Outside of my father, the man who had the greatest influence on my life was a man I met only once and that very briefly at a party. But for all my academic career at Howard University, I sat at Howard Thurman's feet every Sunday in the university's Rankin Chapel.
He would bring in the guest preachers--men and women, black and white, of great renown, responding to the invitation of this remarkable man. Thurman would sit at the side of the stage, a still, somewhat brooding figure, in a simple black academic gown with no marks of distinction. He came alive at the lectern--his voice was low, and he seemed to struggle to give words to his thoughts too profound for utterance. It was almost an act, and he had many imitators. The outward manifestations could be easily imitated.
I never heard anyone--not then, not ever--who for me could match his wide-ranging, searching mind or the language he used to share his thoughts. At the beginning of his sermons, he had a habit of reading a synopsis of them.
"This is what I want to say," he'd declare with a characteristic diffident smile and a twinkle in his eye. "I may go far afield so I want you to have (in a concise form) the idea I shall be pursuing."
He was always pursuing ideas, so he was a naught-for-your-comfort kind of person for those whose passions were single-minded. He is known for his deep spirituality, and his many books of meditations are rich food for, as he calls them, "apostles of sensitiveness." As I wrote that last sentence, however, I feel a further connection with him as I wrestle with the issue of ambiguity. His influence on my life goes on and on.
I remember when Gone With the Wind came to U Street in Washington, D.C., the heart of black theater before the '60s. Some alert journalists and scholars tried to arouse the black community against the movie and elicit protest statements from community leaders. From Howard Thurman, however, they got a comment about the literary origin of the phrase and a wry remark that the passing of the culture was hardly an occasion for black grief.
WHEN I WAS CONTACTED to write a piece for Sojourners about the influence of Howard Thurman on my thinking, I gave an immediate acceptance. I had second thoughts when told that the article was for the December issue with the theme "incarnation." Howard Thurman was the first ordained person I had encountered who, in his moving poetic language, voiced a lack of interest in the traditional Christian presentation of the incarnation complete with a virgin birth, stars and angels, shepherds, and wise men.
I was then told that the focus of the issue would be God working the miracle of incarnation in responsive human beings: Following Jesus instead of just being content to worship him is my gospel, and a gospel for which I am indebted to Howard Thurman.
Can you imagine, however, the theological shock waves that went through a young girl still in her teens, sitting in the Howard University chapel, straight out of the most traditional understanding of Jesus, and hearing this learned and gentle divine question what I had been taught was the essence of Christianity?
Seated beside me when I first heard Thurman was the man whose searching mind had prepared me for him--my father. Like many black men of my father's era, Dad had little use for the church. I hear my father's voice in Fenton Johnson's "Tired":
I am tired of work; I am tired of building up someone
else's
civilization.
Let us take a rest, M'Lissy Jane.
I will go down to the Last Chance Saloon, drink a gallon
or two of gin, shoot a game or two of dice,
and sleep the rest of the night on one of Mike's barrels.
You will let the old shanty go to rot, the white people's
clothes turn to dust, and the Calvary Baptist
Church sink to the bottomless pit.
My father (whose formal education was cut short on the verge of secondary school because his father needed his eldest son on the plantation) was interested in astronomy and responded to Psalm 8:3-4:
When I look at your heavens,
the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars that
you have established;
what are human beings that you
are mindful of them,
mortals that you care for
them?
Dad and I used to have long, long conversations about creation, God, and the meaning of life. For my father, for Fenton Johnson, and for countless others who "stand with their backs against the wall," Thurman writes, "Christianity often has been sterile and of little avail. The conventional Christian word is muffled, confused, and vague."
THESE QUOTATIONS are taken from a small book of Thurman's called Jesus and the Disinherited. I consider these 100 pages to be among the most important I have ever read.
Calmly, Thurman indicts the church:
Too often the price exacted by society for security and respectability is that the Christian movement in its formal expression must be on the side of the strong against the weak. This is a matter of tremendous significance, for it reveals to what extent a religion that was born of a people acquainted with persecution and suffering has become the cornerstone of a civilization and of nations whose very position in modern life has too often been secured by a ruthless use of power applied to weak and defenseless people.
