Multi-Cultural Action Committee Sunday: "Deep Is the Hunger"

the Rev. Daniel Budd
members of the Multi-Cultural Action Committee
Date: February 14, 2010

DEEP IS THE HUNGER                            14 Feb 10

 

 

 

        The Rev. Dr. Howard Thurman was born in Daytona, Florida, one hundred and ten years ago - his autobiography does not give the exact date.

        His father, Saul Solomon Thurman, died when Howard was seven.  At his funeral, a traveling evangelist gave the sermon (the minister of his own church refused since Saul was not a member).  Thurman writes that he “listened with wonderment, then anger, and finally mounting rage as Sam Cromarte (a name which, after 72 years, Thurman had not forgotten) preached my father into hell.”

 

Cromarte took the occasion to show what would happen to sinners who died out of Christ.  In the buggy, coming home from the cemetery, I sought some explanation.  Why would Reverend Cromarte do this to Papa?  Why would he say such things?  Neither Mamma nor Grandma would answer my persistent query.  Finally, almost to myself, I said ‘One thing is sure.  When I grow up and become a man, I will never have anything to do with the church.’

 

        I am certain that many of us made such pronouncements when we were young, about what we would always do or never do, some of which may have turned completely around, as did this one for Thurman.  He would not merely have some “thing” to do with the Church, he would play a role in transforming it.

 

        During his youth, Thurman found more companionship in nature than in people.  He sensed the strength of both the quiet and the aliveness of the woods, and enjoyed fishing and picking huckleberries by the ocean and the river.  A large oak tree in front of his house provided a place of centering, of peace and comfort and contemplation.  At nighttime, he felt solace: “all the little secrets of my life and heart and all of my most intimate and private thoughts would not be violated, spread out before me in the night.”  Cradled by the night sky, he could sort them out and find a reassurance, a sense of timelessness, a natural embrace.

        The community in which he grew up was, of course, segregated.  This experience, as he wrote later, “left scars deep in my spirit and has rendered me terribly sensitive to the churning abyss separating white from black.”  The white community was out of bounds, a world apart, another universe entirely; life was lived completely within one’s own community.  Separate and unequal, Thurman noted that the structure of this society had one crucial difference: the black was always at the mercy of the white.  Illustrating this he wrote:

I was always available as an outlet for . . . hostility whatever may have been the cause. . . .  If [a white boy] was angry because he had been chastised by his parents or because of something else that had happened to him in his world and he met me on the street, he could easily give vent to his anger.  He could molest me or push me off the sidewalk without too great a danger of retaliation. ...Thus I was taught to keep out of his way, to reduce my exposure to him under any and all circumstances. ...I was frozen in my status; he was fluid in his.

 

        Another memory gives a further illustration of this churning abyss.  As a boy he earned money raking leaves in the yard of a white family.  One day, the family’s seven-year-old daughter kept scattering the leaves he had raked, pulling out particular shapes to show him.  After several instances of this, he finally threatened to tell her father.  She looked at him in anger and, taking a straight pin out of her pinafore, stuck it into the back of his hand.  He pulled back in pain, whereupon the little girl said in utter astonishment, “That did not hurt you — you can’t feel!”

        Thus the struggle for Thurman became centered upon trying “to achieve a sense of self in a total environment that threatened the self.” (Luminous Darkness)

        He found that sense of self nurtured in the very church which, at one time, had so angered him.  He joined when he was 12, just five years after his father’s death.  Believing as he did that the traditional “otherworldly” attitude of the black church was superficial and misguided, he recalled his experience as one which nevertheless provided a supportive community that nurtured a sense of dignity and worth, an experience which “served to enhance my consciousness that whatever I did with my life mattered.”

 

        There being only three public high schools for blacks in the entire state of Florida at the time, Thurman had to go to Jacksonville to attend high school.  After graduating valedictorian, he entered Morehouse College in Atlanta in 1919, joining a student body that included Martin L. King, Sr.

        By his final year there, Thurman was convinced that he wanted to attend seminary.  He wrote to the Newton Theological Seminary in Massachusetts (now Andover/Newton Theological Seminary) and received a very cordial letter from the president expressing regret that the school did not admit Negroes.  Recommending some that did, he assured Thurman that he would be able to secure the kind of training that he would need to provide religious leadership for his people.

        In 1923, Thurman applied to and was accepted by the Rochester Theological Seminary in New York.  It was made clear to him that he was privileged since the school’s policy was to have no more than two Negroes enrolled in any given year.  There were not many African-American’s in western New York at that time, and Thurman constantly met racial issues head on, especially when he preached as a student in area churches.

        The first church he served after graduation was in Oberlin — the Mt. Zion Baptist Church.  There he began to explore his “inner regions, and to cultivate an inner life of prayer and meditation.  The experience of religion became increasingly central” to his development.  At the same time, he wrote, “my preaching became less motivated by the desire to ‘teach;’ it became almost entirely devoted to the meaning of the experience of our common quest and journey.”

        Thurman served two years in Oberlin before moving to Haverford College, where he entered a program of directed study for his doctorate.  Afterwards, he returned to Morehouse to teach, and there took over the duties of the college chapel.  This experience helped prepare him for his next move, to Howard University in Washington DC, both to teach and serve as Dean of Rankin Chapel, the University church.

        Thurman completely redesigned worship at Rankin, introducing a greater involvement of music, poetry and literature into the service.  Despite the fact, he wrote, that Washington “was as segregated racially as Atlanta or Jackson, the Sunday chapel service provided a time and a place where race, sex, culture, material belongings, and earlier religious orientation became undifferentiated in the presence of God.”  Thurman also began including

 

speakers who represented other world religions.  Our pulpit was often filled by rabbis.  Invitations were also extended to black ministers who received few, if any, offers to preach before a congregation such as Rankin Chapel.

