|
|
This page was updated 11/20/2007
|
|
"A Strange Freedom"
The Rev’d Dr. Jay
E. Abernathy, Jr.
UU Congregation of Fort Wayne, IN
January 21, 2007
Howard Thurman, "How Good To Center Down!"
How good it is to center down! To sit quietly and see one’s self pass by!
The streets of our minds seethe with endless traffic;
Our spirits resound with clashings, with noisy silences,
While something deep within hungers and thirsts for the still moment and the resting lull.
With full intensity we seek, ere the quiet passes, a fresh sense of order in our living;
A direction, a strong sure purpose that will structure our confusion and bring meaning in our chaos.
We look at ourselves in this waiting moment – the kinds of people we are.
The questions persist: what are we doing with our lives? – what are the motives that order our days?
What is the end of our doings? Where are we trying to go?
Where do we put the emphasis and where are our values focused?
For what end do we make sacrifices? Where is my treasure and what do I love most in life?
What do I hate most in life and to what am I true?
Over and over the questions beat upon the waiting moment.
As we listen, floating up through all the jangling echoes of our turbulence, there is a sound of another kind –
A deeper note which only the stillness of the heart makes clear.
It moves directly to the core of our being. Our questions are answered,
Our spirits refreshed, and we move back into the traffic of our daily round.
With the peace of the Eternal in our step.
How good it is to center down!
Howard Thurman, "A Strange Freedom" [vi-vii]
It is a strange freedom to be adrift in the world of men without a sense of anchor anywhere. Always there is the need of mooring, the need for the firm grip on something that is rooted and will not give way. The urge to be accountable to someone, to know that beyond the individual himself there is an answer that must be given, cannot be denied. The deed a man performs must be weighed in a balance held by another’s hand. The very spirit of man tends to panic from the desolation of going nameless up and down the streets of other minds where no salutation greets and no friendly recognition makes secure. It is a strange freedom to be adrift in the world of men.
Always there must be found for bringing into one’s solitary place the settled look from another’s face, for getting the quiet sanction of another’s grace to undergird the meaning of the self. To be ignored, to be passed over as of no account and of meaning, is to be made into a faceless thing, not a man. It is better to be the complete victim of an anger unrestrained and wrath which knows no bounds, to be torn asunder without mercy or battered to a pulp by angry violence, than to be passed over as if one were not. Here at least one is dealt with, encountered, vanquished or overwhelmed – but not ignored. It is a strange freedom to go nameless up and down the streets of other minds where no salutation greets and no sign is given to mark the place one calls one’s own.
The name marks the claim a man stakes against the world; it is the private banner under which he moves which is his right whatever else betides. The name is a man’s watermark above which the tides can never rise. It is the thing he holds that keeps him in the way when every light has failed and every marker has been destroyed. It is the rallying point around which a man gathers all that he means by himself. It is his announcement to life that he is present and accounted for in all his parts. To be made anonymous and to give to it the acquiescence of the heart is to live without life and, for such a one, even death is no dying.
To be known, to be called by one’s name, is to find one’s place and to hold it against all the hordes of hell. This is to know one’s value, for one’s self alone. It is to honor an act as one’s very own, it is to live a life that is one’s very own, it is to bow before an altar that is one’s very own, it is to worship a God who is one’s very own.
It is a strange freedom to be adrift in the world of men, to act with no accounting, to go nameless up and down the streets of other minds where no salutation greets and no sign is given to mark the place one calls one’s on.
Prayer and Meditation
May the great spirit of love that unites all human hearts be with you.
May the great spirit of life that unites all creatures and plants be with you.
May the great spirit of evolution that drives all the universe be with you.
May the great spirit of justice that calls us to account be with you.
May the great spirit of compassion that feels another’s pain be with you.
May the great spirit of mercy that grants people another chance be with you.
May the great spirit of beauty that finds tranquility be with you.
May the great spirit of creativity that inspires be with you.
May the great spirit of love that unites all human hearts be with you. AMEN.
"A Strange Freedom"
Howard Thurman was born in Florida in 1899. His Grandma Nancy had been a slave, and her intellectual and spiritual influence coupled with his natural intelligence led to the opportunity to attend Florida Baptist Academy, a rare chance for a Black in those days to attend high school. He then graduated valedictorian of Morehouse College. He was granted one of two spots reserved for Blacks at Rochester Theological Seminary, home of the Social Gospel movement, where he was again valedictorian and president of his class. Before further graduate studies he took a church in Oberlin, Ohio. He became involved in the YMCA and then in FOR, the Fellowship for Reconciliation. After serving as a Professor at Morehouse and Spellman Colleges (in Atlanta), he became Professor of Christian Theology at Howard University in 1932. In the Washington, D.C. area he met a great many influential Black leaders.
