Howard Thurman and the Quest for Community: (key quotes; Chapter 7 study guide, part 2)

  Howard Thurman and the Quest for Community: 

From Prodigals to Compassionate Samaritans

This post is the second on chapter 7, which covers the first section of the Good Samaritan parable. After some key quotes from the chapter, I will add some "digging deeper" insights from the study guide. 

QUOTES FOR REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION 

The first quote is key because of many misunderstandings about why the priest and Levite did not stop to help: 

Our best evidence suggests that the consensus among first-century Jews, including priests and Levites, was that saving a life is much more important than any potential issues of purity. 

This quote is from perhaps my favorite Thurman meditation, "We are all Indebted":

We are all indebted to people whose names we do not know, whose faces sometimes we are not able to see.…I am not myself alone, but I am a part of all the life that breathes through me and through which I breathe. We are all of us indebted to a vast host by which we are surrounded. 

Here is a quote about Thurman's foundation for loving ourselves and others--we are all children of God:

To love one’s neighbor as oneself by necessity means that you should love yourself, and an essential foundation of truly loving oneself is the recognition that you are a child of God and that God loves you. Loving oneself leads to what appears to be selfless love, but it is instead loving one’s neighbor as if the neighbor were you.

One of Thurman's ideas was that some people should be "apostles of sensitiveness," or, as Barbara Brown Taylor renamed them, "eccentric apostles." A critical part of being an apostle of sensitiveness/eccentric apostle is, in Thurman's words:

"meeting people where they are, and treating them from there as if they were where they ought to be. By doing so, one places a crown over their heads that for the rest of their lives they are trying to grow tall enough to wear.” 

And, finally, one of my conclusions in this chapter is that:

Loving one’s neighbors does not just include loving one’s perceived enemies; it also includes loving everyone around us, people that we see and may not see because of our lack of attentiveness and mindfulness and an inability to escape a tun nel vision about ourselves, our own situations, lives, problems, or everyday affairs. Portraying the priest and Levite as villains, for example, distances us from them and thus can reduce the story’s realism and weaken its impact on modern readers. More importantly, however, modern interpretations that are too negative often descend as drastically as the road from Jerusalem to Jericho into misrepresentations of Judaism and even anti-Semitism.

Next up: Some "digging deeper" insights from the chapter 7 study guide.