With Head and Heart: The Autobiography of Howard Thurman

by Howard Thurman

I said, “One thing is sure. When I grow up and become a man, I will never have anything to do with the church.”

From the beginning of my ministry I tended to be highly self-conscious in public prayer. I found it difficult to express, in public, utterances of the inner spirit. My felt needs were so profound that at first there seemed little room for the other and possibly unconnected needs of my congregation. But as I began to acquiesce to the demands of the spirit within, I found no need to differentiate human need, theirs and my own. I became more and more a part of the life of my people and discovered that at last I was able to pray in public as if I were alone in the quiet of my own room. The door between their questing spirits and my own became a swinging door. At times I would lose my way in the full tide of emotions as a sense of the love of God overwhelmed me. At such moments we became one in the presence of God. At the same time, my preaching became less motivated by the desire to “teach”; it became almost entirely devoted to the meaning of the experience of our common quest and journey.

However much we wanted them to be at home in a world of diverse cultures and creeds, we knew that this was possible only if they were centered in their own heritage.

When a convert is defending his new faith in the old climate, he must have fine tools. When a man becomes a Christian in a “Christian” country, what is required of him is that he renounce his former, personal life, not the life of his culture and his heritage. This becomes a personal commitment indicating the change of his private heart, but the change is not of necessity a judgment of his heritage and his culture. But in a country such as India, where the Christian religion is not part of the heritage and culture, it is required of the convert to renounce not only his private past, but also the past of his cultural and social identity.

It was in response to my public lectures in Lahore that I received the following letter from H. W. Luce, father of Henry Luce, who founded Time and Life. We were both wrestling with the dilemma created by the paradoxes in the American situation. Lahore February 12, 1936 Dear Mr. Thurman: I listened with a great deal of interest to your address last night at YMCA (as also in the one given by your colleague, yesterday morning, at Arya-somaj College). I shared also in the pleasure of the delightful group as your wife sang to them at the lovely home of Mr. and Mrs. Rallia Ram. I have also been a missionary in China for thirty years, am an ardent internationalist and inter-racialist. From boyhood up I (and some millions of other whites in the United States also) have been interested in doing all I could to assist your group to attain the highest possible best. That gives you my background and my family interest. Nevertheless, at the close of your address I had the feeling (shared by at least a few others) that, doubtless quite unintentionally, you had probably left a wrong impression on some of the thinking minds present. The strong impression left upon me was that you felt the Negro race in America had suffered all it has suffered at the hand of the American whites—that they had not lifted a finger to help, and that your people, so far as they had gone, had attained all by their own inherent power. Not so much in what you said as in what you omitted was the impression given; a...

At dinner one night, at a large university center, there was a discussion of colonialism and what it had brought by way of blessings to the country. A very beautiful young Indian woman, an instructor in a nearby college, whispered to me, “Dr. Thurman, do you know why the sun never sets on the British Empire?” “No,” I replied. “I will tell you,” she said. “God cannot trust the Englishman in the dark.”

I felt the heat in the question “If Christianity is not powerless, why is it not changing life in your country and the rest of the world? If it is powerless, why are you here representing it to us?” Hearing this, our party went from campus to campus, city to city, town to town, talking and lecturing and sharing. This question also presented a definite problem to the missionary, particularly the American missionary.

At the final leavetaking I said, “Will you now, ending, answer just one question? What do you think is the greatest handicap to Jesus Christ in India?” It was apropos of something lie had said to me about Jesus and the Sermon on the Mount. I wanted to know his real thought about the chief obstacle in his own country which prevented the spread of Christianity. He answered, “Christianity as it is practiced, as it has been identified with Western culture, with Western civilization and colonialism. This is the greatest enemy that Jesus Christ has in my country—not Hinduism, or Buddhism, or any of the indigenous religions—but Christianity itself.”

The leave secured, the whole family was caught up in enthusiasm. We would be pioneers in California a century after the gold rush of 1849. To our joy and surprise, there was a contagion of this spirit among many of our friends on and off campus. The Council of Churches in Washington hosted a farewell testimonial dinner on the eve of our departure. The dinner committee was chaired by our close friend Coleman Jennings, a lay reader of the Episcopal Church. The major address was given by Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, who, as it turned out, was one of the first national associate members of the church. She and many others signed their commitment cards in time to be included at the formal inauguration ceremony of the church, October 8, 1944.

There are times when guidance as to techniques and strategy is urgent, when counsel, support, and collective direct action are mandatory. But there can never be a substitute for taking personal responsibility for social change. The word “personal” applies both to the individual and the organization—in this instance, the church. The true genius of the church was revealed by what it symbolized as a beachhead in our society in terms of community, and as an inspiration to the solitary individual to put his weight on the side of a society in which no man need be afraid. It was not merely a building, a novel undertaking in structure and formal commitment, it was not propaganda or a new teaching—no, it was a spirit which it did not create itself, but off which it dared to become an embodiment and living witness. By special grace, it emerged at a historic moment in world crisis created by the struggle between totalitarianism and democracy. There remains one other comment about my preaching ministry. I believe that above all else the preacher’s life experiences, with his successes and failures, hopes and aspirations, make up the only authentic laboratory in which all his fundamental commitments can be tested. I know my own life better than I can ever know any other. Inasmuch as my life is lived as a black man in a predominantly white society, my personal adventures are profoundly influenced by this fact. The result is that in the most unlikely moment, there may spring into my mind ...

The deeper reason for my sense of insecurity was, however, the resurgence of the old dilemma I had experienced in India: the paradox of being a black Christian minister who was representing and, by implication, defending a religion associated in the minds of many of these nonwhite peoples with racism and colonialism. The Africans traveling with me were Moslem. Nigeria itself had a large Moslem population.

The genius of the slave songs is their unyielding affirmation of life defying the judgment of the denigrating environment which spawned them. The indigenous insights inherent in the Negro spirituals bear significantly on the timeless search for the meaning of life and death in human experience.

Atlantic. I had a chance for the first time consciously to assess the journey from boyhood when I so long ago had rejected the church which had condemned my dead father and so grievously traumatized my young life. Walking by the water’s edge, gazing out at the Pacific, I had time finally to think about the life commitment that I made a scant five years later to the very church I had seen as enemy but now knew to be the Way, the only Way for which I was born. I believe the seven-year-old has been hard at work all this time to understand that which subconsciously I have never been able fully to accept. He is at home with me and through God’s grace, I with him.

It is important in this accounting that at bottom all of this was a part of my meaning of God in the common life. God was everywhere and utterly identified with every single thing, incident, or person. The phrases “the God of Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob,” or again, “the God of Jesus” were continuously luminous to me in my journey. I prayed to God, I talked to Jesus. He was a companion. There was no felt need in my spirit to explain this companionship. There never has been. God was a reality. Jesus was a fact. From my earliest memories, Jesus was religious subject rather than religious object. It was Jesus with whom I talked as I sat under my oak tree fingering the bruises and scars of my childhood. Such was the pretheological ground for me when both life and time spread out before me. The older I have grown, the more it is clear that what I needed to hold me to my path was the sure knowledge that I was committed to a single journey with but a single goal—a way toward life. In formal and religious terms this meant for me the disclosure of the Will of God. And from this flowed an inescapable necessity: to be totally involved. What I did with my life had to be secure in the inclusive sense that only the word “total” can signify. The ground of many of the boyhood experiences I have described stands out clearly as part of this single fabric.