He also met A. J. Muste, the Unitarian National Secretary of FOR, who in 1943 was searching for someone to co-pastor the Church for the Fellowship of All Souls in San Francisco – the first multiracial, intercultural church in America. From there he became the spiritual leader to the next generation of Black leaders, including Martin Luther King, Jr. and Whitney Young, also a Unitarian. In 1953 he became Dean of Marsh Chapel at Boston University, where he influenced generations of religious leaders. He traveled widely, and after his retirement, he established connections with Unitarians in San Francisco that went deeper than simply acknowledging another faith. He acknowledged the connections between his sense of the relation of spirituality and morality and the Unitarian Universalist heritage.
1. Morality and spirituality
Thurman, a generation older than the civil rights activists of the Fifties and Sixties is considered their spiritual mentor and inspiration. There is a simple reason for this honor: he always managed to connect spirituality with morality. His was famous as a deeply spiritual teacher, but his life and his religion would not allow him to separate the daily actions of people and the occasional actions of great leaders from their stated beliefs and values.
After all, he knew from personal experience growing up in the segregated South with a grandmother and other loved ones who had been slaves what a two-faced people we are. Our values do not match our actions, and we are, in our daily lives, far from living out the dream of heaven we claim as our goal. In these situations, there are several choices one may make. Some people become deeply cynical, even sociopathic, giving up all hope. Others focus only on themselves and become greedy and selfish. Some other people will "turn on and tune out" in Timothy Leary’s words, turning to drugs, alcohol, work, or other distractions.
There are some people, though, who with compassion accept the nature of humanity and move on to dream of better worlds. They find their inspiration, not in the failures of human beings throughout history, but in the amazing examples of human love, compassion, courage, and creativity that also are part of our past. They find, too, in the still, small voice within them, a connection, a relationship, with the universe and all that exists, with their neighbors and strangers too – with all people.
This is spirituality, this sense of connection, of relationship, this notion that each of us is part and parcel of a vast whole which, far from being threatening, supports and nurtures us. This is the sense of spirituality.
Most, but unfortunately not all, people who are filled with this spiritual sense of participation and partnership with the great whole universe, also have a feeling of morality that drives their daily living. That is simply to say that, once feeling a part of this greater whole, they cannot but make their contributions to a more positive life for all they encounter, to be an active partner in the life of the greater whole. Morality is the intensely personal spirituality we feel deep inside ourselves put to work in our daily lives, in the decisions we make in our personal activities and for our commonweal. Acting as if the unity with all creation were the motivations for our actions, this is the sense of morality.
2. An example: Whitney Young
Howard Thurman gave one of the eulogies at the funeral of Whitney Young in New York City. Whitney had drowned at the age of 49 while swimming on a vacation to Africa. He had been a social worker in Atlanta and became Director of the National Urban League. He was a member of the White Plains, New York Unitarian Church. At this time Thurman was minister in San Francisco, and the first Unitarian Church there asked him to speak, and he gave an expanded version of his earlier eulogy. They next few quotations are from the San Francisco talk.
Thurman said, "Whitney Young had asked and answered the central question, What can I do in the time I have left?" [260] This is the question morality asks once we feel we are part of something larger than ourselves, the great whole which is the physical universe and its laws combined with the great intangibles (love, peace, justice, mercy, honesty, beauty). The answer Young gave to that central question was to immerse himself in civil rights.
Young had trained as a social worker at the Atlanta University complex, the most influential collection of Black colleges in America. He worked in Atlanta, which had a vibrant Black economy and middle class. Yet he saw the incredible divide in Atlanta that limited African-American people. Young made a choice to change the system; Thurman phrased it this way:
Whitney Young spoke with his life to Americans of power and authority, who were in temporary control of the economic and political structure. How did he do it? In the first place, he refused to separate his destiny from their destiny and their destiny from his. Every move he made of challenge, or negotiation, or joint or separate commitment was within the framework of a common destiny. He refused to accept the status of an outsider in American society. He insisted on being regarded as an insider who had the same stakes in the society as those who felt they could say "yes" or "no" with the power to make it stick. [261]
By willpower Young became an equal to those in power, came to have significant power himself. He came to this power, however, not by the usual routes of wealth and power, but education and character. He saw a vision of the world he wanted to live in, and feeling himself spiritually part of that world, his actions reflected this vision, not a smaller, narrower vision of personal wealth, comfort, or power. Thurman drew this conclusion:
Many persons in government and business and philanthropy, present on the fateful Tuesday [at his funeral] regarded the silent figure in the bronze coffin as the one man who had helped them discover what they could do from within the citadels of power and control in which they lived. A man speaks to his time with his life; it is all that he has, it is all that is given him. [261, JEA emphasis]
Let me repeat that last line: "A man speaks to his time with his life, it is all that he has, it is all that is given him."
