"You have not come to hear a detached, scholarly
lecture about the two powerful figures who are on our program. I
am deeply and unavoidably attached. Fully engaged. One of them,
Howard Thurman, was my adopted father, pastor, and spiritual
guide. The other, Martin King, was my adopted brother and leader
in the struggle." So began Dr. Vincent Harding, delivering
the first Sojourners Spirituality Lecture, excerpted below, on
March 10, 1998. Harding's lecture was delivered in Howard
University's Andrew Rankin Memorial Chapel in Washington, D.C.,
where Howard Thurman once served as dean. —The Editors
In their different and sometimes similar ways, Howard Thurman
and Martin King represented a spirituality deeply, solidly based
in one place, among one people, about which they had no doubts at
all. Just as Jesus of Nazareth represented a spirituality based
in one place, among one people, about whom he had no doubts at
all. At the same moment, both King and Thurman reached out far,
far beyond that ground and that base and saw no contradictions in
being grounded and reaching out as part of one motion of spirit
and life.
Thurman was—and this was a deep part of his
spirituality—a seeker. Thurman was never satisfied with the
truth that he had achieved, knowing always that there was more to
come, and that he must never think that he had found it all. And
so in 1935, Howard Thurman and Sue Bailey Thurman—her name
must be connected to his and his to hers, because they were a
magnificent team and she was as powerful a figure as you could
think of—went to India.
They went to India and what is now Sri Lanka and traveled a
great deal. Thurman had to understand who were these people who
were not Christians but who, from the deepest part of his being,
he knew were God's children. He began asking in profound ways,
What is the relationship of God's various children to each other,
though they go by different names? And he went to sit with one of
the greatest of God's children, that Hindu saint, Mohandas K.
Gandhi. Gandhi asked him questions about what it meant to be
black in America. Thurman asked Gandhi questions about the
possible relevance of the nonviolent struggle that was going on
in India for what might go on in the United States.
Thurman's faith was not a door that closed in on him as
something to be kept, protected, and guarded. It was an opening
door that opened out into the spirit, faith, dreams, and seekings
of others. We cannot know the spirituality of Howard Thurman
unless we know the spirituality of the open door.
What was he seeking? Why did he go to Gandhi? The center of
his seeking was, "Mr. Gandhi, we are in deep trouble in my
country. Millions of people are in deep trouble. Some of them
know it, and some of those who are causing the trouble don't know
it. But we are all in trouble in my country, Mr. Gandhi. What do
you have to say to us from what you have learned about the
nonviolent struggle to deal with the troubles of the Indian
people?"
You see, this is not a 1990s New Age seeker who goes around
the world looking for answers only to personal issues. The
spirituality of Howard Thurman was that of the seeker who sought
for the healing of his people and of his nation. Therefore,
Howard Thurman must be understood as a man of spirit who
understood what roots are for. Thurman saw that his roots were
not to be worshiped, that his roots were to provide him with
tree-like strength to reach out, to explore new possibilities for
his life. But even more, to explore new possibilities for the
life of his people and his nation. Roots for growth, not for
self-admiration. Roots for power, not to control, but to share.
I want to read to you from Thurman's The Luminous Darkness.
In it he tells us a great deal about those roots and about that
spirituality and about where he was going.
The fact that the first 23 years of my life were spent in
Florida and in Georgia has left its scars deep in my spirit and
has rendered me terribly sensitive to the churning abyss
separating white from black. Living outside of the region, I am
aware of the national span of racial prejudice and the virus of
segregation that undermines the vitality of American life.
So he says, "I know the story. I know the story of racism
and segregation in my bones. No one has to tell me about
it." And then he says:
Nevertheless, knowing all of that, experiencing all of
that, nevertheless a strange necessity has been laid upon me to
devote my life to the central concern that transcends the walls
that divide and would achieve in literal fact what is experienced
as literal truth: human life is one and all men [and women] are
members one of another.
