Howard Thurman Theology, Final Paper, 9/5/23
Pip Ollie Paris – (newly) He/Him/His
Howard Thurman and the Search for Common Ground
Final Paper
9/5/23
We live in a time where there is much debate about whether the particularities of a person’s life matter. In the Unitarian Universalist tradition, the majority of religious professionals and lay people agree that we need to face our often racist history head-on, to learn from it and to try to do better. Among this liberal majority, there is also the firm belief that we need to challenge white supremacist cultural practices and beliefs that are subtly embedded and weaved through our denomination from our history of swimming in this larger culture that devalues entire groups of people based on skin color and other identifiers. There is, however, a small but loud contingent that feels we are heading in the wrong direction, and should not be focusing on race or other social identifiers at all. The argument is that talking about race and gender and other social identities is divisive, and is actually the real racism. These folks are trying to disrupt the anti-racist processes within the denomination and individual churches. It remains to be seen how much of a long-term effect this resisting group will have.
This slog of a conversation reflects the larger US society. Conservatives decry “identity politics” and get upset about a movement being called “Black Lives Matter” instead of “All Lives Matter.” These folks, also often overlapping with the “Make America Great Again” crowd, don’t like it when systemic or even interpersonal injustices are named, as they either don’t see these problems or simply don’t care. There are also “liberals” who don’t like for differences in life experiences to be named. This group often feels that racial inequality issues were settled by leaders like MLK jr, and Rosa Parks and they respond to claims of racism by either simply denying they are racist, or resorting to claims such as that they “don’t see color,” thereby absolving themselves in their minds of any complicity and also minimizing/erasing the lived differences that are created by systemic injustices. Because people do live within social worlds that oppress some more than others based on things like skin color, talking about the categories helps us understand where people are experiencing systemic injustices. I’m always on the lookout for ways to reframe this resistance to naming lived social identities, especially within religious communities.
It is within this context that I approach Rev Howard Thurman’s writings. I am aware that learning about the lived experiences of folks who face discrimination and systemic harm as a result of often intersecting marginalized identities is essential to understanding how we can all work together for a better world for all. While I worry that Thurman’s words of universality and unity could be cherry-picked to miss his point just as Rev Dr MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech often is, any deep reading of Rev Thurman’s work conveys a profound understanding for how the particular meets the universal.
Thurman articulates the relationship of particularity and universality better than anyone I’ve read. He writes “There must be a conscious “toe hold” for God in religious experience…” he goes on to tell a story of a friend of his who gained the favor of his landlady by emptying ash trays simply because he discovered this finite detail mattered to her… “It worked like magic–a basis of communication was established now which eventually led to understanding at many levels of appreciation. He met her at the level of the ash trays.
In Jesus and the Disinherited, Thurman makes the importance of specificity (as context) in any life experiences, up to and including the life of Jesus. “It is impossible for Jesus to be understood outside of the sense of community which Israel held with God. This does not take anything away from him; rather does it heighten the challenge which his life presents, for such reflection reveals him as the product of the constant working of the creative mind of God upon the life, thought, and character of a race of men. Here is one who was so conditioned and organized within himself that he became a perfect instrument for the embodiment of a set of ideals-ideals of such dramatic potency that they were capable of changing the calendar, rechanneling the thought of the world, and placing a new sense of the rhythm of life in a weary, nerve-snapped civilization.
While Wholeness, Unity, Harmony and Community are, for Howard Thurman, the ultimate experiences that all life naturally exists within and that humans (sometimes shattered) yearn and strive for, this should not be confused with a generalizing impulse that glosses over differences and ignores the specificity of lived differences. Thurman’s visions of wholeness and unity do not erase the particulars. In fact, these visions celebrate small units (down to living cells) as being crucial for the specialization they offer to the bigger whole.
The first page of “The Search for Common Ground,” includes a poem by Robinson Jeffers which mentions both cells and atoms. Soon after, Thurman explains how a cell’s relationship to a body is similar to a person’s relationship to a community, “The degree to which the potential in any expression of life is actualized marks the extent to which such an expression of life experiences wholeness, integration, community. The clue to community can be found in the inner creative activity of living substances. The more highly developed the organism, the more pronounced seems to be the manifestation of the clues. Cells and organisms always show certain characteristics of direction, persistence, and adaptability in their efforts to realize themselves, to round themselves out, to fulfill themselves, to become, to ripen in integration-in fine, to experience community. The more highly developed the organism, the more plainly manifest are these characteristics.”
