The Hurt of Isolation

So much of our common life is spent in seeking ways by which we may break the isolation and solitariness and loneliness of the individual life. There is within us the hunger for companionship and understanding, for the experience of free and easy access to the life of another, so that in the things which we must face, the enemies with which we must do battle, we shall not be alone. Sometimes this isolation is brought about because life has eliminated from our world, one by one, those who have won the right to companion us on our journey. Sometimes the isolation is due to evil things which we have done deliberately or against our conscious wills, rendering those around us afraid and injured, and we are alone. Sometimes the isolation is due to a demand which our hearts make upon ourselves—the right to be free from involvements, the right to experience detachment, the right to take the long, hard look and solitariness and in isolation. But whatever may be the cause, it is so very good to sense the common character of our quest and the mutual support by which we are sustained period new paragraph

We thank Thee, our Father, that this is so. Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort us and we thank thee, oh God; we thank Thee, our Father.

(For the Inward Journey: the writings of Howard Thurman.
Selected by Anne Spencer Thurman. pages 293-294
Originally published in Jesus and the Disinherited)

On Wednesday, I spend more time with myself and the still small voice that speaks to me. I offer you the final installment of Dr. Harding’s biographical sketch of Dr. Thurman. So moving to me!!

Introduction to Thurman’s life, by Vincent Harding
(part five, conclusion, continued from the April 2nd post)

Oh yes, I remember too, how he encouraged me to finish my book about the black experience in America, There is a River, and when I took so long that some publishers were saying that Blackness had gone out of style, I remember Howard. He put on his suit, took the bus downtown, and went to see his longtime friend Dr. Daniel Collins of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. He told Dan that I had a manuscript that he ought to read and that Mr. Jovanovich ought to read too. It was done.

Howard Thurman opened doors, and the doors to publishers offices were among the least important of them. Many of us have become more fully human because of Howard's opening love. Many of us have been challenged by his life to do our own moving, deep into the heart of our own “spiritual idiom,” thereby drawing nearer to the “inside [of] all peoples, all cultures, all faiths.”

When Howard changed the form of his movement in 1981 and passed on, we were saddened, but not desperate. We remembered how Sue used to say, “Howard has a way of leading people home.” Now we are deeply aware of his continuing presence, his opening of the way, and we understand more fully than ever before the meaning of the words of an African poet who declared:

Those who are dead are never gone,
they are there in the thickening shadow.
The dead are not under the earth:
they are in the tree that rustles,
they are in the wood that groans,
they are in the water that runs,
they are in the water that sleeps,
they are in the hut, they are in the crowd,
the dead are not dead.

He is not dead. He lives in these printed words, in thousands of lives, “in the water that runs,” in the opening doors. Never gone. Deep river, moving on.

VINCENT HARDING
Denver, Colorado
Autumn 1983

(For the Inward Journey: the writings of Howard Thurman.
Selected by Anne Spencer Thurman. pages xiv-xv)