship and conversations with God; and consequently, we feel ushered into the Divine Presence. He speaks of God with such humility that we sense the effect of encounter with Mystery. These experiences are assurance for the journey.
Since Thurman is the author of 23 books, it can be rather daunting for the first-time reader to know where to begin. Your selection may depend upon your particular reading temperament or immediate spiritual need. His books can be divided into two main categories: devotional books of short meditations and poetry, and more systematic treatises on religious concerns.
The devotional writings include Deep Is the Hunger, The Inward Journey, Meditations of the Heart, The Centering Moment (a book of prayers), and The Mood of Christmas (an excellent personal and public worship resource for the Advent and Christmas seasons).
Among Thurman's more systematic writings, I usually recommend beginning with Jesus and the Disinherited and Disciplines of the Spirit (especially useful for group study on spirituality). Others in this category are Deep River and The Negro Spiritual Speaks of Life and Death (which are now available in a single volume), The Creative Encounter, and The Growing Edge (a book of sermons).
Anne Spencer Thurman (Howard Thurman's daughter) has edited For the Inward Journey, which contains selections from 10 of his books. This volume provides access to Thurman's poetry, meditation, and essay styles of writing. In a category unto itself is his autobiography, With Head and Heart. It contains many personal anecdotes from his other books, but he weaves these stories into what he describes as "a single tapestry." The influence of childhood experiences, the odds against which his life and career contended, his meeting with Mohandas Gandhi, the development of Fellowship Church--all these and more offer the most complete profile of Thurman himself.
Howard Thurman teaches us how to seek faithfully and respond with head and heart to the sense of history, self, community, and God. Through his books, the presence of Thurman comforts, inspires, and companions us on our journey toward community.
Luther E. Smith Jr. taught at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia when this article appeared, and authored Howard Thurman: The Mystic as Prophet (Friends United Press, 1991).
A Lifetime of Writings
The Greatest of These. 1941.
Deep River: An Interpretation of Negro Spirituals. 1945.
The Negro Spiritual Speaks of Life and Death. 1947.
Meditations for Apostles of Sensitiveness. 1948.
Jesus and the Disinherited. 1949.
Deep Is the Hunger. 1950.
Meditations of the Heart. 1953.
The Creative Encounter. 1954.
The Growing Edge. 1956.
Apostles of Sensitiveness. 1956.
Footprints of a Dream: The Story of the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples. 1959.
Mysticism and the Experience of Love. 1961.
The Inward Journey. 1961.
Temptations of Jesus. 1962.
Disciplines of the Spirit. 1963.
The Luminous Darkness. 1965.
The Centering Moment. 1969.
The Search for Common Ground: An Inquiry Into the Basis of Man's Experience of Community. 1971.
The Mood of Christmas. 1973.
A Track to the Water's Edge: The Olive Schreiner Reader. 1973.
The First Footprints: The Dawn of the Idea of the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples: Letters Between Alfred Fisk and Howard Thurman. With Alfred Fisk. 1975.
With Head and Heart: The Autobiography of Howard Thurman. 1980.
For the Inward Journey: The Writings of Howard Thurman. Edited by Anne Spencer Thurman. 1984.
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Most of these books, along with audiocassettes and other publications, are available from the Howard Thurman Educational Trust, 2020 Stockton St., San Francisco, CA 94133; (915) 392-4297.
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