This introduces us to not only a conception of cells in a body as being similar to humans in a society, but to an innate drive to grow and develop and contribute to and connect with a larger whole. He goes further on about cells on page 40, quoting Sir Charles Sherrington as saying, “‘“In that individual, that ‘persona,’ each cell has taken on the shape which will suit its particular business in the cell-community of which it is a member. whether its skill is to lie in mechanical pulling, chemical manufacture, gas-transport, radiation-absorption, or whatnot. More still, it has done so as though it ‘knew’ the minute local conditions of the particular spot in which its lot is cast. It knows not ‘up’ from ‘down’; it works in the dark. Yet the nerve cell, for instance, ‘finds’ even to the fingertips the nerve cell with which it should touch fingers. It is as if an immanent principle inspired each cell with knowledge for carrying out of a design. And this picture which the microscope supplies to us, supplies us after all, because it is but a picture, with only the static form. That is but the outward and visible sign of dynamic activity, which is a harmony in time as well as space.”
Thurman speaks poetically of his own feelings of harmony and oneness from experiencing nature in childhood, “I was made keenly aware when a storm came sweeping up seemingly from the depths of the sea. First there was a steady quieting, A lull during which the waves seemed to lack the strength to wash fully up the shore; the sea grass along the top of the dunes was still; no wind blew in the treacherous quiet. Then a stirring like a gentle moan broke the silence. Suddenly, the winds were ferocious and the waves, now ten feet high, dashed into the shore. Again, the boundaries of self did not hold me. Unafraid, I was held by the storm’s embrace. The experience of these storms gave me a certain overriding immunity against much of the pain with which I would have to deal in the years ahead when the ocean was only a memory. The sense held: I felt rooted in life, in nature, in existence. As with any poetry – the beauty is in the specificity. That experience of rooting into life, nature and existence happened in the context of waves and winds, sounds and sensations.
A distinction should be made, however, about the difference between a small unit (a cell, an aspect of one’s personality, a person as relating to society, the human race as relating to all of life) functioning in a specialized way that contributes to the harmony of everything, in contrast with fracturing of society, human relationships, and even the shattering of the parts of one’s self into a discordant experience of contradiction as happens in segregation, genocide and other ways that humans have invented to cause great harm to one another and the rest of life that we should actually be in loving relationship with.
Love is an essential need especially from a young age. “The need for love is so related to the structure of the personality that when this need is not met, the personality is stunted and pushed or twisted out of shape. ”While this fracturing has serious results, Thurman shares remedies, “Negro business enterprises, Negro churches, etc., are all rooted in this kind of response to social necessity. It provides for a sense of belonging to and of counting in that tends to counterbalance segregation. The social significance is to provide compensation for
being forced to live behind walls. It establishes identity and confers persona upon individuals. It makes for the feeling of being “at home.” But most important, it exploits whatever there is of an ethnic idiom. And this is good, very good. Such grounding of personal dignity gives to individuals a sense of center which in turn serves as a foil for the threatening impact of the hostility and indifference of the larger community. With this kind of inner reinforcement, it is possible for the ego structure to withstand the shattering impact of the wider rejection.”
There is always an impulse towards wholeness, and life always is yearning towards fulfillment and defining oneself through being a part of something bigger. It is never true that all is lost. There is always hope for peace and unity, and that happens through community. Community is unity (oneness), together. It is forming connections between parts of self, selves in relationship to other people, society as a whole, all of life, and God as the ground of all being. There is hope.
“Every man lives under the necessity for being at home in his own house, as it were. He must not seem to himself to be alien to himself. This is the thing that happens when other human beings relate to him as if he were not a human being or less than a human being…It may be that the experience of which we speak is not possible unless and until the individual sees himself as being contained or held by something so much more than he is that his life is brought into a focus of self-conscious meaning and value. Such an experience is possible only in the light of ultimate values and ultimate meanings. And this is what religion undertakes to guarantee; the extent to which Christianity is religious is the extent to which it would guarantee such an experience for the individual.”
