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With Head and Heart: The Life and Spirituality of Howard Thurman
Bruce Taylor
January 14, 2007

Good morning! It’s a privilege for me to speak to you on this Sunday before Martin Luther King Day. This Sunday is important to Unitarian Universalists. It is a time to remember the achieve-ments of the past. It’s a time to recognize the wounds of slavery and segregation that still exist in American society, and to confront oppression in the world as we find it today.
The theme of this worship service is Howard Thurman, who grew up in the generation before Martin Luther King, Jr. In many ways, Thurman helped to lay the spiritual groundwork for the civil rights movement. His famous book, Jesus and the Disinherited, was an important influence on Dr. King and other leaders. Thurman also published many of his theological reflections. We’ve heard a sample of these in the readings this morning.

I hope to provoke your curiosity about this man and his life, as an example of the creative inter-play between spirituality and social action.

Howard Thurman was born in 1899, and he grew up in Daytona, Florida. His mother worked most of the time. He was raised by his grandmother Nancy, a former slave, who shaped him in-tellectually and spiritually and prepared him to excel in life.

To win his education, Howard Thurman overcame racial and economic barriers every step of the way. Public school for black children in Daytona ended in the seventh grade, but the eighth grade was required for entry to high school. When Thurman completed the seventh grade, the principal at his school tutored him privately, so that he passed his eighth grade exams. But there were few high schools for black children in the state of Florida. Thurman faced economic hardship to at-tend the Florida Baptist Academy in Jacksonville. He graduated as class valedictorian. He pro-ceeded to Morehouse College in Atlanta, where he won nearly every literary prize, purportedly read every book in the library, and graduated again as class valedictorian.

Thurman decided early on that he wanted to become a minister, and he applied to the Newton Theological Seminary in Newton, Massachusetts. He received a polite letter from the president, who expressed his regret that the school did not admit Negroes, and referred him to a school in Virginia, where he could receive the necessary training to provide religious leadership to “his people”.

Thurman enrolled at the Rochester Theological Seminary in Rochester, New York, whose policy was to admit two black students per year, at most. He was given a single room; but then, two white classmates invited him move in with them. The school administration opposed this, but there was nothing they could do to prevent it. Thurman served as a guest preacher and accepted many public speaking engagements to discuss black/white relations. He did this despite harass-ment by the Ku Klux Klan, which was active in western New York.

Thurman graduated from seminary in 1926. I’d like to describe his career, but that would take all morning, so I can only give a brief outline.

Thurman first became pastor to a racially mixed congregation at the Mt. Zion Baptist Church in Oberlin, Ohio. After three years, he left Oberlin to study with Rufus Jones, a Quaker philosopher and mystic. He then returned south to teach at Morehouse and Spelman colleges. In 1932, he came to Howard University in Washington, D.C., as professor of theology and dean of the chapel. In 1935, he led an African-American delegation on a “pilgrimage of friendship” to India, an experience that would change his life.

In 1943, Thurman left his tenured position at Howard University to help lead an interracial, inter-faith church in San Francisco: the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples. In 1953, Thurman came to Boston University as a professor of theology and dean of the Marsh Chapel. This al-lowed him to extend the reach of his interfaith work. It was an important social milestone as well: Thurman was the first African-American to be the dean at a predominantly white univer-sity. He remained at B.U. until 1965, when he launched what he called his “wider ministry.” Howard and his wife, Susan Bailey Thurman, traveled the world and taught widely.

II

So far I’ve sketched the contours of a vigorous man who surmounted many obstacles to serve his fellow human creatures. But what kind of person was he inside? Howard Thurman describes two early influences that formed him: the natural world and his grandmother Nancy.

His early recollections concern nature. The young Howard looked forward to nightfall and found a comforting presence in the darkness:

The night was more than a companion. It was a presence, an articulate climate … I could hear the night think, and I could feel the night feel … I felt embraced, enveloped, held se-cure … All the little secrets of my life and heart and all of my most intimate and private thoughts would not be violated, I knew, if I spread them out before me in the night. [With Head and Heart, p. 9]
So, very early in his life, Howard Thurman felt direct experience of a divine presence. His favor-ite psalm was #139, which echoes his trusting relationship to the darkness. Here are a few verses:

1 O LORD, you have searched me and known me.
2 You know when I sit down and when I rise up;
you discern my thoughts from far away.
7 Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence?
11 If I say, "Surely the darkness shall cover me,
and the light around me become night,"
12 even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day,
for darkness is as light to you.
14 I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Wonderful are your works; that I know very well.
23 Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my thoughts.
24 See if there is any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.

