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Pitts Theology Library
The Howard Thurman Digital Archive
Transcription
thurman.pitts.emory.edu
394-649_A.mp3
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Pitts Theology Library
Emory University
[CHOIR SINGING]
Close, present Father, we are overwhelmed by the strength and vitality of thy spirit within us,
moving at so many different levels of our being, kindling our minds in the ceaseless search for
truth and understanding, present in the glow which we feel when we remember that someone
loves us and that we love someone, the overwhelming sense of caring that distributes itself in so
many little manifestations of grace-- a kind word here, a thoughtful gesture there, sometimes, the
nodding of the head or the quickening light in the eye.
In the sense of inadequacy which we feel when there is so much that we would do and are unable
to do, so much that we would feel, but cannot quite feel, the great and over-reaching desire to be
better than we are through so many levels of our being, our Father, thy spirit moves with such
unerring strength and insight.
We would know thee better. If happily we might, we would enter into thy dreams for us and for
thy children. We would understand thy understanding that so much that confuses and bewilders
and distresses our minds and spirits would have no power over us. But our Father, we are just
men and women, weak and strong, gentle and harsh, loving and hating, sinning and being
righteous. We are just men and women, our Father, in a world of men and women.
Touch us with thy glory that the fear of ourselves will be relaxed. And even for one swirling
moment in thy presence, let us sense that we are thine and thou art ours. Does this seem too
much? Does it seem to thee to be the expression of pride and arrogance and conceit? The hunger
for thee will not be stilled, O God, O, O God, O God.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
"I have a heart that cries to God abandoned across the blind imperfect avenue of mind. I have a
heart that cries to God. I have a heart that cries to God across the quarried stones of thought, the
labored temple slowly wrought, a heart, a heart that cries to God.
I have a heart that cries to God immediately and must dispense with faltering through the world
of sense and calls across the mind to God, that calls across the worlds to God, nor stays to
elaborate the tongue of sacrament to slowly wrung. I have a heart that cries to God."
And then another poet expresses it this way. He is "on the far horizon, the infinite, tender sky,
the ripe, rich tint of the corn fields and the wild geese sailing high. And all over upland and
lowland, the charm of the golden rod-- some of us call it Autumn. And others call it God.
Like tides on a crescent sea beach when the moon is new and thin, into our hearts high yearnings
come welling and surging in, come from the mystic ocean whose rim no foot has trod. Some of
us call it Longing. And others call it God.
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The Howard Thurman Digital Archive
Transcription
thurman.pitts.emory.edu
A picket frozen on duty, a mother starved for her brood, Socrates drinking the hemlock, and
Jesus on the rood, and millions who, humble and nameless, the straight, hard pathway plod-some call it Consecration. And others call it God."
Pitts Theology Library
Emory University
We are continuing our quest of the inward journey. And today, we will take just a hard,
penetrating look at the man, as it was said of him, from whom God hid nothing, Meister Eckhart.
The words which have to do with the story of this man's life are not particularly relevant words
for our purposes except to say that he did live. He was born. And he died. His period is the early
part in the middle of the 14th century. He was a Dominican, a man who was regarded by some
disciplinarians in the field of metaphysics and philosophy as the father of German philosophy.
But all these things are not of particular importance for our purpose.
But here is a man who had the strange and wonderful gift of being able to wrestle with great and
imponderable aspects of existence and to reduce them, in some ways, to manageable units of
understanding. He must have been an extraordinarily scintillating and gifted personality. For
when you read his sermons and his [INAUDIBLE], it is almost impossible to understand him
with all of the background of knowledge that has been developed since his period. And yet
wherever he preached in Strasbourg or in any of the other parts of Germany, the scholars and the
theologians and all of the people who were supposed to know those persons who were prestigebearing figures in the world of religion were always crowded out by the masses of the people.
The simple, the unsophisticated, crowded everywhere just to hear him speak. And either they
were extraordinarily perceptive or he was exceptionally gifted or we are very dumb.
[LAUGHTER]
You can take your choice.
I remember hearing Rufus Jones give a two-hour lecture once to freshmen on Hegelian logic.
And every 10 or 15 minutes, the fellows were in gales of laughter. And later in the afternoon,
when I went up to the library, I saw one of the freshmen poring over the dictionary. And I said,
well, what are you doing? He said, did you hear Rufus this afternoon? I said, oh yes, I did.
He said, I went to the library. I took the two volumes of Hegelian logic out. And I was sure I was
going to have a very exciting and wonderfully relaxing time. And now I'm at the dictionary
looking up the word "T-H-E" because I know that the way Hegel uses it, it must be different
from the way I understand it.
