(I'm teaching Spiritual Formation at Payne Theological Seminary this week. Here are my notes on the prayer life and spiritual formation ideas of Howard Thurman. I've been reading Thurman for the past forty years, having been introduced to him in A Guide to Prayer for Ministers and Other Servants.)
Spirituality of Howard Thurman
Howard Thurman is, I
think, the person who has most influenced African American
meditative and contemplative spirituality. Thurman is brilliant and deep,
something that is always a deadly spiritual combination. He is Jesus-centered.
And humble. Here is one who had real authority, who was used by God to
influence many people, not the least of whom was Martin Luther King, Jr.
One of Thurman's quotes describes my Spiritual Formation class well. Thurman
writes: “One of the great services that the Christian church can render to the
community is to provide spells and spaces of quiet for the world-weary men and
women whose needs are so desperate.” (HTEW, 57) This is what my class intends to do, not
as a one-week experience, but as a lifetime spiritual habit.
*****
SPIRITUALITY OF HOWARD THURMAN
1. Influences on Thurman
Thurman said that he learned more “about the genius of the religion of Jesus
from my grandmother than from all the men who taught me all… the Greek and the
rest of it. Because she moved inside the experience [of the religion of Jesus]
and lived out of that center.” (In L. Smith, Howard Thurman: The Essential Writings; hereafter HTEW, 15)
• To embody the Christian faith, rather than just head-know it.
• To actually know Christ, not to merely know about Christ.
Thurman was influenced by Quaker mystic, scholar, and social activist Rufus
Jones.
• “Jones guided Thurman’s first extensive formal study of mysticism. Thurman
described his time with Jones as ‘a watershed from which flowed much of the
thought and endeavor to which I was to commit the rest of my working life.”
(HTEW, 18)
Thurman met with Gandhi. (HTEW, 20)
• “They were the first African Americans to meet with Gandhi.” (L. Smith, HTEW,
20)
• When Thurman returned to the U.S. after meeting with Gandhi “he traveled
throughout the country speaking about his time with Gandhi and the relevance of
nonviolent resistance as a means for addressing racial injustices.” (L. Smith,
HTEW, 20)
• L. Smith writes: “Directly and indirectly, Thurman was the messenger for
connecting the spiritual methods of India’s struggle for independence to the
need for a spiritually based nonviolent movement to transform racial injustices
in the United States.” (L. Smith, HTEW, 20-21)
See also:
Howard Thurman. WithHead and Heart: The Autobiography of Howard Thurman.
2. Focus on the Timeless Issues of the Human Spirit
Prof. George Cross advised HT – “Give yourself to the timeless issues of the
human spirit.” (Luther Smith, Introduction, Howard
Thurman: Essential Writings [HTEW],
13)
• Ontological issues.
• Cultivate an ontology of the human spirit.
• Nouwen – the deeper we go in persons, the more we are all the same.
3. The Relationship of the Particular to the Universal
L. Smith writes: “The major themes in Howard Thurman’s spirituality are:
• The significance of religious experience
• The hunger for community
• The realization of a true sense of self. (HTEW, 30)
“Within each of these themes, a proper understanding of particularity and
universality is crucial.” (L Smith, HTEW, 30)
L. Smith – “Thurman’s social analysis and theology are based on understanding
the relationship of the particular to the universal. Thurman believes that a
particular contains the universal, and the universal is composed of
particulars.” (Smith, in HTEW, 25)
• In relation to spirituality, and spiritual
formation/transformation/renewal/restoration…, this means: the deeper we go
inside people the more we are all the same.
• E.g. – when God deep-searches out my particular heart…, the ontological
realities of my particular heart are the universal-ontological realities of the
human heart.
Autobiography is connected to spirituality. Luther Smith: “Whatever one seeks
to discover about the meaning of life in general must take into consideration
how such meaning is found in one’s own life.” (HTEW, 14)
• Because the deeper we go into our own selves the more we are like others…
• …such autobiographical study and research provides keys to “the meaning of
life in general.”
• Therefore, find the meaning of your own life.
• Soul-research. Be yourself searched-out by God.
• “Search me, O God, and know my heart.”
