With Head and Heart: The Autobiography of Howard Thurman

by Howard Thurman

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.