Young Howard had a special friendship with a large oak tree in his back yard. I’ve put a picture of this tree on the front of the worship program. Howard drew strength from this tree. He ad-mired the way it survived the Florida storms, bending in the wind and never breaking.
Howard also drew strength from his grandmother Nancy, who was like an oak tree to him. He recalled resting his head in her lap during the long hours of Sunday worship, while he was yet too young to understand the words. Later, she told him about her life as a slave. She often re-peated this story: Once or twice a year, the master would allow a slave preacher to come from a neighboring plantation and preach to the slaves. At the end of the worship service, the preacher would pause, his eyes scrutinizing every face in the congregation, and then he would tell them, “You are not slaves! You are God’s children!”
This may sound like the denial of fact. But it tells truth in a powerful way. There is a difference between the condition of slavery and the identity of being a slave. The preacher wanted his lis-teners to remember that their value was not fixed by the role imposed on them, but by their kin-ship with the transcendent.
Howard Thurman has been called a “mystic.” His spirituality was based on a sense of intimacy with his God and the interconnectedness of all things. During his early years as a pastor, Thur-man began to cultivate a lifelong practice of reflection and meditation. He came to recognize the unity between his own needs, the needs of his parishioners, and human need in general. During these years, as Thurman says, barriers were crumbling within himself and his ministry, although it would take time to work out the implications of this experience.
III
The watershed event was his journey to India, Sri Lanka, and Burma in 1935 with a delegation of African-Americans on behalf of the World Student Christian Federation. In his meetings with Indian intellectuals, Thurman was forced to look critically at his Christian faith. At one speaking engagement, he received this blunt question:
What are you doing here? Your forebears were taken from the west coast of Africa as slaves, by Christians. They were sold in America, a Christian country, to Christians. They were freed … by a man who was not himself a professing Christian. Since that time you have been brutalized, lynched, burned, and denied most civil rights by Christians ... I think that an intelligent young man such as yourself, here in our country on behalf of a Christian enterprise, is a traitor to all of the darker peoples of the earth. [114]
Thurman agreed with the questioner’s stark assessment of the Christian establishment. But he made a careful distinction between Christianity and the religion of Jesus, who stands on the side of justice for all people.
During his travels, Thurman struggled to articulate the relevance of Christianity in a country that was struggling against Western imperialism. At the same time, he came to see the kinship be-tween Christianity and the other world religions he encountered. Thurman says:
I had to find my way to the place where I could stand side by side with a Hindu, a Bud-dhist, a Moslem, and know that the authenticity of their experience was identical with the essence and authenticity of my own. [120]
The high point of Thurman’s India trip was his meeting with Gandhi, who very much wanted to see him. Gandhi asked many questions about slavery, how the people had survived this experi-ence, the struggle against discrimination, and the experience of the black churches. Gandhi ex-pressed his hope that African-Americans would deliver an unadulterated message of non-violence, not only to America but to people everywhere.
Thurman asked Gandhi why his campaign of nonviolence had not yet freed India from the rule of the British. Gandhi answered that the effectiveness of nonviolence depended on its wholesale acceptance by the masses of people and not just the leaders. So far, the ideal had not taken root because the people lacked vitality.
Vitality includes physical well-being. The people were hungry and they could not support them-selves, after the British took away their traditional livelihoods. That is why Gandhi promoted the weaving of cotton cloth, through his own example.
Vitality includes self-respect. The people’s loss of self-respect was due not only to the British rule but to divisions in Indian society: specifically, the caste structure, which treated some human beings as worthless. Gandhi had to attack the problem of untouchability. As a caste Hindu, he provided a personal example by adopting an outcaste into his own family. In his speaking and writing, Gandhi called the untouchables Harijan, that is to say, “Children of God.”
IV
Thurman’s experience in India would bear fruit in the years that followed. He distilled his teach-ings on social ethics in his book, Jesus and the Disinherited.
Thurman acknowledges the role of Christianity in supporting the abuse of power and reinforcing segregation. But he distinguishes the Christian establishment from the life and teachings of Je-sus. He asks us to consider Jesus as a religious subject instead of a religious object.
Jesus was a Jew, living in a land occupied by a foreign power. His people had their backs against the wall. They were threatened in their bodily survival, and in their survival as a people. They saw two options: to knuckle under, or to respond with violence. Jesus preached a third way. It was an emancipatory way of being. Jesus taught his disciples not to fear those who killed the body but could not kill the soul. To the people, he preached: The Kingdom of Heaven is in you. Your destiny is not limited by the oppressor. You are children of God.