Thurman's spirituality was grounded not only in the beauties
of the black experience, but grounded as well in the terrors of
the black experience, as only someone living in Florida and
Georgia could know them in 1915 and 1920 and 1930. At the same
time, it was a spirituality that says: "And knowing all
that, I also know that all human beings are one."
This kind of strange combination of spiritual truth with hard
political social truth led one young man in the 1930s to say this
about Howard Thurman: "I'm disappointed in him. We thought
we had found our Moses. And he turns out to be a mystic."
That's the spirituality that gets people all riled up.
Understand this about Thurman, and about King: Here are men
who at no point in their life would ever deny the terrors of what
it was in those days to be black in America. At no point in their
life would they deny the terrorism of so much of being white in
America; at the same time they would never deny the oneness of
all. That's a tough spirituality. That's not any kind of
sweet-by-and-by spirituality. That's a spirituality that takes on
the world as it is and says, "I'm gonna figure this out one
way or another." The mystic and the Moses.
IT IS IMPORTANT to realize that King and Thurman were deeply
connected to each other. The legend is that Martin carried around
a copy of Thurman's Jesus and the Disinherited wherever he
went. He was certainly a practitioner of what Thurman was trying
to deal with in that book. Thurman was saying, If you are living
the spirit of Jesus, then you cannot live in the spirit of fear,
you cannot live in the spirit of deception, even for good causes;
you cannot live in the spirit of hatred. None of those is the way
of Jesus.
The spirituality of Martin King, in an even more active,
militant way than Thurman, was the spirituality of wrestling with
the angels, the angels within and the angels around. The demonic
angels and the divine angels. No spirituality without
wrestling—that's where King was coming from. That
spirituality came directly out of the gospel of Luke: "The
spirit of the Lord is upon me." And what is the spirit upon
me for? So I can jump and scream and shout and sing? Yes, maybe
that. But right then, in Montgomery, Alabama, the spirituality
began, "The spirit of the Lord is upon me" so that I
can go and stand with the poor, with the messed up, with the
beaten up, with the downtrodden.
That was King's spirituality. A spirituality that makes it
impossible for you to avoid the folks in trouble. A spirituality
to work with the poor, to be with the prisoners, to stay close to
the brokenhearted, and to know what Thurman knew: Even though God
was so good to black folks in such hard times, their God could
never be captured by black folks. Black folks were simply one of
God's beloved people. Like Thurman, King had to figure out what
you do with all of the other beloved people. Especially the
messed-up beloved people. Especially the beloved people that
don't know they're beloved.
So this was King's spirituality, that sent him into Albany,
Georgia; into Birmingham; into St. Augustine—present,
present, constantly present with those in trouble. That's where
he was coming from when he came here to Washington, D.C., in
1963. Don't forget that, please. He didn't come down and say
"I have a dream" and disappear. He came out of hard
struggles that were guided by his spirituality. Tough, dangerous,
death-defiant struggles. And yet, at the same moment, he could
speak to the whole nation and say, "You aren't what you
should be, nation. And I'm not just cursing you out, I am
entreating you in love to be what God meant for you to be, for me
to be, for us to be." King was offering an entire nation the
opportunity to be free at last if we're willing to work, if we're
willing to struggle, if we're willing to face our bondage.
This spirituality took him back to Birmingham to mourn with
the mourning mothers and fathers of those bombed-out children.
But it also led him to challenge the white supremacy of that
Alabama countryside and say, "No, I'm not going to give into
this, because this is contrary to the Spirit. White people are
not supreme. And every time they think they are, they are killing
their spirit and every spirit." This spirituality led him to
Selma, to challenge the terrible voting discrimination there and
throughout the South. His spirituality led him to call thousands
of us to risk our lives, to join the struggle for the expansion
of democracy.
