Lerone Bennett, the former executive editor at Ebony Magazine, called Howard Thurman “the holy man.” Born in Daytona Beach, Florida, the luminary was in search of ultimate meaning.
Today would have been the author, mystic, pastor and one of the greatest theologians of the twentieth century’s 125th birthday. A patron saint of somebodiness, Thurman believed, “At the core of life is a hard purposefulness, a determination to live.”
Known both for his spiritual insights and deep questioning, he asked in “Deep is the Hunger,” “How can one believe that life has meaning, if his (sic) own life does not have meaning.” For Thurman, the self is a source of ultimate meaning.
“Who are you, really?” he regularly asked his students. This question was often coupled with “Who do you want to be?”
Whatever your answer, his advice to those who listened for “the sound of the genuine” within was: “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
Thurman understood ultimate reality to be community and that all of life works together toward wholeness. It is evidenced by what he described as “radical amazement” in “The Inward Journey.”
He wrote: “We are most alive when we are brought face to face with the response to the deepest thing in us to the deepest thing in life. … (Using the illustration of a sunset) Then when in the midst of all of this something else emerges—the sunset opens a door in us and to us, to another dimension, timeless in quality, that can be described only as ineffable, awe-inspiring—then we know radical amazement. … Then we pass through all the external aspects of our situation and need, then the walls of our pretensions are swept away and we are literally catapulted out of the narrow walls that shut us in. We experience radical amazement. Spirit is met by Spirit and we are whole again.”
The interrelatedness of all life and creation’s ability to lead us to this ultimate truth and away from the chopping block of categorizations based on race, class, and gender, that is the illumination of a mystical experience, is repeated throughout his writings.
It is also the “self-fact,” which is the inherent worth of an individual as a child of God and, thus, somebody, that enables persons to live with meaning and dignity that cannot be diminished, distorted or denied.
It must be said that Thurman came to this awareness during Jim Crow segregation and that the goal was an emancipatory way of being.
Naming the distinction of the religion of Jesus and addressed to those whose “backs are against the wall,” he was fully persuaded that where the spirit of the Lord is, “the three hounds of hell: fear, hypocrisy and hatred” are not.
To this end, he asked quite pointedly in his seminal text “Jesus and the Disinherited,” “Why is it that Christianity seems impotent to deal radically, and therefore effectively, with the issues of discrimination and injustice on the basis of race, religion and national origin? Is this impotency due to a betrayal of the genius of the religion or is it due to a basic weakness in the religion itself?”
These questions bear repeating until they are answered fully.
Thurman’s focus on the inwardness of religion called us away from the shores where lines are drawn in the sand to the inward sea, to an altar, to an angel with a flaming sword. He reminded us of our inner authority and that there is a “fluid area of (our) consent.”
In “The Luminous Darkness: A Personal Interpretation of the Anatomy of Segregation and the Ground of Hope,” Thurman determined that “I never gave to the way of living demanded of me by my environment, the inner sanction of my spirit. I gave to it what may be called the sanction of strategy. There was a place in me untouched by these pressures on my life.”
Thurman, understanding the need for somebodiness rather than becoming “persons by an other-than-self reference” and “the value of living life seriously,” spared no expense but launched out into the deep, anchoring us in the mystical tradition and the wisdom of the ancients. He remains a gift worthy of adulation and celebration.
But, today, I’ll just say, “Happy birthday, Howard Washington Thurman!”
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Director of The Raceless Gospel Initiative, an associate editor, host of the Good Faith Media podcast, “The Raceless Gospel” and author of Take Me to the Water: The Raceless Gospel as Baptismal Pedagogy for a Desegregated Church.