4. Spiritual Disciplines
HT relies on spiritual disciplines “to tutor our spiritual discernment so that
both the familiar and the strange are understood in light of the desires of
God’s heart.” (L. Smith, HTEW, 32)
• Spiritual disciplines “tutor our spiritual discernment.” This brings
“understanding.”
Spiritual disciplines “are meant to ‘ready’ the mind, the emotions, the spirit.
They are no guarantor of Presence… God reveals His Presence out of the mystery
of Being. With all of my passionate endeavor, I cannot command that He obey.”
(HTEW, 45)
• E.g. – if I played basketball. I engage in “training” so as to compete in the
game.
• The training, the “disciplines,” prepare me for the game.
• Spiritual disciplines “train” the body and mind and spirit of a person.
In Disciplines
of the Spirit HT identifies five
spiritual disciplines:
• Commitment
• Growth
• Suffering
• Prayer
• Reconciliation
1. Commitment
“Commitment means that it is possible for a man to yield the nerve center of
his consent to a purpose or cause, a movement or an ideal, which may be more
important to him than whether he lives or dies. The commitment is a
self-conscious act of will by which he affirms his identification with what he
is committed to. The character of his commitment is determined by that to which
the center or core of his consent is given.” (HTEW, 46)
• In commitment there is a “yielding.” There is a “giving oneself to…”
“Commitment” is related to “surrender. “Whatever stands in the way of the
complete and full surrender, we must search it out and remove it.” (HTEW, 48)
“Surrender your inner consent to God.” (HTEW, 48)
I think “commitment” and “surrender” are like: jumping out of the plane and
trusting the parachute to open. It is a whole-being thing.
Like: “I surrender all…”
2. Growth
“Growth means development in the life of an organism. It means change manifest
in structure.” (HETW, 51)
• “Change manifest in structure” is: transformation.
• Structural change.
• Systemic change.
• Which will lead to changes in attitude and behavior.
“There are many adults who for various reasons have escaped this essential
discipline of their spirit. True, in terms of physical and intellectual
development they have continued to grow. Their bodies and minds have moved
through all the intervening stages to maturity, but they have remained
essentially babies in what they expect of life.” (HETW, 52)
• It’s either deep change or slow death.
• It’s either maturing or endless baby-hood.
• It’s either dining on spiritual meat or drinking spiritual milk from the
bottle.
One of the real challenges of growth is crisis, and the “real possibility of
failure.” “To guard against this and be prepared to deal with it when it occurs
is an authentic discipline of the spirit… And for the religious man, it is to
grow not only in grace but also in the knowledge and experience of God.” (HETW,
54)
• Ongoing engagement in the spiritual disciplines prepares one for crises and
failure.
• Always growing deeper… the body wastes away but the spirit is being renewed
day after day after day… closer knowing and experiencing of God…
What HT says about “growth” sounds like what I mean by spiritual
transformation; the pain of change.
3. Suffering
“When a man is driven by suffering to make the most fundamental inquiries the
meaning of life, he has to assess and re-assess his total experience. It may be
that… he has never thought seriously of God. He has taken his life and all of
life for granted. Now under the assault of pain he is led to wonder about the
mystery of life. Why do men suffer? He asks himself. He sorts out the answers
available to him…” (HTEW, 55)
“What would life be like if there were no suffering, no pain? The startling
discovery is made that if there were no suffering there would be no freedom.
Men could make no mistakes, consciously or unconsciously. The race could make
no mistakes. There would be no error. There would be no possibility of choice
at any point, or in any sense whatsoever… Freedom therefore cannot be separated
from suffering. This, then, may be one of the ways in which suffering pays for
its ride…” (HTEW, 55)
“Why do men suffer? They suffer as part of the experience of freedom. They
suffer as part of the growth of life itself.” (HTEW, 55)
“Without suffering there is no freedom for man.” (HTEW, 56)
“What hostility may do is to serve as a guide through the wilderness of our
suffering until we are brought to the door of the temple.” (HTEW, 56)
“There are many people who would feel cheated if suddenly they were deprived of
the ego definition that their suffering gives them.” (HTEW, 56)
o Which means: some people are self-defined by their suffering. They are men
and women of sorrows, and that is all. So to free them of their sufferings, to
redeem them, would be to deprive them of their core identity. Such people
resist the redemptive activity of God. They need their sufferings.
They will feel they are
a nobody should their being-abused cease.