Words written a half century ago, and still the Christian soldiers go marching into war. Or, updated now, to bombing into war and cynically quoting "just war" theories that are long since outdated by the bombs.
"It is not a singular thing," he says--said many years ago, but the living urgency remains!--"to hear a sermon that defines what should be the attitude of the Christian toward people who are less fortunate than himself." There is a certain grandeur and nobility in administering to another's need out of one's fullness and plenty. "But there is a lurking danger in this very emphasis. It is exceedingly difficult to hold oneself free from a certain contempt for those whose predicament makes moral appeal for defense and succor."
It's how charity and good deeds got a bad name. Jesus understood the trap and withstood the first temptation, the temptation to do good deeds. And Paul, comprehending his teacher fully here, knew that one could give away all one's possessions for motives other than love for the needy.
Thurman goes on. "What does our religion say to the poor, the disinherited, the dispossessed?" The issue is not what it counsels them to do for others--and become as self-righteous as their benefactors! The issue is what does Christianity offer them to meet their own needs? Thurman believes the teachings of Jesus offer the way.
The hounds of hell that dog the footsteps of the disinherited, Thurman says, are fear, the need to deceive, and hatred. Against them all Jesus made the love ethic central. No small achievement, Thurman admits.
Thurman believes everyone needs to establish as securely as possible the lines along which each one proposes to live life. Thurman calls this life's "working paper." "Whenever there appears in human history a personality whose story is available and whose reach extends far in all directions, the question of his working paper is as crucial as is the significance of his life. Such a figure was Jesus of Nazareth."
And then Thurman concludes with his answer to all the church minions who would make Jesus so different from us that all we can do is bow down and worship. "In him the miracle of the working paper is writ large, for what he did all men may do. Thus interpreted, he belongs to no age, no race, no creed. When we look into his face, we see etched the glory of our own possibilities."
WHAT DOES A person with these ideas do with Christmas?
When Thurman was dean of the chapel at Howard University, it was his custom to put brief meditations in the Sunday bulletins. He continued the practice at the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples in San Francisco and as dean of Marsh Chapel at Boston University. Many collections of those meditations have been made; there is one very special collection, The Mood of Christmas, that answers the question posed above.
In the prologue, Thurman writes, "Christmas is a mood, a quality, a symbol. It is never merely a fact. As a fact it is a date on the calendar--to the believer it is the anniversary of an event in human history. An individual may relate himself to the fact or the event, but that would not be Christmas."
A few years ago, the Fellowship of Reconciliation presented a Christmas card that was a treasure to be kept forever. A fold-out card featuring angels of African lineage, it carried this quotation from The Mood of Christmas:
There must be always remaining in every one's life
some place for the singing of the angels--some place
for that which in itself is breathlessly beautiful and
by an inherent prerogative throwing all the rest of
life into a new and creative relatedness--something
that gathers up in itself all the freshest of
experience from drab and commonplace areas of
living and glows in one bright light of penetrating
beauty and meaning--then passes. The commonplace
is shot through with new glory--old burdens become
lighter, deep and ancient wounds lose much of their
old, old hurting. A crown is placed over our heads
that for the rest of our lives we are trying to grow
tall enough to wear. Despite all the crassness of
life, despite all of the harsh discord of life, life
is saved by the singing of the angels.
Life is saved by the singing of the angels--the commonplace is shot through with new glory. Every child is The Child, the one with whom the creating God is well pleased. Every mother is a treasure to be treated with dignity and care so that she knows she carries a new possibility for the human race.
And Howard Thurman leads us to know:
When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nation,
To bring peace among brothers and sisters,
To make music in the heart.
Verna J. Dozier, a native of Washington, D.C., was an educator, lay theologian, and member of the Episcopal Church when this article appeared. She authored The Dream of God: A Call to Return (Cowley Publications) and The Authority of the Laity (The Alban Institute).
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