When I am awake, I am still with Thee

In all the waking hours
The Tentacles of Time
Give channel to each living thing:

The bird on the wing;
The mole moving in darkness underground;
The cricket chanting its evening song;
The primeval whale sporting in chilly seas,
or floating noiselessly in turbulent waters;
In mountain crevice or sprawling meadow
The delicate beauty of color-stained flower or fragile leaf;
High above the timber line
The sprig of green dares wind and snow;
In barren parchness of desert waste
The juiceless shrub and waterlogged cactus;
High in the treetop the green-pearled fruit of olive mistletoe,
and the soft gray stillness of creeping moss;
The infant, the growing child,
The stumbling adolescent, the young adult,
The man full-blown or stooped with years;
The Tentacles of Time
Give channel to each living thing.

And beyond this?

Thoughts that move with grace of being;
Light thoughts that dance and sing
Untouched by gloom or shadow or the dark;
Weighty thoughts that press upon the road
with tracks that blossom into dreams
or shape themselves in plan and scheme;
Thoughts that whisper;
Thoughts that shout;
Thoughts that wander without rest,
Seeking, seeking, always seeking,
Thoughts that challenge;
Thoughts that soothe;
The Tentacles of Time
Give channel to each living thing.

Out from the House of Life
All things come,
And into it, each returns for rest.

When I awake,
I am still with thee.

(For the Inward Journey: the writings of Howard Thurman.
Selected by Anne Spencer Thurman. pages 111-112
originally published in The Inward Journey)

a special note, from David Carl Olson

In my practice during these days of lengthening sunshine, I choose one day a week for a “deeper dive,” as it were, when I hold extra time to consider my life. Many of these considerations will be things I do not share with you.

This becomes a day, too, when I take time for a longer period of prayer and meditation. It is a time when I fast for a portion of the day. It is a time I consider financial contributions. Usually, this is on a very traditional day—Wednesday—and this season it seems that Wednesday will again be my “deeper dive day.” (It is, coincidentally, my day off!)

In addition to a writing from Thurman, I am going to share, each Wednesday, a page or two from Vincent Harding’s introduction to For the Inward Journey. This holds some special meaning for me. Dr. Harding was the spiritual Elder of the first “Word and World” retreat “bringing together the sanctuary, the seminary and the street” held in Greensboro, NC. With my friend Brad Brockmann, I participated in W&W One whose special focus was on the history of anti-racist struggle in Greensboro in the 1950s, 60s, 70s and 80s. Dr. Harding asked me how things were with Unitarian Universalism, and especially inquired about my mentor Jack Mendelsohn. It was a rich week and I felt privileged to have some time with him. I will always be grateful for his kind admonitions.

Introduction to Thurman’s life, by Vincent Harding
(part one)

How shall we approach Howard Thurman? He seems to present a marvelous difficulty. When a life is opened at so many deep levels, filled with such spontaneous richness, and joined with so great a variety of intricate parts, introductions do not come easily. Any brief overview can only be suggestive, tentative and unfinished.

Thurman himself may have unintentionally provided us with the best summary we have of the man and his work. Writing in his autobiography, With Head and Heart, about the transformative experiences of a visit to India in the mid 1930s, Thurman explained why he and his wife, Sue Bailey Thurman, felt such an overwhelming desire to meet with Rabindranath Tagore, the mystic and Nobel Prize laureate who was often called “the poet of Asia.” Thurman said of Tagore:

He was the poet of India who soared above the political and social patterns of exclusiveness dividing mankind. His tremendous spiritual insight created a mood unique among the voices of the world. He moved deep into the heart of his own spiritual idiom and came up inside all people, all cultures, all faiths.

Perhaps no single description better captures the essence of the life, work, and magnificent vision of Howard Thurman than that last sentence. For this was precisely the direction of Thurman’s own “God-intoxicated” pilgrimage—constantly moving toward the source of all human life and truth by way of the concrete beauty and terror of the Black experience in the United States. In the course of that harrowing and redemptive journey, he became poet, teacher, mystic, preacher, counselor, friend, and guide to thousands of men and women in this nation and overseas. It is good that we now have this anthology of selections from ten of Thurman’s more than twenty books to offer us some taste of the man in his many, fully integrated parts, some sense of his pilgrimage, his movement toward the “inside.”

For Howard Thurman, the personal journey began in Daytona Beach, Florida, in 1900. From the very outset his life was profoundly affected by the nurturing dynamics of the church and the larger Black community., the wisdom and disciplined spirituality of his maternal grandmother, Nancy Ambrose, and the powerful, ever present rhythms of nature. Apparently, in the midst of that rich gathering of forces, Thurman the American mystic began to be formed. Later, he remembered:

As a boy in Florida, I walked along the beach of the Atlantic in the quiet stillness. . . . I held my breath against the night and watched the stars etch their brightness on the face of the darkened canopy of the heavens. I had the sense that all things, the sand, the sea, the night and I, were one lung through which all life breathed.

The night became an even more constant companion after tragedy struck the family. Thurman’s father died when the boy was seven years old, from that point on his deep thirst for knowledge and for schooling—along with solitude—had to compete with the family’s poverty. Nevertheless, a combination of friends, relatives, unexpected patrons, and much hard and imaginative work and prayer on his part kept him moving. From Daytona he went on to attend high school in Jacksonville, Florida. (There were only three high schools for Black young people in Florida before World War I, all privately operated.) After Jacksonville, the goal was Atlanta, Georgia, where he attended Morehouse College with Martin Luther King, Sr.

Inspired by some of the powerful and committed teachers and preachers in Atlanta and elsewhere, Thurman went on from Morehouse to Rochester Theological Seminary in 1923. Three years later, shortly after his graduation from seminary, he married Kate Kelly, a Spelman graduate from LaGrange, Georgia, who had been doing social work in New Jersey. Together they went to Oberlin, Ohio, where Howard served his first full-time pastorate at Mount Zion, a Black Baptist church. It was there that the Thurmans’ daughter Olive was born. It was also in Oberlin that Kate was diagnosed as having contracted tuberculosis.

Partly as a result of his wife’s illness, the next period was a very difficult one for Thurman. At the same time, it was also a period of much growth—he always found difficulty and growth to be creative tensions within his life. In January 1929, Thurman left the church at Oberlin and went to Haverford College in Pennsylvania to study with the Quaker mystic Rufus Jones in a special one-to-one relationship. Meanwhile, Kate and the baby returned to Georgia. The family gathered again in Atlanta that fall when Thurman accepted an invitation to teach at Morehouse and Spelman. But the reunion was relatively brief. Kate died near the end of December 1930.

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