Prisonhood is their
"normal"; freedom is abnormal and alien to them. Therefore one of the
ways that people stay enchained and enslaved is that their chains define and
delimit them. For such people to escape this horrible life-condition requires a
revelation of their true self, their true identity, as children of God and made
in God's image. Only then will they be horrified by their chains and suffering
and cry out for release and redemption.
5. Prayer
First of all, “prayer… means the method by which the individual makes his way
to the temple of quiet within his own spirit and the activity of his spirit
within its walls. Prayer is not only the participation in communication with
God in the encounter of religious experience, but it is also the “readying” of
the spirit for such communication. It is the total process of quieting down and
to that extent must not be separated from meditation. Perhaps, as important as
prayer itself, is the “readying” of the spirit for the experience.” (HTEW, 57)
• Thurman: “When one has thus been prepared, a strange thing happens. It is
very difficult to put into words. The initiative slips out of one’s hands and
into the hands of God, the other Principal in the religious experience. The
self moves towards God. Such movement seems to have the quality of innate and
fundamental stirring. The self does not see itself as being violated, though it
may be challenged, stimulated, inspired, conditioned, but all of this takes
place in a frame of reference that is completely permissive. There is another
movement which is at once merged with the movement of the self. God touches the
spirit and the will and a wholly new character in terms of dimension enters the
experience. In this sense prayer may be regarded as an open-end experience.”
“Fundamental to the total fact of prayer in the Christian religion is the
persuasive affirmation that the God of religious experience is a seeking and a
beseeching God.” (HTEW, 57)
“I agree most heartily with Rufus Jones when he says that prayer at its best is
when the soul enjoys God and prays out of sheer love for him.” (HTEW, 59-60)
On the “problem” of intercessory prayer – see (HTEW, 58-59)
6. Non-Discursive Experience
By the phrase "non-discursive experience" I mean: experience that one
cannot fully discourse about. (See here, here, and here.)
“Religious experience is interpreted to mean the conscious and direct exposure
of the individual to God.” (HTEW, 37)
This is what William James called “acquaintance-knowledge,” contrasted with
“knowledge about.”
It is “immediate experience,” if not quite “purely immediate.” (HTEW, 37-38)
“The individual is never completely one with his experiences. He remains always
observer and participant. This is very important to remember.” (HTEW, 38)
• So… no metaphysical union; no essential union with God.
There is something “extraordinary” in religious experience. This is: “awareness
of meeting God… the individual is seen as being exposed to direct knowledge of
ultimate meaning, ne plus ultra being… He is face to face with something which
is so much more, and so much more inclusive, than all of his awareness of
himself that for him, in the moment, there are no questions. Without asking,
somehow he knows.” (HTEW, 38-39)
“The experience is beyond or inclusive of the discursive. It is not other than
the discursive, but somehow it is inclusive of the discursive… ‘IT is the
knowledge of the subject of all predicates’ [Bennett].” (HETW, 39)
• To meet God. To know God, and be known by God.
“The goal of life is God! The source of life is God! That out of which life
comes is that into which life goes. God is the goal of man’s life, the end of
all his seeking, the meaning of all his striving. God is the guarantor of all
his values, the ultimate meaning – the timeless frame of reference… ‘Thou hast
made us for thyself and our souls are restless till they find their rest in
thee,” says Augustine.” (HTEW, 40-41)
Sheer rational and reflective processes cannot bring us to the God-conclusion.
“This is the great disclosure: that there is at the heart of life a Heart… Wade
in the water, because God is troubling the water.” (HTEW, 41)
Faith is a way of knowing, a form of knowledge. (HTEW, 43)
“Religious experience in its profoundest dimension is the finding of man by God
and the finding of God by man. This is the inner witness.” (HTEW, 43)
“The religious experience is always current, always fresh. In it I hear His Voice
in my own tongue and in accordance with the grain in my own wood. In that
glorious and transcendent moment, it may easily seem to me that all there is,
is God.” (HTEW, 46)
• The constant need for NEW words from God.
• For me, e.g., every Sunday is a “new Word” Sunday.
“Through religious experience… the individual comes to know God’s loving
presence in a personal and private way.” (L. Smith, HTEW, 35)
L. Smith – Thurman “laments the tendency of the church to substitute creeds,
doctrines, dogma, and ritual for religious experience.” (HTEW, 37)
• It’s all about the God-encounter that happens in religious experience.
