Preparation

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. And brief overview can only be suggestive, tentative, 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 cvoices of the world. He moved deep into the heart of his own spiritual idiom and came up inside all peoples, all cultures, and all faiths.

Perhaps no single description 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 Thurmans’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.”

Vincent Harding
introduction to
For the Inward Journey: the writings of Howard Thurman
(selected by Anne Spencer Thurman)
Friends United Meeting
Richmond, Indiana, 1984

Introduction to my Journey in 2025

Each spring, during the time of the lengthening of days leading to Easter, I spend a few minutes each morning trying to pay attention. I listen to the sounds of the earth—one morning gentle raindrops, another a whistling breeze—all against the sounds of the city. I watch the changes in the courtyard outside my little apartment in Queens, one morning flurries of snow (never quite a storm), another the quiet awakening of soil and greening of trees. I notice the cats who intermix play with their demands for food. I walk to my car or the number 7 train and inhale the freshness of the lengthening days. March will “come in like a lion and go out like a lamb,” and I will spend a few minutes reading and then listening inwardly to the movement of heart, mind, conscience, courage, spirit.

I chose to share with you these writings of Howard Thurman for this year’s Lenten meditation. It is somewhat personal. I need, in this time of fragmentation and polarization, a renewal of the message of that greater hope: that we constitute one human family, one race discovered through myriad cultures and holding myriad beliefs. I need in this time of political tumult and personal isolation a word of the breadth of human potential, drawing from the greater world of the mystic and the pilgrim. Caught in my own living room and in my prayer closet, I want to make pilgrimage to all the holy sites my imagination may discover. I have found a fellow traveler on that journey in the sage, the guru, the pastor, Dr. Thurman.

Wish me well on my journey, friends. You are welcome to come along.

David Carl Olson