Howard Thurman and the Quest for Community: From Prodigals to Compassionate Samaritans (Quotes from chapter 2)

  

Howard Thurman and the Quest for Community: 

From Prodigals to Compassionate Samaritans

To repeat: Howard Thurman's insights could benefit current discussions about what to do in the face of the injustices that so many people face today. The depth of community, the rejection of hatred and violence, and the dedication to making "Good Trouble, Necessary Trouble," in what Thurman called a (peaceful) "shock to the system, are among the things we should embrace.

So here are some quotes from the book that are found in the study guide for chapter 2 of the book (Howard Thurman and the Quest for Community: From Prodigals to Compassionate Samaritans):

One thing I always encourage is for people to listen to Thurman himself, so I'll begin with some links to some of Thurman's recordings as context for this chapter.

Thurman’s sermon “On Forgiveness” (September 30, 1951) uses stories about the woman caught in adultery (John 8:2–12) and the “sinful” woman who anointed Jesus’s feet (Luke 7:36–50). Thurman also cites John 8:2–12 in the second part of his lecture, “The Search for Meaning in the Experience of Love” (November 5, 1975). For background on the “Mysticism, Social Change, and Civil Rights” section, see the 1978 “Mysticism and Social Change”: Part 1; Part 2. For context on the “Role of the Fine Arts in Building Community,” see Fra Angelico in the 1953 “Men Who’ve Walked with God” series. For background on the spirituals, from “We Believe” (1958): “Deep River, My Home is over Jordan”; “Deep River; Nature of Life”; “Balm in Gilead”; “The Blind Man; Heaven, Heaven.”

Thurman also used the fine arts to deepen understanding, community, and spiritual consciousness. So as preparation for this chapter, I recommend the brief essay, David B. Gowler, “Painting Urges Viewers to Speak and Act as Jesus Did in an Inhumane World” about a Max Beckmann painting. It portrays a story to which Thurman refers many times (about “the woman caught in adultery,” John 8:2–12) as a model for how human beings should treat each other in an often-inhumane world.

Some quotes from chapter 2:

Thurman claims that ‘the underlying unity of life seems to be established beyond doubt.’…This sense of Oneness—the underlying unity of reality—is what God desires for all of creation. Human beings should live their lives in accord with such unity, and this unity—true community—is the end purpose of life.

The child of God realizes others as children of God and seeks to cultivate relatedness with others; out of that sense of relatedness emerges community. 

True integration developed from unifying experiences that were multiplied over extended periods of time. Integration could begin to create a beloved community, defined by ‘the quality of the human relations experienced by the people who live within it.…It cannot be brought into being by fiat or by order; it is an achievement of the human spirit as men seek to fulfill their high destiny as children of God.’ 

Luther Smith observes that the aims of Thurman’s innovations involving art and meditation were twofold. They were designed (a) to help evoke religious experiences that ‘magnified the essence of religion’ as opposed to dogma and (b) to affirm and facilitate unity within a religiously, socially, and philosophically diverse congregation. 

[William] Blake’s argument that what is not too explicit ‘rouzes the faculties to act’ is a key component of this book’s arguments: parables as works of art function in the same way that Blake envisioned visual art should ‘work’: They ‘rouze the faculties to act.’

Some additional information that didn't make it into the book because of some final cuts that had to be made: 

• As Luther Smith notes (2007, 50–51), the love-ethic extends to all of God’s creation, including plants and animals. All life is related; all exist in an underlying unity. See especially Thurman’s discussions of a common consciousness that all humans share and how this consciousness extends to communication between those of different languages as well as with animals and even plants (e.g., Thurman 1986, 56–75).
• In their 1936 meeting, Gandhi requested that the delegation headed by Thurman sing a few spirituals. Led by Sue Bailey Thurman, they sang “We Are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder” (which Gandhi’s personal secretary Mahadev Desai said represented every disinherited community’s hope and aspiration “to climb higher and higher until the goal was won”) and “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?” (which Gandhi said expressed “the root experience of the entire human race under the spread of the healing wings of suffering”): AHH, 7.
• Amanda Brown cites the pragmatist John Dewey’s ideas about art as influencing Thurman in the sense of art being able to dislodge people from old habits of thought and feeling and connect them on a new level: “Art intensifies the feeling of living, and the process of experiencing art can have a lasting effect on one’s life.…Artistic expression, performance, and observation were means to attain new and elevated consciousness—a sensibility in accord with mystical experience” (2021, 149–50).
• Thurman argues that “the genius of the slave songs is their unyielding affirmation of life defying the judgment of the denigrating environment that spawned them” (WHAH, 216–17). The spirituals are works of art of great depth that can comfort and inspire others who are oppressed and disinherited. They are realistic about that which is not under their control but insist on their common humanity with their enslavers as equal children of God. Cf. Eisenstadt 2023, 149, 155.
• The Khyber Pass is significant historically because of its vital role as part of the trade route between central Asia and the Indian subcontinent (e.g., the Silk Road) and as a gateway for military invasions (e.g., Alexander the Great). For Thurman, however, his “vision” experience at Khyber Pass confirmed the possibility of true human community.
• The program for the April 11–15, 1956, Festival of Religion and the Arts at Marsh Chapel at Boston University noted that religion is a “total response” to our Creator that “finds unique expression through the arts.” Whenever art reflects the ultimate concern of human beings, it is religious art, whether or not it appears as what is deemed “traditionally religious.” Humans need the witness of religion in art as a declaration of human worth and dignity, since humans are created in God’s image, as a response to the “contemporary culture of alienation, anonymity, and materialism”: HTC: Box 62, Folder 51, xxi.