 

        He experimented with different forms of worship, and provided stretches of time for meditation, prayer and silence.  Through his efforts, Thurman created a worship atmosphere at Rankin Chapel which provided “an experience of unity among peoples . . . more compelling than all that separates and divides.”

        In 1935, Thurman and his spouse, Sue Bailey Thurman, spent a year in India at the invitation of the national YMCA and YWCA International Committee.  It was an experience which both challenged and deepened his faith.  After a lecture, for instance, he was asked how “an intelligent young Negro such as yourself” could account for his Christian beliefs.  After all, it was professed Christians, for the most part, who were responsible for both slavery and the brutalization of his race in the United States.  Thurman recalled, in part, that his own judgment of Christianity turned out to be “far more devastating” than the questioner’s.  “I make a careful distinction between Christianity and the religion of Jesus,” he said.  While Christianity had become “an imperial and world religion,” responsible for much misery and hypocrisy, Thurman’s faith was “concerned about and dedicated to experiencing that spirit that was in Jesus . . . on the side of freedom, liberty, and justice for all people, black, white, red, yellow, saint, sinner, rich or poor.”  Thurman’s Jesus lived in the presence of God, accepted others into that presence without judgment, and emphasized the worth and dignity of everyone, unlike the teachings of much mainline Christianity.

        Just before leaving India, he had the opportunity to meet Gandhi, who expressed his puzzlement as to why slaves had not become Muslims instead of Christians, Islam being a religion in which, ideally, lines are not drawn within the religious fellowship; within that faith, all are equal.  They also spoke of non-violence, and of their mutual struggles to nurture self-respect — Thurman among African-Americans, and Gandhi within the repressive Hindu caste system.

 

        In 1943, a Presbyterian minister and professor of philosophy at San Francisco State College wrote to Thurman proposing that Thurman join him as co-pastor of a church he was organizing.  Thurman enthusiastically accepted.  Alfred Fisk and Howard Thurman thus joined together in what would be the first interdenominational, interracial church organized in the United States.

 

In spirit, we met at two critical points: we were sensitive to the immorality and amorality of the Christian church in its ineffectiveness in the face of racial discrimination in its own body, as well as in the general society; in the second instance, we were convinced that a way could be found to create a religious fellowship worthy of transcending racial, cultural, and social distinctions.

 

        The inaugural service was held at the First Unitarian Church of San Francisco and the congregation grew rapidly.

 

Most of the major denominations were represented in the membership with persons of other faiths sharing worship with us and joining in all . . . activities.  There were humanists and others with the widest range of political concerns and orientations.  The one thing we had in common was a vast hunger for a better way of living together than we had ever known and a deeper spiritual hunger that only the God of life could satisfy.  Within this broad context each of us had his or her own dream and dedication...

...and the Church for the Fellowship of all Peoples grew and flourished.

 

        Worship was the keystone for Thurman in this venture:

 

Our worship became increasingly a celebration before God of life lived during the week; the daily life and the period of worship were one . . . rhythm.  Increasing numbers of people . . . found in the church restoration, inspiration, and courage for their work on behalf of social change in the community.

 

It was here that he became profoundly aware of the insight which had come to him in India: “What is true in any religion is in the religion because it is true; it is not true because it is in the religion.”

        His faith in what he called “the practical efficacy of the religious experience” exposed the new community to much criticism.

 

We did not fit the limited definition of an ‘activist’ group.  It was my conviction and determination that the church would be a resource for activists — a mission fundamentally perceived . . . [that it be a place where] individuals who were in the thick of the struggle for social change would be able to find renewal and fresh courage in the spiritual resources of the church.

        ...The true genius of the church was revealed by what it symbolized as a beachhead in our society in terms of community, and as an inspiration to the solitary individual to put his [or her] weight on the side of a society in which no [one] need be afraid.

 

        In 1953, Thurman was offered the Deanship of Marsh Chapel and a professorship in the School of Theology at Boston University.  It was a difficult decision, but in the end, he and Sue accepted.  His charge was to build the type of community he had in San Francisco, and he did.  It was, in fact, his life work, and could be summarized in his felt need “to bring to bear all the resources of mind and spirit on the oneness of the human quest.”  (Thurman’s first year at Boston College, incidentally, corresponded with the last year of a student finishing his PhD, the son of one of Thurman’s former Morehouse classmates, Martin Luther King, Jr.)

      Upon his retirement from Marsh Chapel, Thurman oversaw the Howard Thurman Educational Trust, which was dedicated to the education of black youth, especially in the South, and to the collection and classification of his written and taped materials that were the distilled essence of his spiritual discoveries over 40 years.

        When he wrote his autobiography at age 79 (he would die two years later, in 1981), Thurman closed his narrative of his life with these words:

[In all our strivings and tragedies] there is a secret door which leads into the central place, where the Creator of life and the God of the human heart are one and the same.  I make my stand for the future and for the generations who follow over the bridges we already have crossed.  It is here that the meaning of the hunger of the heart is unified.  The Head and the Heart at last inseparable; they are lost in the wonder in the One.

 

        May we likewise bring to bear all the resources of our minds and spirits to the oneness of the human quest, that the spirit of such great souls as Howard Thurman may live on in all to which we aspire in and for our lives today.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

REFERENCES

All quotations are taken from With Head and Heart, the autobiography of Howard Thurman (a Harvest Book, Harcourt Brace & Co. San Diego, 1979), excepting the one noted from The Luminous Darkness (Friends United Press, Richmond IN, 1965).