Anchored in the Current

Discovering Howard Thurman as Educator, Activist, Guide, and Prophet

Gregory C. Ellison II

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780664260668
• eBook ISBN: 9781611649994
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

Howard Thurman was famously known as one of the towering giants of American religion in the twentieth century. His writings have influenced some of the most important religious and political figures of the last century, from Martin Luther King to Barack Obama. Theologians such as James Cone and Cornel West regularly signal their indebtedness to him. He was a mystic, a preacher, an educator, a theologian, and much more. It is impossible to understand the African American church today without an appreciation for his contributions.

And yet, while Thurman's name is often recognized, his seminal ideas have not received the attention they deserve. In this volume, internationally known leaders like Marian Wright Edelman, Parker Palmer, and Barbara Brown Taylor invite the reader into creative engagement with Thurman's writings. Anchored in the Current illuminates how Thurman's life and wisdom lead these influential names on the ancient quest to connect with the Ultimate, all while discovering the contemporary need to seek racial justice and sharpening the minds and faith of those who come after us. Readers will find important and enduring answers in the works of this indispensable prophet and teacher.

PART 1

Thurman as Vocational Anchor

Interlude

Our Life and Times

MARI EVANS

This is a cautionary tale

For parents and caregivers

Living in the midst of joy and wonder

Subliminally unconscious

The oldest was,

from his beginning,

chivalrous . . .

The youngest was,

from his beginning,

Love, personified . . .

We listened, we heard their voices

we did not understand, or know

what they were saying; We watched

but did not understand what we

were seeing . . .

Innocence adrift

Innocents adrift in childhood’s chaos

Childhood’s turbulence

Childhood’s vulnerability

and we the sea

We the sea . . .

Living in the midst of joy and wonder

with no understanding; in the midst

of fear and apprehension

Subliminally unconscious

Too deaf and much too blind

to see or feel

the pain

1

Longing for Reunion with a Man I Never Met

BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR

To love is to make of one’s heart a swinging door.

—Howard Thurman, Disciplines of the Spirit¹

My relationship with Howard Thurman is so unbound by time that I cannot tell you how or when it began. Many of the copies of his books on my shelf have my maiden name inside them, which suggests a connection of forty years or more. But did I meet him in college or seminary? His face is as familiar as King’s or Gandhi’s. But who introduced him to me? The trademark cadence of his voice quiets any crowd. But how did I miss hearing it live? Like all the important relationships in my life, this one has no evident beginning or end. Love makes of the heart a swinging door, with no clocks on either side.

When I left parish ministry for the classroom in 1997, Thurman’s portrait had hung in my virtual art gallery for so long that the paint had weathered around it. I thought of him the same way I thought of George Washington Carver, Ida B. Wells, or W. E. B. Du Bois, as a luminary who belonged to other people first. He was an African American genius on whom African Americans had primary claim, not least because they received his teachings on violence, suffering, and reconciliation in ways I never could. My white life was so different from his and theirs that I kept a respectful distance, happy for the crumbs that fell from the table. I overheard what Thurman said above my head and was grateful to be in the room at all.

The last thing I expected was to meet him again in a world religions class in rural north Georgia, but that is what happened. I had added a new textbook to the syllabus called My Neighbor’s Faith: Stories of Interreligious Encounter, Growth and Transformation.² One of the first-person essays in the book was by Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, a prominent leader of the worldwide Jewish Renewal movement. When he was invited to write about a significant encounter with someone of another faith, he remembered something that had happened much earlier in his life, when he first became a graduate student at Boston University in 1955.

Reb Zalman was in his early thirties then, serving an Orthodox congregation in New Bedford, Massachusetts. His entire religious education up to that point had taken place within the Jewish world. When he felt called to study the psychology of religion in the wider world, the first thing he did was to ask for his rebbe’s permission to enter the master’s program at BU. Then he started figuring out how to handle the commute from New Bedford to Boston.

As an Orthodox rabbi, he was committed to saying morning prayers as close to sunrise as possible, which would have posed no problem during the summer months. He could have said his prayers at home before entering the rush hour stream of traffic toward Boston. But since his classes began in the winter, he had to come up with a different plan. The only one that worked was to leave home at 5:00 a.m. while it was still dark, watch the sun rise on his way to school, arrive on campus in time to say his prayers, and have breakfast before his first class at 8:00 a.m.

What he had not yet worked out was where to pray. The Hillel House on campus was not open when he arrived. Next he tried the main university chapel, which was open, but too full of Christian images for his Orthodox Jewish comfort. After that he went downstairs and discovered a small meditation chapel, but it was dominated by a large brass cross on an altar that still left him feeling crowded. Finally he found an open door to the Daniel Marsh Memorabilia Room, where he settled in an east-facing corner and began praying toward Jerusalem. This worked well enough that the room became his regular destination on his early mornings in Boston.

He was in and out before 8:00 a.m., which may be why he thought the man who surprised him one day was the janitor. “I’ve seen you here several times,” the middle-aged Black man said. “Wouldn’t you like to say your prayers in the small chapel?” The man was so kind and plainspoken that Reb Zalman worried about hurting his feelings if he explained about the cross. While he was still trying to think what to say, the man looked at him earnestly and said, “Why don’t you stop by the chapel tomorrow morning and take a look? Maybe you’d be comfortable saying your prayers there.”

