For the Inward Journey

Howard Thurman

• Publisher: Friends United Press
• Year: 1984
• ISBN:
  9780944350997
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

The essence of Dr. Howard Thurman (1900-1981) and his throught emerges in a message of hope, reconciliation, and love. An anthology of the most important and eloquent writings of Thurman, minister, philosopher, educator, and spiritual leader whose influence on leaders of the civil rights movement and on Americans at large has been likened to that of Martin Lurther King, Jr.

CONCERNING DISCIPLINES OF THE SPIRIT

Life and Order

MIRACLES IN THE SPIRIT

“There are miracles in the spirit of which the world knows nothing." Such is the testimony that comes to us from the lips of George Fox. Our lives are surrounded day by day and night after eventful night by the stupendous revelations of what man is discovering about the world around him. Each day we seem to penetrate more deeply into the process of nature. Thousands of men and women with utter devotion give themselves to the pursuit of secret disclosures from the chamber of mysteries of which they themselves are a part and from which they have come forth. It is as if there is a mighty collective and individual effort to remember what they were before the mind became mind and the body became flesh and blood. So successful has been the appropriation of the knowledge of the mysteries of air and wind and earth that what a decade ago would have startled and frightened the most mature adult is today taken for granted by the simplest child. We speak of going to the moon not as denizens of the shadows where unrealities tumble over one another in utter chaos. Rather we speak of going to the moon and back again with voices that are brimming over with an arrogance that even a god may not command.

But let one arise in our midst to speak of secrets of another kind. Let one say that the world of the spirit has vast frontiers which call to us as our native heath. At once the deep split in our spirits reveals itself. Out of our eyes, as we listen, there leaps the steady glow of recognition while our lips speak of superstition and delusion. Can the miracles in the spirit be real, true? Because they seem always to be personal and private, does this not add to their unreality?

The miracles in the spirit? What are they? The resolving of inner conflict upon which all the lances of the mind have splintered and fallen helplessly from the hand; the daring of the spirit that puts to rout the evil deed and the decadent unfaith; the experiencing of new purposes which give courage to the weak, hope to the despairing, life to those burdened by sin and failure; the quality of reverence that glows within the mind, illumining it with incentive to bring under the control of Spirit all the boundless fruits of knowledge; the necessity for inner and outer peace as the meaning of all men’s striving; the discovery that the “Covenant of Brotherhood” is the witness of the work of the Spirit of God in the life of man and the hymn of praise offered to Him as Thanksgiving and Glory!

THE CONSCIENTIOUS DEMAND

Years and years ago—farther back than the records of history reveal—early man learned how to use a club in self-defense and thus to extend his control over an area farther than his arm unaided could reach. When he learned to throw this club with precision and power, it meant that the control of his environment was farther extended. So the story goes; as man developed—extending his arm through club, bow and arrow, gun powder, gasoline engine, through various kinds of vehicles and machines up to and including the jet-propelled plane and the atomic bomb—he required a complete adjustment of his mind and spirit to his new power. He has been forced to fit his new powers, with each development, into a scheme of life that would keep him from destroying himself. Difficult as this adjustment has been for man’s mind, it has been infinitely more difficult for his spirit and conscience. A bow-and-arrow conscience finds itself paralyzed in the presence of the cannon and the rifle. A sense of social responsibility in the use of the arrow finds itself paralyzed by the tremendous moral demands of gun powder. The dilemma of modern man is to match spiritual and moral maturity with the amazing power created by his mastery over nature. He has learned a part of the sector of energy by unlocking the door of the atom, and yet he continues to be moved by prejudice, greed and lust. He has devised a machine that can keep pace with the speed of the earth through the heavens, and yet he has not learned how to walk the earth in the midst of his fellows with simple reverence and grace. Today we stand on the verge of a brave, startling era which can yield the end of poverty, of war, and of all the breeds of hate that have made the earth a hell for countless millions. Oh, for how many years, by our deeds, shall we curse God and die, when we could reflect Him and live?

WE SPREAD OUR LIVES BEFORE THEE

The story of our lives is the old story of man. There is the insistent need to separate ourselves from the tasks by which our days are surrounded. The urgency within us cries out for detachment from the traffic and the complexities of our involvements. There is the ebb and flow of anxiety within us because always there seems to be so little time for withdrawal, for reflection. These are the thoughts which find their way into our spirits when at last the Time of Quiet is our portion.

It is no ordinary experience to spread our lives before the honest scrutiny of our own selves, but there is no escape from such a necessity. The obvious things in our lives we pass over, taking them for granted; this may be a source of weakness and despair. Deeply are we aware of limitations in many dimensions of our lives. We are conscious of the ways in which and by which we have undermined the Light, the Truth, that is within; sometimes we do call good things bad and bad things good.