MARTIN LUTHER KING'S spirituality did not stop with marching
from Selma to Montgomery. Martin was saying some very, very
powerfully spiritual things to black people and white people and
everybody else who would listen. Here is how, in 1966, he
expressed his spirituality. This man must have certainly gotten
things mixed up. Because this is what he thought spirituality was
about:
I choose to identify with the underprivileged. I choose to
identify with the poor. I choose to give my life for the hungry.
I choose to live for and with those who find themselves seeing
life as a long and desolate corridor with no exit signs. This is
the way I'm going. If it means suffering a little bit, I'm going
that way. If it means sacrificing, I'm going that way. If it
means dying for them, I'm going that way. Because I heard the
voice saying: do something for others.
That was his spirituality. I'm not absolutely sure why you
would want to know about it, but that was it.
Of course, before many months were over, King also said,
"I identify with those people you call gooks and enemies and
Viet Congs and those who must be burned to death. I identify with
them; they are my sisters and brothers. Those are my children
running aflame." That was his spirituality. It's not just
praying "Our Father," but finding his sisters and
brothers and then acting it out in public challenges to the U.S.
government. Acting out his commitment to the poor by trying to
organize the poor. Not just to give nice things to them, but to
organize the poor so that they can gain what they needed for
their own lives.
That is the spirituality that we see him going to the end of
his life with. His final saying was, "America, listen to me,
please. You are being burdened down by some terrible commitments.
Any nation that chooses to spend more on armaments than on social
reform is a nation in trouble." He said, "America, I
would not say these things to you if I did not love you. But you
are in danger of giving in to militarism, to materialism, as well
as to racism."
The tricky matter is that when Martin said these things it had
already become very clear that he was not just talking to white
people. The very process of desegregation was already beginning
to suck us in so deeply into the ways of life and thought of the
nation that he could not speak to the nation about its situation
without speaking to his own black people. That was a spirituality
that got lots of people very uncomfortable. That's what
spirituality does. It gets people uncomfortable.
Howard Thurman once offered a wonderful statement from the
great social gospeler, Walter Rauschenbusch. He said that
Rauschenbusch claimed that there are many, many good people
around, but very few who are good enough to disturb the peace of
the devil. King became a disturber of the peace without any
question, speaking to us.
I WANT TO CLOSE now by coming back to King's father, to my
father, to your father—Howard Thurman—and to listen to
these words that Thurman wrote about life in this country and
what kind of spirituality is required to live it. This again is
from The Luminous Darkness (please forgive Father Howard's
sexist language).
The burden of being black and the burden of being white is
so heavy that it is rare in our society to experience oneself as
a human being. It may be, I don't know, that to experience
oneself as a human being is one with experiencing one's fellows
as human beings. It means that the individual must have a sense
of kinship to life that transcends and goes beyond the immediate
kinship of family or the organic kinship that binds him [or her]
ethnically or "racially" or nationally. He has a sense
of being an essential part of the structural relationship that
exists between him and all other men [and women], and between
him, all other men [and women], and the total external
environment. As a human being, then, he belongs to life and the
whole kingdom of life that includes all that lives and perhaps,
also, all that has ever lived. In other words, he sees himself as
a part of a continuing, breathing, living existence. To be a
human being, then, is to be essentially alive in a living world.
What more could one ask from a spirituality? To show us the
way to be alive with God's life in God's world. That's what the
father was about. That's what the brother was about.
Dr. Harding, a noted author, was a Sojourners contributing
editor and professor of religion and social transformation at the
Iliff School of Theology in Denver when this article appeared.
For more about Dr. Harding, visit The Veterans of Hope Project
Read other articles by:
Harding, Vincent
|
Subscribe to Sojourners today at a special introductory price and save $10 off the basic rate! Click here for details.
WE WANT TO HEAR from you! Click here to share your views. Or write to "Letters," Sojourners, 3333 14th St. NW, Suite 200, Washington DC 20010; fax (202) 328-8757. Please include your name, address, and daytime phone number. Letters may be edited for space and clarity.
|
|
 |
Read other articles by:
Harding, Vincent
|