So I was telling Dr. Jones about this. And I said, how does it happen that you have this
extraordinary gift? And he told me an interesting story. And it's very important here, even though
I'm taking precious time from Eckhart to tell you.
He said when he was graduated from Haverford College, he was a young radical. As a matter of
fact, his class was the most radical class that had been graduated from Haverford up to that time,
so radical that it was they who brought Matthew Arnold to America to lecture for the first time.
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Pitts Theology Library
Emory University
He was invited to give-- he, Rufus, was invited to give a sermon at the Friends Meeting in
Cleveland. And he prepared a very elaborate sermon. And he delivered it at the right moment in
the quiet. And when he unfinished, there were three comments made. One was made by a man
who sat near him. And he said, thee did very well, even though what thee had to say came from
underneath a mustache because Quakers were not supposed to have any new-fangled notions,
like mustaches.
The second said, thee did very well. But thee did not have very much unction because when thee
arose, thy coat was caught in thy belt. And when thee sat down, thy coat was still caught in thy
belt.
And then the third, the third was a lady. And she said, we enjoyed thee friend, Rufus-- that is,
some of us. But there is one thing that thee has forgotten. Our blessed master said, feed my
sheep, not my giraffes.
[LAUGHTER]
This is the idea. So Eckhart must have remembered this. His great and central insight has to do
with one of the most persistent questions of the mind. How can you get behind the creation of the
world? How can you get behind God?
If God is the revelation, then there must be that which is behind God that is inarticulate, that is
unformed, that is a pulse beats of being. And here I use the word "being," which is a form of
"this-ing" and "that-ing," a form of differentiation.
Eckhart was trying to get behind all of the manifestations of life. And he comes upon what is the
heart of his theological interpretation that there is a Godhead, which is the very ground of all
existence. It is undifferentiated. It is inarticulate. It is what he calls the "unnatured nature." It is
unknowable. He even refers to the Godhead as the great nameless nothing, trying to put into
words what cannot be put into words.
And he says, out, out of the Godhead, God moves. God is the self-consciousness of the Godhead,
moving always towards the manifestation of all of creation that there is no evolution, no gradual
development of things, except as a delusion, for all existence is mirrored in God, not as
something that is in process, but as pure thought, pure idea. Existence is. And all of the external
world is but an expression of the mind of God, the total existences, but an expression of the mind
of God.
Therefore, wherever you touch anything that is created, wherever you have any primary
experience with any sense data, wherever knowledge, which is a form of differentiation, a form
of expression, a form of thisness and thatness, a form of distinction between that which is known
and the knower-- wherever you come into any touch with any aspect of your whole sense
experience, it is as if you are a vast cathedral. And remove your shoes because it's holy.
Now, if this is true, says Eckhart, then man must partake of this. And then here his thought
moves in two, apparently, opposite directions. You see, he's trying to account for man and for the
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one who thought the things that he thought. And he says that there is-- on the one hand, there is
something in man that is a part of the unnatured nature, a part of the Godhead, the part of that
which is beyond all values, all good and evil, right, wrong-- that is, that which is beyond all
forms of judgment and all dimensions of conception, that which is deeper than thought, deeper
than feeling, that which is inarticulate.
Pitts Theology Library
Emory University
This is at the very center of man. This is man's-- this is the core of man's soul. And it is not an
aspect of the Godhead. It is not a manifestation of the Godhead. It is not an emanation. But it is
the Godhead itself in man and the process by which man becomes conscious and by which he
begins to develop in terms of the creative, the process by which man can hold in his mind
thoughts and ideas and watch as a dreamer in his sleep watches the dawning of day, watch ideas
take flesh and become expression of that which, at one time, was mirrored in the mind.
And we've all seen it happen, haven't we, an idea that you have? And you brood over it. You turn
it over and this way and that way. And finally, you are able to reduce the idea to a form that will
give it manifestation. And then, once the idea is, for instance, in time and space, the idea begins
to take on a character and a life and a history and a development of its own. But it is but an
expression of something that was in you that was not developed, but something that existed
whole, total, complete.
Now, how practical is this? What does this mean? The closest that I can come to an expression of
it is that when you love somebody, you see that person whole. This is why it is so difficult to find
a way to recognize the faults in someone you love.
You see them totally. You see them complete. And in your spirit, you deal with them totally. But
as you begin to express this in terms of your own pattern of details, what you express is always
so much less than what you see and sense. What you are trying to realize in a pattern of behavior
is but a broken manifestation of the thing which you see and sense and regard as whole.