There is nothing easy about the path of Jesus. It requires mastery of the three “hounds of Hell” that dog the disinherited: fear, deception, and hatred. Gandhi also recognized this connection be-tween freedom and self-mastery. The Hindi word for freedom is swaraj: self-rule. The people must be strong to master themselves, and reclaim the freedom that naturally belongs to them.
Jesus provided this strength in his teachings about the Kingdom of God, his healing presence, and his self-sacrifice. Likewise, Gandhi offered his vision, his personal example, and his life.
V
Howard Thurman returned from India and continued to teach at Howard University. In 1943, he received a letter from Dr. Alfred Fisk, a Presbyterian minister in San Francisco. The letter asked if Thurman knew anyone who could help establish an interracial church. The leadership of this church would be shared equally between a black and a white minister. The governing board, the staff, and the Sunday school would also be integrated.
When Thurman read this letter, he says, he felt a touch on his shoulder. It meant giving up a ten-ured professorship, uprooting his family, and moving across the country. He had to take leave without salary. As it turned out, he did not return from this unpaid sabbatical.
San Francisco in the 1940s was a city in need of healing. Thurman refers to the “bleeding wound” caused by the deportation of Japanese Americans. The war industry brought an influx of workers from the South – whites and blacks – and the residue of prejudice and resentment they carried with them. San Francisco was a place simmering with ethnic tensions, misunderstanding, and xenophobia.
The Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples held its inaugural service at the First Unitarian Church of San Francisco. They held their early services in the chapel of a former Japanese con-gregation. The church members represented most of the Christian denominations. People from other faiths often came to worship and to participate in the leading of worship.
The worship format was opened up to include meditation, the fine arts, drama, liturgical dance, and other nontraditional elements. One year’s schedule included a World Communion Service; Music and Liturgy of the Synagogue; Living Madonnas; two dance services with the Fellowship Dance Choir, and a Color Motion Picture service.
These programs attracted visitors. But the church leaders sought other ways to reach out to a di-vided city. One vehicle was a series of intercultural workshops: to showcase the works of local authors and artists; international dinners, with foods from around the world; and cultural presen-tations by members of different ethnic groups in the surrounding community.
In Sunday school, the children learned about the lives of children in other countries and their dif-ferent religions. Thurman recalls one small boy who told his mother when he went home, “I knew Jesus was a Baptist, but I had no idea that he was a Jew!”
These achievements may seem pretty tame by today’s standards. But remember, this was 60 years ago – before the advances in civil rights that we now take for granted.
Thurman was able to put into practice his understanding of love, which he first experienced as a child in the dark. It is the experience of being known and loved that allows people to turn around and love others. But this love requires understanding. Thurman says:
I began with the concept that goodwill which did not have as its center a hard core of fact and understanding was futile and mere sentimentality … How to “thicken” the relations and give content to their character was the issue. [146]
VI
The work of social justice has two aspects – the work of action and the inward struggle, where matters of life and death are first decided. Thurman’s life shows how the two are connected. As a mystic, his personal experience forced him to live out his vision in the world. As boundaries were dissolved within himself, Thurman found ways to heal alienation between people, and to build bridges of understanding between different religions, ethnic groups, and social classes.
Thurman regarded patience as essential, even and especially in matters concerning social change. Patience is not inactivity or resignation but a dynamic process. He says:
Some things cannot be forced but they must unfold, sending their tendrils deep into the heart of life, gathering strength and power with the unfolding days … Patience, in the last analysis, is only partially concerned with time, with waiting; it includes also the quality of relentlessness, ceaselessness and constancy. It is a mood of deliberate calm that is the distilled result of confidence. [Deep Is the Hunger, p. 54]
Howard Thurman died in 1981. In his eulogy, the Reverend Jesse Jackson described him as “a teacher of teachers, a leader of leaders, and a preacher of preachers.” During his lifetime, How-ard Thurman patiently pulled down walls at the interpersonal and the community levels. He led the way for more sweeping social changes. Without mincing words, but also without bitterness, he holds the door open to the disinherited and the privileged alike. He encourages us to cross so-cial boundaries and recognize one another as children of God.