First Parish Unitarian UniversalistMeet Howard Thurman
Sermon by the Rev. Diane Teichert
First Parish Unitarian Universalist - Canton, MA
February 25, 2001
Sermon
If you don’t already know him, you might be wondering why I would want you to meet Howard Thurman. He was not a Unitarian, nor was he a Universalist. Nor was he a UU. Although his path intersected with our movement a few times years later, he was ordained a Baptist minister. Actually, though, he was not associated with any one denomination. Rather, I think of him as a charismatic bridge-builder, a great uniter, between Christian denominations, and across faiths, races and cultures. He believed that a group of people with worship at their center can become a community across differences, and that such a community will naturally be led into work for social justice.
Here on the last Sunday of Black History Month, let us get to know the Rev. Dr. Howard Thurman, a great American religious leader of the twentieth century, an African American liberal Christian, a mystic, visionary, pastor, author; husband, father and grandfather; whose midwife grandmother had been a slave, whose mother was a devout Christian and a cook for white families, whose father was a railroad track layer who died of typhoid when Howard was only seven.
Thurman may be familiar to many of you already. First of all, there are two readings by him in the back of our hymnal. One I used for the Words of Meditation this morning. The other you may recall from Christmases past,
When the song of angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
to heal the broken,
to feed the hungry,
to release the prisoner,
to rebuild the nations,
to bring peace among the brothers,
to make music in the heart.
Or, you may have attended services at Marsh Chapel at Boston University, where he served as Dean of the Chapel from 1953-1965. Less likely, maybe you attended the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples in San Francisco of which Thurman was founding co-pastor. Or, you may know one of his twenty-two books of poetry, meditations, prayers, and reflections on the message of Jesus, the founding of the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples, the meaning of African-American spirituals, and race relations in the United States.
There are two things about the Rev. Dr. Howard Thurman that inspire me. One-the major emphasis of this sermon-is his faith that a group of people with worship at their center can become a community across differences, and that such a community will naturally be led into work for social justice.
The other-unfortunately to be largely left for another day-is what he thought about the message of Jesus. Namely, in brief, that as a member of an oppressed minority group himself (as a Jew under vicious Roman rule), Jesus spoke a message of great worth to African Americans, bearing little resemblance to the teachings of the Christian church.. Jesus' real message was a message of finding self-worth or the Kingdom of God within, saying "no" to fear, hatred and deception, and "yes" to love between enemies when there is a connection that breaks through the differences in status (see Jesus and the Disinherited.).
Admittedly, my sense of Howard Thurman is derived from what he was willing to publish about himself and his ideas, plus a few references to him in UU sources, stemming from the times when his path crossed ours. Probably it is not wise to speak praises of someone whom one never met and about whom one has not read a critical biography. Nevertheless, I will today do just that.
Thurman was born in 1899 in Daytona Beach, Florida. He completed all there was of public schooling for black children there, back then: seventh grade. That way, as he tells it in his autobiography, there would be no demand for a black high school and if there was, the demand could be denied on the ground that no black children were qualified to start the ninth grade without having completed the eighth grade.
Howard, however, did complete the eighth grade, because his elementary school principal tutored him on his own time. Thurman must have been an outstanding individual, for all his life he both sought and was offered such opportunities unusual for someone of his race and poor beginnings.
Yes, he pursued what he wanted despite the limitations of race and class, but he also frequently benefited from luck, serendipity, or grace-call it what you will. For example, he tells this story. Having decided to attend the high school for blacks nearest to his home, he packed an old trunk with no locks or handles, tied it securely with rope, and made his way to the train station, with not much more money than what it would take to purchase a ticket for Jacksonville. But, they wouldn’t check his trunk, because it had no handle. And he didn’t have enough money to ship the trunk separately.
“I sat down on the steps of the railway station and cried my heart out. Presently I opened my eyes and saw before me a large pair of work shoes. My eyes crawled upward until I saw the man’s face. He was a black man, dressed in overalls and denim cap. As he looked down at me he rolled a cigarette and lit it. Then he said, ‘Boy, what in hell are you crying about?’”
So, Thurman told him.
“’If you’re trying to get out of this damn town to get an education, the least I can do is to help you.’” The man paid to have his trunk shipped. “Then, without a word, he turned and disappeared down the railroad track. I never saw him again.” (With Head and Heart, pp. 24-25).
That’s why Howard Thurman’s autobiography is dedicated to “the stranger in the railroad station in Daytona Beach who restored my broken dream sixty-five years ago.”
At the end of his first year of high school, Thurman learned he could no longer room free with his cousin. He would need to raise the money for room and board at home over the summer. He did get a shoeshine job, but it didn't pay well enough. He decided to ask for financial support from the owner of Procter and Gamble whose winter home happened to be in Daytona Beach-not that Howard knew him, of course.