We are given life, a blessing whose source we do not know. We are given a life, and we can look no further, but live our lives as simply as any animal – satisfying our appetites using all the skills we possess. We have another alternative: we are given brains that can visualize a larger world than our immediate environment. We can love and hope and work for peace and justice, if we have this larger vision and a positive sense of its meaning and our place in it. This is spirituality, and it is presented to us down through the years through religion, its various institutions, teachings, prophets, and ideals.
Thurman placed Young’s decision in the social context of Black experience in the post-Civil War South. Young, Thurman, Martin Luther King, Ralph David Abernathy, and all the others, decided to practice one world of all people, regardless of race, that, in our familiar UU words, "respects the worth and dignity of each person." Thurman quotes Young:
"We need a generation of people who have the commitment and creativity to try integration – to explore the creative possibilities of diversity. But I don’t think it rests on the hands of the Negro. He has already said in a thousand ways that he believes in America. Now the time has come for America to say, ‘I believe in you.’" [262]
I am a member of that generation that accepted the challenge to believe in my fellow Americans, regardless of their race. It was the supreme vision of my time, beginning in the Fifties and reaching its height in 1963. This vision was not simply of equal rights for African-Americans. It had a much greater scope: it was the positive value of integration, the "the creative possibilities of diversity." This is a spiritual value, not a cultural trait. It is the product of a spiritual vision of a creation that includes all its inhabitants in some great and positive whole that embraces all its creatures and values.
3 Conclusion
I chose this long example not only for its "family connections" but also for its point. Make no mistake, many people practice a spirituality without morality." They have a grand vision of a larger world, but it does not move them beyond themselves. They are not included; they are not, in some fundamental way, part of that greater whole. The vision remains in their heads; it never reaches their souls.
Morality is difficult, and we all sometimes wonder what its basis is, can we in fact determine what to do. This is all true but not terribly significant. Morality is not about comfort and ease. It is not personal, there for us, to satisfy or convince us that we are the center of existence. Morality results from a sense of active and willful participation in a greater whole to which we are drawn, not by its rewards but by its inclusivity. Creation (the word I use to unite both the physical universe and the great intangible values) – creation is not complete without us, each one of us; we belong here as much as any star or love itself. In the great words of the Jewish poet and dreamer, "And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good." [Gen 1:31 – the last sentence of ch. 1, the later of the two creation stories in Genesis.]
This is why Young’s point about "the creative possibilities of diversity" is so important. The fullness of the spiritual vision includes all creation, not simply the parts I know, or like, or seem comfortable to me. It is this larger vision that inspires us, for there is, finally, nothing greater in the universe –not even love or peace or justice. We are part and parcel of the universe, Emerson constantly reminded us. To be fully a part of this universe we are motivated to include its great diversity within ourselves – to practice this great inclusiveness in all we do and say. Let us never settle for less.
Benediction
You say the little effort I make
Will do no good, They never will prevail
To tip the hovering scale [where=which] justice keeps in balance.
I do not think I ever thought they would.
But I am prejudiced beyond debate In favor of my right,
To choose which side shall feel
The stubborn ounces of my weight. [anon, 261-2]
Now go at peace with yourselves and in love with your neighbors in this vast universe, knowing that your few ounces of moral weight are added to the to the commitment of millions of others in our constant effort to realize the great vision that all the world be just and fair, openly accepting us all in love and mercy. AMEN.
… Whitney chose this role as the most creative approach to the dilemma created when the will to separateness as a technique both for identity and survival was challenged by the will to community as a concept big enough to provide for the widest divergences within the creative synthesis which is at once the genius of the democratic dogma. [264]
@[at the time of his death in a drowning accident in Africa, Whitney Young was only 49] Whitney Young had asked and answered the central question, What can I do in the time I have left? [260]
@ Whitney Young spoke with his life to Americans of power and authority, who were in temporary control of the economic and political structure. How did he do it? In the first place, he refused to separate his destiny from their destiny and their destiny from his. Every move he made of challenge, or negotiation, or joint or separate commitment was within the framework of a common destiny. He refused to accept the status of an outsider in American society. He insisted on being regarded as an insider who had the same stakes in the society as those who felt they could say "yes" or "no" with the power to make it stick. [261]
@ Many persons in government and business and philanthropy, present on the fateful Tuesday [at his funeral] regarded the silent figure in the bronze coffin as the one man who had helped them discover what they could do from within the citadels of power and control in which they lived. A man speaks to his time with his life, it is all that he has, it is all that is given him. [261]
@ Quoting WY: "We need a generation of people who have the commitment and creativity to try integration – to explore the creative possibilities of diversity. But I don’t think it rests on the hands of the Negro. He has already said in a thousand ways that he believes in America. Now the time has come for America to say, ‘I believe in you.’" [262]
