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Pitts Theology Library
The Howard Thurman Digital Archive
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thurman.pitts.emory.edu
394-648_A.mp3
[MUSIC PLAYING]
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(SINGING) [INAUDIBLE]
Our Father, we gather ourselves together in all of our available parts to see if somehow there
may be made clear for us the meaning of our own lives and the meaning of the journey to which
we are committed.
We confess our sins-- those things within us of which we are grossly ashamed as we wait in thy
presence, those things within us and those expressions of our lives of which we are scarcely
aware until our spirits are sensitized by thy spirit, but things which do violence to thy purposes
and thy will for us and our world.
We want to be better than we are. And so often, we do not know how. Again and again we are
moved by the impulse to be better than we are. But we do not quite know how to give way to it,
that it might sweep through us with its renewal and its inspiration.
We are such divided, tempers tossed, driven children. If we knew the right words to say, Our
Father, we would say them. If somehow we could bring our minds and our hearts into focus so
that what we mean we say and what we say we do-- if we could do this, it would help us to be
whole.
And it may be, Our Father, that all the inner divisiveness and conflict of which we are aware as
we wait in thy presence is a part of the divisiveness and the conflicts of the world of which we
are apart. It's all so complicated.
Shall we seek to make peace within ourselves by the ordering of our wills in accordance with thy
will? Or shall we seek to help those about us whose needs are great? And in helping them, we
might find wholeness for ourselves.
What shall we do, our Father, oh, that we might be unanimous within ourselves, that our total
being and our lives may be a tuned instrument in thy hands, making the kind of music that would
calm the distressed, that would heal the broken in body and mind, that would bring tenderness to
those who feel rejected and outcast.
As we wait in thy presence, our Father, gather us in. Gather us in, our Father, that we may be a
lung through which Thy Spirit may breathe. Is this asking too much. We wait, oh, God, our
Father. We wait.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
How good it is to center down, to sit quietly and see oneself pass by. The streets of our minds
seethe with endless traffic. Our spirits resound with clashings with noisy silences, while
something deep within hungers and thirsts for the still moment and the resting love.
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Transcription
thurman.pitts.emory.edu
With full intensity, we seek ere the quiet passes a fresh sense of order in our living-- a direction,
a strong, sure purpose that will structure our confusion and bring meaning in our chaos. We look
at ourselves at such a time, the kinds of people we are.
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The questions persist. What are we doing with our lives? What are the motives that order our
days? What is the end of our doings? Where are we trying to go? Where do we put the emphasis?
And where are our values focused?
For what end do we make sacrifices? Where is my treasure? And what do I love most in life?
What do I hate most in life? And to what am I true in life?
Over and over the questions beat in upon us. As we listen floating up through all the jangling
echoes of our turbulence, there is a sound of another kind, a deeper note which only the stillness
of the heart makes clear. It moves directly to the core of our being.
And then it seems sometimes that our questions are answered, our spirits refreshed. And we
move back into the traffic of our daily round with the peace of the eternal in our steps. And then
we know how good it is to center down.
This morning, I want to begin thinking with you about the inward journey. The mind of modern
man is confronted with something new, something that it has not confronted before, or
something that has not confronted it before.
And of course, you hear it on every hand. It's the thing that is more and more a part of the
periphery at an array of all of our thinking. And yet, we do not talk too much about it, except
when we are sharing in moments of great stripping our deepest concerns about human existence.
And this thing is the fact that, for the first time in human history, mankind is faced with the stark
possibility and probability of the biological extinction of the race.
And we are like a man who was described in a paragraph I read some time ago. He was talking
about a photograph or painting that he had seen. And this painting impress them profoundly,
because it was a portrait of a man who was gazing over his shoulder with a great graphic sense of
panic and fear in his face.
He was looking at something. But the artist did not put in the picture the thing at which he was
looking. We are afraid, because the possibility of the end of man is real and authentic. Now this
is new and terribly threatening, because it undermines the grounds of optimism about the destiny
of man on this planet.
You will wonder, I suppose, even perhaps at the very end, what does all this have to do with the
inward journey. Well, you'll just have to wait and see. It is a very subtle thing that the seed bed,
one of the seed beds of optimism for all levels of human thought and religion is the idea, the
concept of the remnants.
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thurman.pitts.emory.edu
Whatever may be the nature of the catastrophe that may be envisioned as falling with a kind of
impersonal logic indiscriminately upon mankind, living in the shadow of the anxiety there is
always the notion-- the persistent notion-- that when this thing passes there will be left a remnant
that will be the seed of the future.
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In the deluge as described in the book of Genesis when the whole Earth was flooded, there was
Noah-- not a particularly good man, but the best man around. And he became the vestigial
remains of the grace of Jehovah.
And upon him wrested the destiny of mankind for the future. But Noah was not only there. There
was a remnant of all of nature in the ark so that everything could start over again.
It is difficult for us to realize how deep in the grain of the feeling tones which we express about
the hope-- either of our own hope or the hope of the race-- may be found in this profound sense
of remnant.
When I was a boy about 9 or 10 years old, I was living in a little town in Florida, a town
dominated by a large sawmill-- the largest sawmill in the state of Florida. They made beautiful
lumber. That is, they did something to the trees to make beautiful lumber.
It was the summer of Halley's Comet. And I have mentioned this to you before. But I want to
point up its bearing in terms of the way this concept of remnant is so fundamental to us.
One day my stepfather came home for lunch. And he had a little bottle like this. And in that
bottle he had some little pellets, little pills. And he told my mother that during the morning a Mr.
Conrad who owned the mill had come out to the place where he was working-- he operated the
planar end of the thing-- and gave him this little bottle of pills.