There again, serendipity entered in, for after composing the letter, he needed to know the man’s summer address. By chance, as he biked back to work after lunch one day, as he tells it, “a very ill-tempered woman …came out of her front door just as I was riding by and yelled, ‘Boy! Come here.’ I put on my brakes and wheeled around. She scrutinized me for a moment, then said, ‘You look like a boy who can be trusted. Here, mail these letters.’ I took the letters and was on my way. Just before I put them in the mailbox, I looked at them, and to my utter amazement, one was addressed to Mr. James N. Gamble, 1430 Union Trust Building, Cincinnati, Ohio.”
Gamble's response to Thurman's' letter was an offer to send five dollars each month, the cost of a room in Jacksonville, for nine months. Apparently, Gamble remained a benefactor for some time, as Thurman wrote, “For the rest of my high school and college years, he was a good and faithful friend.” (pp. 25-26).
Thurman graduated from Morehouse College, took philosophy courses that summer at Columbia University (paid for by winning every cash prize at his Morehouse Commencement!), and in 1926 entered Rochester Theological Seminary in Rochester, New York, whose policy it was to have no more than two Negroes enrolled in any given year.
A short stint as a Baptist minister in Oberlin, Ohio was followed by a year of study with the Quaker mystic Rufus Jones at Haverford College. During that time Thurman's wife died of an illness contracted in the course of her job as a social worker. Their small daughter was cared for by Thurman’s sister. He returned to Atlanta to teach at Morehouse and Spelman Colleges. He soon met Sue Bailey, a YWCA national staff youth worker; they married in 1933 and relocated to Washington D.C. where Thurman was first appointed to the faculty of the Department of Religion at the prestigious historically black Howard University, then became Dean of Rankin Chapel there, a position in which he and his wife (and soon two daughters) thrived for twelve years, building a worshipping community and establishing a lively social rapport with students that faculty families at Howard University had apparently not known before.
While they were at Howard, Thurman and his wife Sue took a leave of absence, leaving their young daughters with Howard's sister, to lead a small delegation of Afro-Americans, the first of its kind, to India under the auspices of the YWCA/YMCA International Committee. Thurman devoted a full chapter of his autobiography, more than thirty pages, to this life-changing eight month tour in 1935. He and Sue had profound misgivings about the trip, and at first declined the invitation. They did not see how they could represent the segregated American Christian church abroad, especially in a country of brown-skinned people that was struggling for its independence from Britain at the time. In fact, Thurman was queried on this after his very first lecture there.
He replied, "I make a careful distinction between Christianity and the religion of Jesus…From my investigation and study, the religion of Jesus projected a creative solution to the pressing problem of survival for the minority for which He was a part in the Greco-Roman world. When Christianity became an imperial and world religion, it marched under banners other than that of the teacher and prophet of Galilee."
In India, the Thurmans met (among others) the poet Rabindragath Tagore, Madame Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit who later would become President of the General Assembly of the United Nations, and Mahatma Gandhi himself with whom they had three hours.
"Never in my life have I been part of that kind of examination: persistent, pragmatic questions about American Negroes, about the course of slavery, and how we had survived it," wrote Thurman. "He wanted to know about voting rights, lynching, discrimination, public school education, the churches and how they functioned. (p. 132)
When Gandhi was satisfied, Sue and Howard got to ask a few questions. They asked when Gandhi would come to the United States. He replied that he wouldn't come until he felt he would be able to "make some helpful contributions toward the solution of the racial trouble in your country" and that he couldn't try to do "unless or until I have won our struggle in India."
Then they asked about why Gandhi's movement had failed to rid India of the British. He said the masses of people had not embraced nonviolence long enough for it to be effective, because they did not have enough vitality to do so.
"It struck me," wrote Thurman, "with a tremendous wallop that I had never associated ethics and morality with physical vitality." (p. 133)
Gandhi explained that the masses lacked vitality for two reasons. One, they were hungry, because the British had prevented them from raising their own food and making their own cloth. So Gandhi was working to help the people recapture these abilities. And second, he said, they lacked vitality due to loss of self-respect, not because they'd been colonized, but because of the caste system in Hinduism, which relegated one class of their own people, the untouchables, to worthlessness. These things would have to change before independence could be won nonviolently.
Thurman's last question to Gandhi was about the future of Jesus in India. And Gandhi's reply was, "The greatest enemy that Jesus Christ has in my country is not Hinduism, or Buddhism, or any of the indigenous religions, but Christianity itself because it is identified with Western culture and colonialism." (p. 135).
Howard Thurman seemed to return to the United States with two deep and powerful discoveries made in India, which then informed his work for the rest of his days. The first he made in deep conversation with Hindus. That is that "what is true in any religion is in the religion because it is true; it is not true because it is in the religion." (p. 144). Second, he discovered a profound commitment within himself to "answer the persistent query of the Indian students about Christianity and the color bar." (p. 136).
These two discoveries led him directly into his next two ministries, both experiments in creating multi-racial, inclusive worshipping communities, thus proving that Christianity could cross and even help dismantle the color bar in the U.S.
