Keep Open the Door of Thy Heart

It is a wondrous discovery when it is disclosed to the mind the fact that there may be no direct and responsible reaction between two human beings that can determine their attitude toward each other. We are accustomed to thinking that one man’s attitude to another is a response to an attitude. The formula is very neat: love begets love, hate begets hate, indifference begets indifference. Often this is true. Again and again we try to mete out to others what we experience at their hands. There is much to be said for the contagion of attitudes. There are moments in every man’s life when he tries to give as good or as bad as he gets. But this presupposes that the relation between human beings is somehow mechanical, as if each person is utterly and completely separated. This is far from the truth, even though it may seem to square with some of the facts of our experienced behavior.

There is a profound ground of unity that is more pertinent and authentic than all the unilateral dimensions or our lives. This a man discovers when he is able to keep open the door of his heart. This is one’s ultimate responsibility, and it is not dependent upon whether the heart of another is kept open for him. Here is a mystery. If sweeping through the door of my heart there moves continually a genuine love for you, it bypasses all your hate and all your indifference and gets through to you at your center. You are powerless to do anything about it. You may keep alive in devious ways the fires of your bitter heart, but they cannot get through to me. Underneath the surface of all the tension, something else is at work. It is utterly impossible for you to keep another from loving you. True, you may scorn his love, you may reject it in all ways within your power, you may try to close every opening in your own heart—it will not matter. This is no easy sentimentality, but it is the very essence of the vitality of all being. The word that love is stronger than hate and goes beyond death is a great disclosure to one who has found that when he keeps open the door of his heart, it matters not how many doors are closed against him.

(For the Inward Journey: the writings of Howard Thurman.
Selected by Anne Spencer Thurman. page 181-182
originally published in Meditations of the Heart)

Ah! Here Thurman’s words must speak for themselves! How I want to believe that the notion that love, flowing freely from my heart, may overwhelm obstacles. Dr. King warned against love without power as being mere sentimentality. Thurman argues his notion is “no easy sentimentality,” and instead is a cousin of the notion that “love is strong as death.” It all rings as true within my essential theology, my humanism, yes, and my process thought, yes, and even my desire to follow Rabbi Jesus. Thank you, Dr. Thurman.