When he arrived the next morning, Reb Zalman looked in the small chapel to find the large cross gone. In its place were two candles burning in brass candlesticks, with a giant Bible between them opened to Psalm 139: “Whither shall I flee from Thy presence?”

“From then on,” he wrote, “I understood that I was at liberty to move the cross and say my morning prayers in the chapel. Afterward, I would always put the cross back and turn the pages to Psalm 100, the ‘thank you’ psalm.” He still had no idea who his host was.

A short time later, Reb Zalman learned that the Dean of the Chapel was offering a course in spiritual discipline. He was intrigued because the course included “labs,” but he was also leery because he knew the Dean was a Christian who might feel obliged to try and convert him. Before registering for the course, he made an appointment to discuss his concerns.

The minute he saw the friendly Black man from the chapel sitting behind the Dean’s desk, the rabbi knew his concerns had been misplaced. As he had learned from their first encounter in the chapel, this was someone he could trust. But he was still anxious about how far away from home the course might take him.

“Dean Thurman,” he said, “I would like to take your course, but I don’t know if my ‘ANCHOR chains’ are long enough.” Thurman did not answer him right away. Instead, he put his coffee cup down on his desk and began to look at his own hands, turning them over and over as if he were considering two sides of an argument. One side was very light, Reb Zalman noticed, while the other side was very dark. Thurman did this for so long and with such calm that Reb Zalman had plenty of time to examine the large bump on Thurman’s forehead, just above and between his eyebrows. “I could swear that it was about to open and reveal the ‘third eye,’” he said, when Thurman finally spoke.

“Don’t you trust the ru’ah hakodesh?” Thurman asked him.

Reb Zalman was stunned. “He had used the Hebrew for the Holy Spirit, something I had not expected from a Gentile. And in so doing, he brought that question home to me in a powerful way. I began to tremble and rushed out of his office without answering him.”

For the next three weeks, he said, he was tormented by Thurman’s question. Did he indeed trust the ru’ah hakodesh enough to risk an encounter with another religion—to trust his soul to a non-Jew—without fearing the loss of his Jewish identity? After he realized there was only one answer to Thurman’s question, he signed up for the course, which he found “marvelous and tremendously impactful.” In it, he not only learned that his trust in the Holy Spirit was well placed. He also learned from Thurman “what a living, breathing religion is all about.”

INTER-RUPTIONS: SEISMIC SHIFTS AND INTERCONNECTIONS

This story caused a seismic shift in my relationship with Thurman. In the first eruption, I realized that words alone would never deliver me into his presence. I could read as many of his books as I liked, but this was not the same as watching him get up early one morning to turn a small Christian chapel into a place where a rabbi could say his prayers, taking one last look from the door to make sure the welcome was clear, and leaving without a word. I could listen to the recorded archive of his sermons, lectures, and seminars from beginning to end, but that was not the same as sitting in front of him while he turned his hands over and over again, entirely at home in the silence, until he came up with the perfect question to send his visitor away—speechless—to seek the truth.

In the second eruption, I realized that Howard Thurman could be my teacher too. His ministry was not only interracial; it was also interreligious, intercultural, interlingual, and interdisciplinary. If life had been discovered on other planets before he died, I am pretty sure his ministry would have been interplanetary too. None of this diminished his stature as an icon of the American civil rights movement or blunted the fact that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was still twelve years in the future when he became the first Black dean at a major white university. It simply meant that he might be speaking to me, in my skin, as profoundly as he was speaking to other people in theirs.

Rediscovering Thurman in the context of a college course on world religions sent me back to the shelf of his books again. What else did he have to say to people like my students and me, who were just beginning to learn other religious languages? How could he help us see that affirming the religious identities of other people did not make us traitors to our own? None of us could say ru’ah hakodesh yet, but the fact that Thurman had done so in a way that changed a rabbi’s life—not by converting him to Christianity, but by speaking to him in his own language about his own faith—this caused a stir. How had Thurman come to such a quiet understanding that the best way to practice his own faith was to encourage other people in theirs?

PUBLIC VOCATION, QUIET WITNESS: THURMAN AS PROPHET AND MYSTIC

The first book I chose was not one Thurman wrote, but one that was written about him: Howard Thurman: The Mystic as Prophet by Luther E. Smith Jr. It had been on my shelf so long that all the letters on the spine had faded from the sun. I met Smith at Candler School of Theology in the late 1970s, when he was on the faculty and I was assistant to the dean. He was an affable scholar, beloved by his students, who taught courses in church and community. He was also unfailingly kind to me, the least significant person he passed in the hallway on his way to meet his classes.

His book on Thurman came out in 1981, published by the same Quaker press that published a dozen of Thurman’s titles. Over the next ten years it received such wide attention both in the academy and in the church that Smith offered a revised edition in 1991. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1: Thurman as Vocational Anchor
• Part 2: Thurman as Anchor for Educators
• Part 3: Thurman as Anchor for Activists
• Part 4: Thurman as Spiritual Anchor
• Conclusion: Embracing the Quest
• Postlude: A Perpetual State of Relative Completion
• Notes
• Index