After ten years at Howard University, Thurman would move to San Francisco to be the black co-pastor, the other being white, of an intentionally interracial church being newly organized in San Francisco under the auspices initially of the Presbyterian Church. At this point, Thurman's path crossed ours as UU's, when the October 1944 inaugural worship service of the new Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples, as it was called, was held at the First Unitarian Church of San Francisco. Soon, the new congregation had its own location, and after two years of co-ministry, Howard Thurman became its sole full-time pastor.
Worship was the keystone of the Fellowship of All People's life. Thurman wrote that his "basic concern was the deepening of the spiritual life of the gathered people…Our worship became increasingly a celebration before God of life lived during the week…Increasingly, numbers of people…found in the church restoration, inspiration, and courage for their work on behalf of social change in the community…But even the most radical of our congregation were eager to safeguard the centrality of the…concerns of the spirit…at [its] center." (p. 144).
As for the people who joined, they were diverse, but at first it was just a matter of getting used to each other's presence. They realized, though, they had to move beyond that to personal understanding. So the church soon was offering social and informational programs in which adults and children alike of different races got to know each other and each other's cultural backgrounds. Thurman thrived in this ministry. One gets the feeling that he grew in spiritual depth himself, because of his commitment to motivate the parishioners to "do what could be done [for social justice] by the individual in his world, in his home, in his life, on his street." ( p.162).
Toward the end of his time in San Francisco, Thurman's path crossed ours again. In 1952, the American Unitarian Association Board established the Commission on Unitarian Intergroup Relations. Its charge was to take stock of race relations in Unitarianism, understand its dynamics, and set specific goals. Among the Commission members was Howard Thurman. Discovering a great complacency among our congregations the Commission called for Unitarians "to move unflinchingly toward the development of a religious movement in which all may be participants without thought of racial or national origin." The recommendations of this critical and forward-thinking, Commission were never implemented, states the Rev. Mark Morrison-Reed, in his book Black Pioneers in a White Denomination (p. 145).
In 1953, Thurman was again wooed across the country, to become Dean of Marsh Chapel at Boston University. It was a wrenching decision: to leave the Fellowship after nine fruitful years as its minister, to leave the church for a secular university, to leave a thriving congregation for one that had become moribund, to risk failing as the first black man to hold such a position. Yet, it was also an opportunity to start another intentionally diverse worshipping community that could be, like the one in San Francisco, inter-racial, but also inter-faith, due to the increasing number of international students at BU. Thurman thought the impact of such a community would be even greater than that of the Fellowship, because thousands of students would experience it and then bring the fruits of that experience with them wherever they went after graduation.
Conferring with family and the leaders of the Fellowship, he decided to make the move. He then set about crafting a worship experience at Marsh Chapel that would be inclusive enough to welcome a wide variety of students, faculty, and people from the different neighborhoods of Boston, with sufficient spiritual depth to hold them together. Around the core of worship, he and Sue brought people together in their home and for various kinds of social, educational and activist programs, much as they had built a sense of community at Howard University and in San Francisco. They remained in Boston until 1968, when they moved back to San Francisco three years after Thurman's retirement from BU. There they began an educational foundation in his name to support the education of African American young people, primarily in the South. Howard Thurman died at the age of 82 in 1981.
I realize our time is nearly over and I haven't yet answered the question as to why this man's life should matter to us. To me, knowledge of history is always useful in charting a course from the present into the future. As a white person, I've needed to hear or read the stories of black Americans so that I could try to understand their experiences with racism and best determine roles for myself in dismantling it. But, this man speaks to more than just history and social change. He speaks to me in an inner place, a wordless place where my hopes and ideals are born and re-born. He speaks as he titled his autobiography, with head and heart.
Religious experience for Howard Thurman is intensely rational. He says, for him "the root of all meditation is the need or urgency in me [that] 'mines' all experience to find what is useful for my condition." (p. 263). Yet, though intensely rational, it is suffused with spiritual energy, as in these closing sentences of the autobiography he published two years before his death, in which the wordless awesome wonder that is life is so beautifully conveyed,
"The years, the months, the days, and the hours have flown by my open window. Here and there an incident, a towering moment, a naked memory, an etched countenance, a whisper in the dark, a golden glow-these and much, much more are the woven fabric of the time I have lived. What I have written is but a fleeting intimation of the outside of what one man sees and may tell about the path he walks. No one shares the secret of a life; no one enters into the heart of the mystery. There are telltale signs that mark the passing of one's appointed days. Always we are on the outside of our story, always we are beggars who seek entrance to the kingdom of our dwelling place. When we are admitted, the price exacted of us is the sealing of the lips. And this is the strangest of all the paradoxes of the human adventure: we live inside all experience, but we are permitted to bear witness only to the outside. Such is the riddle of life and the story of the passing of our days." (p. 270)
Benediction
May we each mine our experience for its deepest meanings,
So that to our own selves we might be true.
Finding within a source of energy and love
Sufficient to change the world.
Amen