There are some things in our lives which we have not looked at for a long, long time. We make as an act of sacrament the lifting and exposing of these things before God, with tenderness and compassion. There are some things within us that are so far beneath the surface of our movements and our functioning that we are unmindful not only of their presence but also of the quality of their influence in our decisions, our judgment, and our behavior. In the quietness we will their exposure before God, that they may be lifted to the center of our focus, that we may know what they are and seek to deal with them in keeping with our health and our innermost wisdom.

All of the involvements of our lives in family, in primary community relations, in our state and country, and in the far-flung reaches of the things that we affect, and the things that affect us in our world; all of the concern that is ours for various aspects of the things that affect us and that we affect—these we spread before our own eyes and before the scrutiny of God.

THE GROWING EDGE

Look well to the growing edge. All around us worlds are dying and new worlds are being born; all around us life is dying and life is being born. The fruit ripens on the tree, the roots are silently at work in the darkness of the earth against a time when there shall be new lives, fresh blossoms, green fruit. Such is the growing edge! It is the extra breath from the exhausted lung, the one more thing to try when all else has failed, the upward reach of life when weariness closes in upon all endeavor. This is the basis of hope in moments of despair, the incentive to carry on when times are out of joint and men have lost their reason, the source of confidence when worlds crash and dreams whiten into ash. The birth of the child—life’s most dramatic answer to death—this is the growing edge incarnate. Look well to the growing edge!

Commitment

A STRANGE FREEDOM

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. The deed a man performs must be weighed in a balance held by another’s hand. The very spirit of a man tends to panic from the desolation of going nameless up and down the streets of other minds where no salutation greets and no friendly recognition makes secure. It is a strange freedom to be adrift in the world of men.

Always a way must be found for bringing into one’s solitary place the settled look from another’s face, for getting the quiet sanction of another’s grace to undergird the meaning of the self. To be ignored, to be passed over as of no account and of no meaning, is to be made into a faceless thing, not a man. It is better to be the complete victim of an anger unrestrained and a wrath which knows no bounds, to be torn asunder without mercy or battered to a pulp by angry violence, than to be passed over as if one were not. Here at least one is dealt with, encountered, vanquished, or overwhelmed—but not ignored. It is a strange freedom to go nameless up and down the streets of other minds where no salutation greets and no sign is given to mark the place one calls one’s own.

The name marks the claim a man stakes against the world; it is the private banner under which he moves which is his right whatever else betides. The name is a man’s water mark above which the tides can never rise. It is the thing he holds that keeps him in the way when every light has failed and every marker has been destroyed. It is the rallying point around which a man gathers all that he means by himself. It is his announcement to life that he is present and accounted for in all his parts. To be made anonymous and to give to it the acquiescence of the heart is to live without life, and for such a one, even death is no dying.

To be known, to be called by one’s name, is to find one’s place and hold it against all 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 to worship a God who is one’s very own.

It is a strange freedom to be adrift in the world of men, to act with no accounting. to go nameless up and down the streets of other minds where no salutation greets and no sign is given to mark the place one calls one’s own.

SADDLE YOUR DREAMS

“Saddle your dreams before you ride them.” It is the nature of dreams to run riot, never to wish to contain themselves within limitations that are fixed. Sometimes they seem to be the cry of the heart for the boundless and the unexplored. Often they are fashioned out of longings too vital to die, out of hankerings fed by hidden springs in the dark places of the spirit. Often they are the offspring of hopes that can never be realized and longings that can never find fulfillment. Sometimes they are the weird stirrings of ghosts of dead plans and the kindling of ashes in a hearth that has long since been deserted. Many and fancy are the names by which dreams are called—fantasies, repressed desires, vanities of the spirit, will-o’-the-wisps. Sometimes we seek to dismiss them by calling their indulgence day-dreaming, by which we mean taking flight from the realities of our own world and dwelling in the twilight of vain imaginings.

All of this may be true. But all their meaning need not be exhausted by such harsh judgment. The dreams belong to us; they come full-blown out of the real world in which we work and hope and carry on. They are not impostors. They are not foreign elements invading our world like some solitary comet from the outer reaches of space which pays one visit to the sun and is gone never to come again. No!...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Acknowledgments
• Concerning Disciplines of the Spirit
• Jesus and the Disinherited
• Concerning Love
• Deep River
• Moments of Celebration
• The Centering Moment
• Sources of Selections
• Select Bibliography of Howard Thurman's Writings