Howard Thurman – the Black Mystic (1899 – 1981)

The life of Howard Thurman has been an inspiration for thousands of preachers over the decades, yet few outside of that clique have come to appreciate the contribution he made to faith development and spiritual formation. Grandson of a slave, Howard was born in Daytona Beach in 1900 and was mostly raised by his illiterate grandmother, who was born a slave but insisted that education was the inevitable path to success in a world gripped by racism and hatred.

Howard was sent to a high school in Jacksonville with the hope that he would achieve a good education. His grandmother, as she sent him off with but meager possessions said to him, "I want to tell you something, and you remember it all your life: Look up always; down never. Look forward always; backwards never. And remember, everything you get you have to work for." And so Howard began a journey that would take him throughout the world of religion, academics, diplomacy, education, and counseling.

In high school, Thurman excelled in Latin, and upon graduation, was accepted into Morehouse College in Georgia. It was there that he settled on the call of God to the pursuit of preaching, as he understood it. He would later comment, "When I was born, God must have put a live coal in my heart, for I was His man and there was no escape." During the summer he would trudge over to Columbia Divinity School, where he immersed himself in the works of Plato, Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel. Upon graduation from Morehouse, he applied to Andover Theological Seminary, but he was refused entrance, because he was Black. He was subsequently accepted into Colgate Rochester, where he was the only non-white in his class.

Upon graduation from Colgate, Thurman received what he thought then was the most sobering counsel from his beloved professor of Systematic Theology, Dr. George Cross. The wise words were, "Howard Thurman, you have the capacity to become one of the great original creative thinkers; to influence the religious thought of our nation, perhaps of the whole world -- if you aren't tampered with! Because you are a Negro you may be tricked into using all your valuable creativity in fighting the race question. The race question is a social question and all social questions are temporary. Suppose Jesus had used all his energies in fighting the Roman Empire? Address your mind to the timeless questions of the human spirit! You have that kind of mind."

Soon after graduation, Thurman was introduced to the world of mysticism, while studying for one year as a disciple of Dr. Rufus Jones, the great Quaker who was at that time a professor at Haverford College. This led him to faculty appointments at both Morehouse and Spelman Colleges, where he taught Philosophy of Religion, and then to my alma mater, Howard University in Washington, D.C., to be Dean of the Chapel and Professor of Systematic Theology in 1932.

In 1935, Howard, along with his wife Sue, had the rare opportunity to travel as chairman of the Pilgrimage of Friendship to students of India, Burma, and Ceylon under the auspices of the World Student Christian Federation. This trip was significant in the life of Howard Thurman, for there he encountered Mohandas Gandhi. Upon inviting Gandhi to visit the United States to be the special guest of the "American Negro," Gandhi responded, "That is the only way I could come, but not unless I have some creative and healing thing to say to the people. Until I have found an answer to our own problem in India, I have no right to come to America and say anything." Then Thurman asked, "What is the greatest enemy that Jesus Christ has in India?" "Christianity," Gandhi replied.

This experience in India became an epiphany for Thurman. He and Gandhi questioned the integrity of remaining true to respective religious traditions that seemed to collude with practices that lacked the fundamental principles and divinely ordained prescriptions of equality, fairness, and person-hood. For both Gandhi and Thurman, visions of discrimination and inhumane treatment of people of color were not too distant, both in India and in the US.

Thurman returned to the US with a conviction that he would become the agent of a nascent form of reconciliation that would take shape through a congregation committed to the ideals of community and the ushering in of the Shalom community. In 1943, Thurman, with the support of Dr. Alfred Fisk, a Presbyterian minister as well as Professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State College, formed the "Neighborhood Church," where there was no membership, but an abundance of passion. The years following would provide a case study for any seminarian who would entertain the thought of planting a new church.

Receiving financial support of $3,600 annually from the Presbyterian Church meant that in due course, the congregation would become a Presbyterian Mission Church by default. Thurman made the tough decision to curtail the subsidy and to accept speaking engagements as a way to support himself and his family. The congregation was later renamed the Fellowship Church, where Thurman remained as pastor for the next nine years, until his call to Boston University as the Dean of the Chapel.

Of importance to those who are interested in multicultural motifs of ministry is Thurman's sociological theology or his convictions about the way in which communities of reconciliation could be formed. Though often criticized that his congregation was too "high church," his preaching was never about bigotry, politics, or the racial problems; he attacked the systemic underpinnings of society that allowed these ills to be perpetuated. Thurman believed that a genuine encounter with God would transform society. In fact, it has been written that one worshipper walked out in the middle of one of Thurman's sermons, because she claimed that he was not dealing squarely with the problems that were so evident. It is a widely held notion that visitors to the Fellowship Church left with one of two observations: "This is the church I've been looking for all my life," or "And I am not really religious." Thurman defines a creed as "a bronze plaque erected at the site of a battle, signifying who won," and dogma as "the rationalization of somebody else's personal religious experience."

One can surely capture the thinking of Thurman in these words he spoke at the mortgage-burning ceremony: "Man builds his little shelter, he raises his little wall, builds his little altar, worships his little God, organizes the resources of his little life to defend his little barrier, and he can't do it! What we are committed to here, and what many other people in other places are committed to, is very simple – that it is possible to develop a religious fellowship that is creative in character, so convincing in quality that it inspires the mind to multiply experiences of unity – which experiences of unity become over and over and over again more compelling than the concepts, the ways of life, the sects and the creeds that separate men....

"Wherever man has the scent of the eternal unity in his spirit, he hunts for it in his home, in his work, among his friends, in his pleasures and in all the levels of his function. It is my simple faith that this is the kind of universe that sustains that kind of adventure. And what we are fumbling towards now . . . tomorrow will be the way of life for everybody!" (The Atlantic Monthly, 1953).

For further reading:
With Head and Heart: The Autobiography of Howard Thurman, New York: Harcourt Brace, and Company, 1979