Howard Thurman

And there's a theological metaphor that will help.

The Reverend Dr. Howard Thurman, prominent, pivotal black theologian in the 20th century, dean at the chapel at Boston University, who, among other things, profoundly influenced a grad student at Boston University named Reverend Martin Luther King.

Thurman wrote in 1958, the churches tend to look like two kinds of models of water.

One is a swamp.

I mean, what do you tell those folks or how do you think about that?

Yeah, you know, Martin Luther King is one of the greatest influences in my life and he was greatly influenced by a guy named Howard Thurman.

And Howard Thurman has a famous quote where he says, don't ask what the world needs, ask what makes you come alive and do that because what the world needs are more people who have come alive.

Yeah.

And so I tell people all the time that when we use words like activism and direct action, our minds get really narrow and we have a very narrow, specific view of what it means to be an activist and what it means to be doing social change work.

And just get the joy from it because people just want to witness people enjoy.

There's this great quote by Howard Thurman that says, don't ask what the world needs.

Ask what lights you up because the world needs people who are lit up.

And that's

Beautiful, beautiful.

Who's that quote by?

I think it's Howard Thurman.

I'm pretty

Black Liberation Theology, James Cone.

Everyone, you know, the cross and the lynching tree should be required reading, along with Jesus and the Disinherited by Dr. Howard Thurman.

who is one of Dr. King's mentors, you cannot read the Bible correctly and not take away from it that God is always on the side of the oppressed, the suppressed and the repressed.

You're not reading the Bible correctly if you don't take away those messages.

That's what taught me how to be.

And I think it's something to be said for Dr. Howard Thurman influencing civil rights.

I think militant mysticism needs to make a comeback.

Yeah.

Gray Carr.

At the time, he was the head of Africana studies at Howard University.

He's still teaching the world.

And in this space, we have been going strong since 2020 and it has been amazing.

John Mercer Langston, of course, a congressman from Virginia who had gone through human trafficking and captivity, who had come into his full adulthood having come through captivity.

And he wrote a memoir, as our brother Quaker Larry Crowe knows and has talked about many times.

He came to join the faculty of Howard University, became the dean of the law school, and for almost two years, the president.

of Howard University, the first Black president, but he was the interim president between white presidents, and they did not make him the permanent president.

Not just spiritual practices, but spiritual practices that created new worlds.

Howard Thurman likes to call our interiority the quiet center.

Barbara A. Holmes, the inner cosmologies or the sacred territory, how we create hushed harbors within.

Both of these beautiful theologians recognize that there is something about the interiority of our lives, our wellness, our wholeness, heart, mind, and soul that matters to God and that should be protected.

And even as a child, it felt wrong, but I didn't know how to acknowledge that part of myself.

it felt like well that that must be my desperately wicked heart talking um and so you know again if hell is real if god's going to punish people if they don't believe in jesus properly then then what we're doing is actually loving and we were able to sort of justify it and i i moved forward that way um and it really wasn't until i began to deconstruct some of those fear-based beliefs that i was able to see that there was a sort of a voice there all all along um I've been helped by some of the mystics that you even mentioned.

I love this quote from Howard Thurman, which, is it Barbara Holmes? Barbara Holmes, she mentions this quote as well in her book, that until you learn how to listen to the sound of the genuine in yourself, you spend your entire life at the end of strings that other men pull.

And in many ways, I was this marionette that I was going through these fear-based motions because this is what God wanted for me.

... outside.

But it's like, oh, this is, you know, Howard Thurman said, "Don't look at the world and find out what it needs and go.

Find out what makes you come alive and go do that because the world needs people that have come alive." But yeah, I think on the days when it's hard, I remember that I didn't go to seminary for this, that this happened, and that surprise is an indicator of the Spirit to me.

Exactly.