Howard Thurman

In my sermon Sunday, I mentioned Howard Thurman when speaking about “inner authority,” a phrase of his. I want to share a bit more about him with you.

Howard Thurman was a pastor and more. His work is centered at the intersection of contemplative prayer and work for social justice. He found God in silence and in nature and the person of Jesus, sustaining him to resist the indignity of racism. Firstly, God showed him himself as God’s beloved, so he could reject the self-negating lies of white supremacy. Later, Thurman met Mahatma Gandhi in India in 1935. The encounter lit a fire in him to bring inspiration from Gandhi’s non-violent movement to free India from British colonial rule to free people from Jim Crow in the United States. Thurman founded an interracial congregation in New York City and began to write, becoming the spiritual father of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Every time he marched, Martin Luther King, Jr. carried with him a copy of Thurman’s book, Jesus and the Disinherited. 

If you want to learn more about Howard Thurman, I recommend a short but powerful book surveying his life and work by Lerita Coleman Brown: What Makes You Come Alive: A Spiritual Walk with Howard Thurman. Below I’ll share a few quotations that most inspired my sermon Sunday.

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If a person knows what word he can use to address you so as to draw you off balance, he can always keep you at his mercy. The basis of inner togetherness, one's sense of inner authority, must never be at the mercy of factors in one's environment, however significant they may be. Nothing from outside a man can destroy him until he opens the door and lets it in.... Whatever determines how you feel on the inside controls in large part the destiny of your life.

–Howard Thurman, Deep Is the Hunger

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Realizing we have never been disconnected from the Presence, we discover a God-created self that does not capitulate to coercion and provocation. …"A new self emerges and that new self becomes the center of the orientation of my life," Thurman observes in a sermon. "Love does that for us, for it inspires in an individual what was sleeping, relaxed sense of worth and value and meaning, and when this slumbering thing awakens, the kind of radiance that circulates through all the corridors of one's life makes the individual see in himself what he had never seen before. It is the discovery of a new center around which increasingly all of the details of life are more and more organized.”

–Lerita Coleman Brown, What Makes You Come Alive

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Thanks be to God for Thurman’s witness. And that of Lerita Coleman Brown, who died just this past December.

Pastor Clark Olson-Smith