Now, the baring of all of this on our journey is not far to seek-- that if it is true that there is in
every man that which is God, then growing in life means finding ways by which all the things in
your life that keep you from realizing in your own mind and spirit this which is inherent and
indigenous to you must be done away with so that we find in Eckhart a great deal of emphasis
upon getting rid of creatureliness. He says one-- in one place that, if I am able to empty myself of
creatureliness, if I am able to empty myself of the things that create conflict in me, if I'm able to
purify my life by putting out of it those things that block my visions, then automatically, he says,
the God in me gets on the move. And when it begins to move, it fills all the spaces that had been
occupied by my wedding to things, occupied by my anxieties, occupied by my acquisitiveness,
occupied by all of the things that keep me from being, in the language of the master, true to my
truest self.
And the same thing applies as he moves out into the world. He says, always, behind whatever
manifestation of the external world that I encounter, I must see that the Godhead, and let us not
be upset by his language-- the Godhead is trying to break through to the Godhead that is in me.
When, then, I, through quiet, through discipline and his great word through contemplation-when I am able, through focusing my life, to create in the upper regions of my being a vacuum
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Transcription
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that pulls the Godhead up through me so that it begins to manifest itself in all aspects of my life,
he summarizes by saying, what I sense in contemplation, I must express in love.
Pitts Theology Library
Emory University
Always, then, he comes back to the same simple, but profound insight. Every man, be he rich or
poor, be he sane or insane, be he sick or well, be he wise or stupid, every man has the same
essential increment in him. And when I deal with a man, I am really dealing with this spark-- this
think line, as he calls it. And I am never, then, at liberty to deal with him on the basis of any
particular manifestation of his life.
But always, I must recognize that even in his goodness and in his badness and the things about
him that I despise or the things that I admire, always, that which is pushing from deep within
him, trying to move out so as to join with all of the other expressions of this in all creation, this is
the thing that I must honor in him and in me. And I must not sit in judgment then upon any
particular expression of my life and say, this is I. But always, I must do a double take behind all
of the expressions.
There is something that is trying to be born in me. And all of life, perhaps, is summarized in
trying to find ways by which this can be born in me, can break through, to use the contemporary
term-- break through and become radiant in all of the expressions of my life. And to deny this is
to deny all meaning not merely in me, but in those above me, and not merely in those above me,
but in the great world outside.
Speak to Him, thou, for he heareth. And spirit with spirit may meet. Closer is He than breathing,
nearer than hands and feet. It is a wonderful thing to me to know that God is not at the mercy of
the institution, not at the mercy of the book, not at the mercy of the sacrament. But He is as close
as is the breath I take.
What a boon this must have meant to those people back in the 14th century, dying like flies from
the Black Death, the church in a great battle, having no time from its struggle to administer to the
private, personal desperations of the little man. What a boon it must have been to them to feel
that the hunger in their heart could be answered in their heart, for the hunger for God perhaps can
never be separated from God, for it may be that God is the hunger. God is the hunger.
Leave us not either to the thoughts that we think or the things that we feel. But teach us how we
may trust thy spirit within us, O thou who lighteth every man that cometh into the world, our
Father.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[CHOIR SINGING]
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Marsh Chapel, Boston University, Boston, Massachussetts
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1960s
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394-649_A
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Thurman, Howard
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Meister Eckhart (3); The Inner Light (4), 1961 Oct 15, 22
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<a href="http://pid.emory.edu/ark:/25593/rp8k9">MSS 394</a>
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audio
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<a href="http://pitts.emory.edu/">Pitts Theology Library, Emory University</a>
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1961-10-15
Description
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This sermon is the third of nine in a series of sermons given in Marsh Chapel that are titled "The Inward Journey." In this sermon, Thurman reflects upon Meister Eckhart's description of the Godhead. In his dissection of Eckhart's Godhead, Thurman wrestles with the tension between the external Godhead that exists in the world, and the internal Godhead that wrestles within the self, noting "The Godhead is trying to break through to the Godhead that is within me." Considering this sermon series' emphasis on mysticism and discovering the spirituality that is innate within human existence, Thurman uses the Godhead concept as a means to describe the indescribable nature of God, and God's relationship to the human experience.
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Description by Dustin Mailman
Autumn
Black Death
conflict
contemplation
creatureliness
Dominican
ecology
existentialism
geese
Germany
Godhead
grace
Haveford College
heart
Hegel
holiness
in-breaking
Incarnation
language
longing
love
manifestations of life
Matthew Arnold
Meister Eckhart
mysticism
panentheism
patterns
prayer
purification
Quakers
Rufus Jones
self-consciousness
Socrates
unknowingness
wholeness