And he said, I bought a supply for my family and for certain of the people who are strategic in
the sawmill, because I bought them this morning from a man who was selling them. And they are
comet pills.
And the notion was, of course, that if you take these pills according to direction when the tail of
the comet strikes the Earth and the Earth is reacting to this, you will be left. If you take these,
according to the directions, you will get an immunity. So you will be the remnant. And Mr.
Conrad wanted to be able to start business all over again when this was done.
Now this is a crude saying. But it cuts deep into our thinking so that we are utterly unprepared
with the farthest reaches and leaps of our minds to deal with an idea that does not presuppose the
possibility of some kind of remnant.
This is the ground of our optimism. Now we are faced with something else, trying to think about
the future of man, trying to think about the destiny of man, stripped of all of the reinforcement to
our thinking from the notion of the remnant.
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thurman.pitts.emory.edu
And I am frank to say to you that I don't quite know how to put my mind around this. Now
there's a second thing.
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Always in the past when there have been these visitations that are catastrophic and calamitous in
character, they have been seen again and again against a prospective of the consideration and the
guiding hand and the controlling power of God so that these things that have come, whether the
flood or what have you from some other kind of religion-- they have been acts of God when at
last, he had to act to save his creation.
But we are a generation that does not have that kind of spiritual orientation. Our orientation is to
things-- things. We-- particularly in our own land-- we have been so overwhelmed by the
necessity of trying to reduce a frontier to a manageable unit of control and order.
We have been wrestling with nature in such an all consuming manner that even in our deepest
probings in terms of our science, always it has moved in terms of the ability to manipulate the
external world. And we have no provision for the inner orienting of ourselves.
Now there's one more preliminary thing. And I see that all the time has gone on preliminaries.
There's one more thing that's important. And that is it is the inner region of our lives in which, as
it would seem to me, we must find the clue to whatever will be the nature and the quality of our
thinking about the outer destiny. That is my proposition.
And it is interesting how important is this inner thing. I've been reading recently about the early
days of and the rise of Mussolini and the rise of Hitler.
And one of the things that impressed me so much as I read this and relived certain aspects of it
was the fact that in terms of external resources, both Italy and Germany were relatively
impoverished countries in terms of resources.
But one of the secrets and one of the insights-- universal insights, which seems to be at the very
core of this sort of political business that we call fascism is the necessity for recognizing that a
hard core of metaphysical purpose must be so deeply felt, must be so experienced internally by
all the people that on its behalf they can lay hold on the external world and make it a living
instrument in the hands of that kind of internal will.
And this is a spiritual insight, for it is deep within you that the issues that determine how you will
live, what you will do with any of the external arrangements of your life-- it is deep within the
secret place where you are stripped to whatever there is that is most fundamental and irreducible
in you that the decisive moment of declaration is yours.
Hence, the master says that the Kingdom of God, wherever else it may exist at any moment in
time or space, the Kingdom of God is within.
And so for these next days in our thinking, I want to work on what seems to me to be the bearing
of the inward journey on the outer predicament. You may remember in my brother's face--
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�Pitts Theology Library
The Howard Thurman Digital Archive
Transcription
thurman.pitts.emory.edu
Mukherjee is my brother's face-- he talks about the musk deer, the doe of which is haunted by the
odor of musk in the springtime.
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And he runs over hills, jumping rivulets and streams with his little nostrils dilating and his whole
body in one palpitation hoping that around the next turning in the path or behind the next bit of
bush he will discover musk. And at last, he falls exhausted from his questing with his little head
resting on his still more tiny paw to discover that the odor of musk is in his own skin.
I laugh when you say that a fish in the water is thirsty. Do you seek the real, the authentic? Go
where you will from Benares to Mathura. If you have not found your own soul, the world is
unreal to you.
The Kingdom of God within-- and it may be-- it may be that whatever clue that may be available
to us that can see the mind with a new ground of hope about tomorrow will be available to us not
by ignoring the external world, but by finding what it is that the spirit in man has to say, for it is
so much older than the mind and so much more persistent than the thoughts of the mind, for the
spirit is thought. It is as if the spirit is the thought of God.
And then maybe we can decipher something. This is our hope. And this is our faith. Walk beside
us, Our Father, in our journeying. Leave us not to the strength which is ours or the weakness of
which we are aware, for we are but little children walking along on the seashore admiring here
and there a pebble for its beauty and its shape, while the great ocean of truth stretches out before
us boundless and unexplored.
Teach us to trust thee with our spirits. Oh, God of our spirits, teach us to trust thee.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Amen. Amen.
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Location
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Marsh Chapel, Boston University, Boston, Massachussetts
Time Period
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1960s
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394-648_A
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Thurman, Howard
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The Innward Journey (1); Jacob Boehme: The Mystic Will (2), 1961 Oct 1, 8
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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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1961-10-01
Description
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This sermon is the first of nine in a series of sermons given in Marsh Chapel that are titled "The Inward Journey." In this sermon, Thurman questions the ways in which one is seeking fullness, freedom, and responsibility. Though it is tempting to seek these ideals of the human spirit in the external world, Thurman notes that it is within the internal spirit, the voice of the genuine that is within all, that one may actualize one's potential for fullness, freedom, and responsibility. It is in the act of "centering down," that one gives themselves the opportunity to find the voice of the genuine within themselves, thus actualize the potential that rests within oneself.
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Dustin Mailman
center down
Dhan Gopal Mukerji
division
Genesis
Halley's Comet
Hitler
immunity
Incarnation
inward journey
Kingdom of God
Marsh Chapel
metaphysical purpose
Mr. Conrad
musk deer
Mussolini
Noah
order
pills
prayer
preaching
preliminaries
remnant
seedbed
sermon
sound of the genuine
temporality
traffic
violence