“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 clashing, with noisy silences, while something deep within hungers and thirsts for the still moment and the resting lull.” – Howard Thurman
Book Recommendation: Jesus and the Disinherited by Howard Thurman
So much has been written by and about Howard Thurman, as he was prolific during his life. He was an author, a poet, a mystic, a civil rights leader, a theologian, a philosopher, an educator, a husband, and a father. To learn more about his life and influential work, you can watch this video (one hour): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVl_irB59lM
One of my favorite concepts of Thurman’s is the inner altar, which is our crucial link with the eternal. I love the imagery he offers here: “There is in every person an inward sea, and in that sea there is an island and on that island there is an altar and standing guard before that altar is the angel with the flaming sword. Nothing can get by that angel to be placed upon that altar unless it has the mark of your inner authority. Nothing passes the angel with the flaming sword to be placed upon your altar unless it be a part of the fluid area of your consent. This is your crucial link with the Eternal.” I love hearing him speak in his own voice about removing the blocks that prevent us from our inner altar, our heart.
He had a concern about alleviating human suffering and civil rights for “as the mystic looks out upon the world, he sees there obvious elements in the social condition that keep men and women from the sense of presence within themselves.” That is, social conditions can keep us from our own inner altar. But more than human suffering and social conditions, Thurman wrote and spoke about “a unity that binds all living things into a single whole.” For Thurman and for me, it is more than just humans. The unity he speaks of binds all living things, humans AND our non-human relatives.
photo from the Howard Thurman facebook page
mystical friend 