Additionally, it is essential that a human being have a sense of his own worth as a human being, “It is never sufficient for the individual to have a clue merely to ultimate significance in general, but there must be provided in the religious experience a sense of the ultimate worth of the individual himself as a private person. Anything less than the very core of one’s being is not quite relevant”
And, again we come back to cells. Thurman writes, “I am convinced that there is a ground of unity between animals and man of which any oral communication is but symbolic or vehicular…The sense of separateness from the rest of nature is so marked that man tends to see himself as being over against nature. In defense of this conceit, various dogmas and even theologies have been developed. My point is not that the sense of separateness is not authentic but merely that it is not absolute (emphasis mine) Life is always seeking to realize itself in myriad forms and patterns of manifestation. These forms and manifestations include the organic structure as well as diffused consciousness or awareness at its most elemental level and self consciousness in its profoundest expression. Fear keeps the doors between sealed” but, “Contradictions of life are not final.”
This sense of searching, and yearning, is something that we see in Thurman’s own development of self and knowledge through the course of his work, “as long as I can recall reacting to the experiences of life, I have observed in myself a tendency-even more, an inner demand-for ‘whole-making,’ a feel for a completion in and of things, for inclusive consummation. Experiences must somehow fit together; they must make sense to the mind.”
Cells show up again here too as he describes the genesis of an idea, “the idea comes as a poignant quivering deep within the cells of the brain; sometimes it comes as a distinct current of enthusiasm, sweeping all before it; sometimes it comes as the total response of the personality to the impact of some impressions and challenging demand. However the contact is initiated, the profound order remains the same–conception, growth, birth, and development.”
It seems to be that Thurman, as a scholar, is always on the search for an idea or ideas that can be his unique contribution to the world… “As he seeks community within himself, with his fellows, and with the world, he may find that what he is seeking to do deliberately is but the logic of the meaning of all that has gone into his own creation. I believe that God stands in relation to all existence somewhat as the mind of man stands in relation to his time-space existence. ”He also felt the need to test this beautiful vision of a community of wholeness and unity and belonging, with the The Church of the Fellowship for All Peoples. Here, he had to find a way to live the prophetic vision into the granular details of parish work.
This included such things as making liturgical changes, but also his very specific policies about interracial marriage. He had rules for interracial couples considering getting married. These rules included that “they must be prepared to restrict their choices of a place to live: (a) to a certain section of the country; (b) to a certain section of the city. They may well have trouble finding suitable apartments to which they will be admitted as tenants. And be warned: each restriction tends to provoke personal conflicts which have to be resolved by understanding the prejudices and not by blaming each other.” Clearly, these are important considerations in a racially divided world! It reminds me of the mention of the “toe hold” above, God meets us where we are at, and as religious professionals, we are best able to help people find fulfillment and meaning when we meet them at the actual lived circumstances of their lives.
I’ll close with Thurman’s discussion of Utopias. I’ve already established his deep appreciation for the finite’s contributions to the infinite, and the parts for the whole. I’ve already mentioned his lifelong search for the ideas and words to understand how life works, and how people and societies can heal from fragmentation. I’m also especially intrigued by his ideas about utopias, because I’ve always been prone to thinking about utopias. They are often flawed concepts (because they never truly meet the needs of all people, they are always a dystopia for somebody), but also they reveal our mental “toe holds” in how we are able to think about creating a better world.
In describing the difference between utopian ideas that are merely flights of fancy, and utopian ideas that have the potential to change the world, Thurman says, “In one we build impossible castles in the air; in the other we consult a surveyor and an architect and a mason and proceed to build a house which meets our essential needs; as well as houses made of stone and mortar are capable of meeting them…Utopias are rooted in the very structure of man’s conscious life. There is a spirit that hovers over all the generations of man that rejects the contradictions of his private and social life as being either ultimate or final.”
Again, we are rooted in specificity. Architects and masons, stones and mortar. These ideas first form out of mental structures, using tools that a person is capable of considering, even if those tools are used in unique ways from previous experience. Building a better world, a world that works for all people and all life and the planet, requires a good, hard look at actual, current lived circumstances including the ways that a person’s psyche, life, relationships and community have been shattered by the long-term impacts of slavery and jim crow. Of course these systemic oppressions just morphed into other forms, but even just the inability to amass wealth for generations has a disastrous effect. Now that we understand more about epigenetic trauma, we also know that trauma gets passed through DNA. All of these things need to be contended with, and faced head-on so that we, as a society, we can consider what reparations may be in order.
I return to the refrain that there is hope. While our world is not the harmonious whole that it should be, facing it allows us to heal, meet the actual lived current needs, and begin to build relationships and healing for people and society. Thurman’s reflection on Plato concludes that Plato was of a similar mind about potentiality. He writes that “Plato rejects the idea that the contradictions of life are in themselves final, ” a mirrored statement to his own statement, “Contradictions of life are not final.” Indeed. May it be so.