Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. For more information, visit faith.yale.edu.
This is For the Life of the World, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity.
Hello, friends. Thanks for listening. In this episode, we're continuing our series honoring the black voices who have shaped and influenced and inspired our experience of the world. It's our way of celebrating Black History Month. And we at the Yale Center for Faith & Culture, and some of our close friends are sharing the personal impact just a few African-American thinkers have had in our lives.
Today, Sameer Yadav, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Westmont College honors Howard Thurman. Thurman was a 20th Century minister, theologian, philosopher, and activist who helped to inspire the civil rights movement in America. He wrote numerous books, including Jesus and the Disinherited, The Luminous Darkness, and Mysticism: And the Experience of Love. He played a pivotal role in Martin Luther King Jr's education and formation. In this reflection, Sameer brings together the themes of belonging, connectedness, alienation, and trauma through segregation, and the vitality of the black Christian experience, and shows how they all weave together in the beautiful fabric of Thurman's thought.
Sameer Yadav: Howard Thurman was an early 20th Century Christian minister and theologian. He was born in 1899 and raised in segregated black communities in Daytona, Florida. I think that in order to understand the profound power of Thurman's contribution to Christian theology, we need to understand his life and his thought as a way of keeping faith with three of his earliest religious experiences.
And the first was a sense of belonging to a mysterious unity shared between all living things. He describes himself as a shy and inward youth who felt a deep sense of communion with nature. He recalls times of feeling a sense of fellowship and even conversation with the trees he would sit under.
And second, along with this deep sense of connectedness, Thurman's upbringing also included a traumatic sense of alienation that came from his daily experiences of the brutality of Jim Crow segregation.
Third, he experienced the vitality of Christian faith that was passed down to him from his grandmother, Nancy Ambrose. She had grown up enslaved on a plantation and later she gained her freedom. And she introduced Thurman to a deep reservoir of black Christian resistance to slaveholder Christianity, and a way of identifying with the meaning of Jesus for the oppressed, one that put black Christian faith in touch with the dignity of our common humanity, as it was revealed by Jesus. The humanity we share with Jesus is one that cannot be reduced or dominated, but holds a value in union with God that goes beyond any attempt we can make to manipulate it for our own purposes.
And Thurman's career as a minister and a theologian was a lifelong journey of bringing these three themes together and seeing how they interacted with one another: a divine common ground shared by all living things, the devastating effects of social injustice on human personhood, and sharing in the humanity of Jesus uniquely revealed in the history of black suffering and the resilience of black joy.
So during his theological education at Morehouse College in Atlanta, and then Rochester Seminary in New York, Thurman came to be exposed with figures in the Christian mystical tradition. And it immediately resonated with what he found in figures like Nicholas of Cusa and Meister Eckhart. And so in 1929, he sought out a Quaker theologian, Rufus Jones, at Haverford College. And he spent a semester there as a special student in the formal study of Christian mysticism.
And in 1932, he came on faculty at Howard University. And he served there as Dean of Rankin Chapel. And while he was there, Thurman led the first ever black delegation to India on what we call "the Pilgrimage of Friendship." And he met with leading figures like Gandhi and Tagore and others. And he was especially moved by the Gandhian approach to nonviolence, or satyagraha, which literally means "soul force," which is something Gandhi himself learned from his exposure to Jesus and his correspondence with Leo Tolstoy and his reflections on the gospels. So in large part, based on Thurman's reflection from that trip, and from his attempt to answer the challenge that it presented to him for black life in America, Thurman wrote his most influential book, Jesus and the Disinherited, which was published in 1949.
And there, he argued that when those who are socially dispossessed attend to the rootedness of their being in the life of God and the love of God that orders all living things into a union of fellowship and shared life with one another, we can find a kind of inward strength to stand up under the oppression and resist it in solidarity with Jesus's owned form of resistance to the brutality of the Roman occupation that he experienced.
An underlying theme that was developing in Thurman's thought was that Christian mystical practices and Christian social activism are not opposed to one another, with mysticism being some matter of private experience or inward spiritual life while social activism is about the outward public discourse and political agency that we exercise against injustice. Instead, he thought that the two belonged in vital connection with one another. And the crucible of this thought was his engagement with black Christian experience and tradition.
So from 1944 to 1953, Thurman left his tenured position and sought out a kind of--how to work out the catholicity or shared humanity that he found in the life of Jesus. And he came to pastor the first interracial and intercultural church community of its kind, the Fellowship of Reconciliation of All Peoples in San Francisco. And then in 1953, he accepted an invitation. He left there and accepted an invitation to become the Dean of Marsh Chapel at Boston University. And there he had a profound impact on Martin Luther King Jr. King was there doing his doctoral program, and he was reputed to carry around on his speaking trips a dog-eared copy of Thurman's Jesus and the Disinherited.
And to the day of his death in 1981, Thurman continued to work out this interconnection between Christian conceptions of mystical union and Christian social imagination. All was informed uniquely by the race-based injustice that uniquely shapes our society. So I'll close with a quote from the preface of a book called Luminous Darkness, which is a book Thurman published in 1960. And it aims to diagnose the American racial and economic segregation that we experience and what it does to our common humanity. So Thurman says this in the preface to that book:
"The fact that 25 years of my life were spent in Florida and in Georgia has left deep scars in my spirit and has rendered me terribly sensitive to the churning abyss separating white from black. Living outside of the region, I am aware of the national span of racial prejudice and the virus of segregation that undermines the vitality of American life. Nevertheless, a strange necessity has been laid upon me to devote my life to the central concern that transcends the walls that divide and would achieve in literal fact what is experienced as literal truth: Human life is one and all humans are members of one another. And this insight is spiritual and it its the hard core of religious experience. My roots are deep in the throbbing reality of Negro idiom and from it I draw a full measure of inspiration and vitality. The slaves made a worthless life—the life of chattel property, a mere thing, a body—worth living. They yielded with abiding enthusiasm to a view of life which included all the events of their experience without exhausting themselves in those experiences. To them this quality of life was insistent fact because of that which deeply was within them. They discovered God, who was not or could not be exhausted by any single experience or series of experiences. To know God was to live a life worthy of the loftiest meaning of life. People of all ages and times, slave or free, trained or untutored, who have sensed the same values, are their fellow pilgrims, who journey together with them in increasing self-realization, in quest for the city that has foundations whose builder and maker is God.”
Evan Rosa: Thanks for listening, friends. Check this episode's show notes for a transcript of the quotes Sameer just read from Luminous Darkness.
For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured theologian, Sameer Yadav. I'm Evan Rosa, and I edited and produced the show. For more information, visit us online at faith.yale.edu. We produce new episode every Saturday, and you can subscribe through any podcast app. Thanks for listening.
