©2009 by Alice Walker

Sounds True which offers so many amazing and helpful works, has recently produced an audio set of Howard Thurman’s talks.  Thurman was a mystic and theologian who influenced many of today’s most thoughtful leaders.  I was asked to introduce a segment of this collection.

Howard Thurman used to come speak to us at Spelman College during morning chapel and perhaps vespers.  I cannot claim to remember these visits precisely, but, listening to his voice on tapes made roughly half a century ago, I seem to be once again in that atmosphere.  There we were, young girls of seventeen to twenty, required to be in our assigned seats at Sisters Chapel each morning, five days a week, to hear words of inspiration that would propel us through our studies, and through our days.  Service started promptly at eight o’clock.  Or was it, more likely, seven?  I remember sliding into my seat just as the clock struck, pajamas tucked discreetly into my socks, yawning, and thinking of the French poetry I’d ventured to translate until late the night before.

After singing, after a prayer, after wondering whether there would even be time for breakfast, there would be, if we were very lucky, Howard Thurman, and not some other speaker whose concern would be more about our behavior with boys, or with a God who was always male and needing to be feared and obeyed, than with the growth of our spirit and the awakening of a political and social and activist conscience.

In fact, what struck me about Howard Thurman then, as I seem to recall those times listening to him now, is that he was one of the first spiritual guides I encountered who could pray to a “heavenly father” with every awareness, transmitted to his listeners, that the “heavenly father” of whom he spoke did not live by himself in heaven.  Thurman was capable of knowing and of teaching us also that “heaven” is inhabited by all things: ancestors, heroes of our interminable struggles for justice in the form of racial and economic equality, as well as the water in the ocean lapping at the shore, and the sunshine blessing us with its radiance.  The flowers were a part of heaven, as was our own kindness and thoughtfulness. This might not seem much now when we are surrounded by spiritual guides who acknowledge mystical and pagan and animist roots, but for most of the girls in Sisters Chapel, coming as we did from strict Christian families for whom the Bible was total law, and everything dominated by one God, himself jealous and alone, it was a revelation to be told, in quite clear terms that no, heaven was not a closed room.  It was not small either, it was vast.  And, even in its vastness it also existed inside of you.

He was subversive of the very system of the school he was speaking in.  I wonder how much he considered this, as he spoke to us.  For we were actively engaged in the struggle to free our people from American apartheid.  Sometimes leaving the chapel to march in the streets of Atlanta, some of us going to jail, reading our textbooks as we went.*

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