At Howard U “Thurman crafted liturgies that introduced dance and other artistic
expressions to university worship.” (L. Smith, HTEW, 21)
Thurman’s “speaking style captivated audiences. He was a master in the use of
silence. At times, he would be so overwhelmed by an understanding that he
seemed to be in a trance.” (L. Smith, HTEW, 22)
7. Mysticism
The word “mysticism” comes from the Greek word muo, which means:
“to conceal.”
L. Smith – “Thurman is a mystic. He describes mysticism as a form of religious
experience where the awareness of a “conscious and direct exposure” to God is
more intense. Thurman does not consider mysticism as a superior religious
experience, only different.” (HTEW, 35)
8. Waiting on the Lord
“In the total religious experience we learn how to wait; we learn how to ready
the mind and the spirit. It is in the waiting, brooding, lingering, tarrying
timeless moments that the essence of the religious experience becomes most
fruitful. It is here that I learn to listen, to swing wide the very doors of my
being, to clean out the corners and the crevices of my life – so that when His
presence invades, I am free to enjoy His coming to Himself in me.” (HTEW, 45)
• Cf. Nouwen’s distinction between “waiting” as expectation, and “wishing.”
9. On “Jesus and the Disinherited
Jesus
and the Disinherited is a beautiful,
loving, and powerful book. It is Thurman’s most famous text.
The most-quoted phrase from Jesus and the Disinherited is: “What, then, is the
word of the religion of Jesus to those who stand with their backs to the
wall?”
• The question is: “Does Jesus offer any answers that help the disinherited in
this predicament of no exit?” (L. Smith, in HTEW, 27)
• This is redemptive stuff. This is “buying-out-of-bondage” stuff. This is
“Exodus-stuff.”
• “James Cone identifies JD as an influential book for his development of a
black theology of liberation.” (L Smith, HTEW, 28)
• Martin Luther King carried JD with him during the Montgomery Boycott. (L
Smith, HTEW, 28)
***
Prayer and Stillness
Howard Thurman writes:
"There is no argument needed for the necessity of taking time out for
being alone, for withdrawal, for being quiet without and still within. The
sheer physical necessity is urgent because the body and the entire nervous
system cry out for the healing waters of silence. One could not begin the
cultivation of the prayer life at a more practical point than deliberately to
seek each day, and several times a day, a lull in the rhythm of daily doing, a
period when nothing happens that demands active participation...
...At first the quiet times might be quite barren or a retreat from exhaustion.
One has to get used to the stillness even after it has been achieved. The time
may be used for taking stock, for examining one's life direction, one's plans,
one's relations, and the like. This in itself is most profitable. It is like
cleaning out the closets, or the desk drawers, and getting things in order.
The time may be used for focusing or re-focusing one's purposes in the light of
what at first may be only one's idea of the best and the highest. Then quiet
changes begin to take place. Somewhere along the way, one's idea of the best
and the highest takes on a transcendent character and one begins to commune, to
communicate with one's idea of the best and the highest - only a man does not
talk to, or with, an idea. When the awareness of God comes in - how He entered,
one does not know - one is certain that he has been there all the time. This
assurance is categorical and becomes the very core of one's faith; indeed, it
becomes more and more one's faith." (Thurman, Meditations
of the Heart, 27-28)
I love how Thurman puts the idea of getting still in the presence of God.
·
Withdraw daily from the
rat-race of life
·
Get still in your heart
·
Your physical body cries
out for such heart-and-space stillness
·
Take time to "do
nothing" but be with God
·
If you're new at this,
tiredness and exhaustion will take over, and the God-times may seem barren and
dry
·
Our world does not train
us for this kind of stillness, so it takes getting used-to
·
Once achieved as a
lifestyle it becomes the gateway to the Source of Life
·
In the stillness be
examined by God, as you engage in listening prayer
·
In the stillness
"spring cleaning" happens every day (there's a lot of useless garbage
in the human heart, which accrues in inverse proportion to the amount of
"still time" with God)
·
Then... God
breaks in, creativity happens, life results, energy gets restored,
purpose gets defined, direction is given, transcendence takes over, and one
communes (dwells/abides) with God.
