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394-652_A.mp3
[MUSIC - "BE STILL, MY SOUL"]
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(SINGING) Be still, my soul. The Lord is on thy side. Bear patiently the cross of grief or pain.
Leave to thy God to order and provide. In every change, he faithful will remain. Be still, my
soul. Thy best, thy heavenly friend through thorny ways leads to a joyful end.
If I ascended into heaven, thou art there. If I make mine bed in hell, behold, thou art there. If I
take the wings of the morning and fly to the uttermost parts of the sea, even there shall thy hand
hold me and thy right hand shall steady me.
If I say, behold, the darkness covers me, even the night shall be light about me. The darkness,
hideth not from thee. But the night shineth as the day. The darkness and the light are both alike
to thee.
For thou hast processed my reigns. Thou hast covered me in my mother's womb. In thy book, all
my members were written which in continuance were fashioned when as yet there was none of
them.
How precious, how precious are thy thoughts unto me, oh God. How great is the sum of them. If
I should count them, they are more in number than the sand. When I awake, I am still with thee.
Search me, oh God, and know my heart. Try me, oh God, and know my thoughts and see if there
be any wicked way in me. And lead me in the way everlasting, everlasting.
[MUSIC - "BE STILL, MY SOUL"]
And this has to be part one of Saint Augustine, architect of a new faith as a continuation of our
series the end of the journey. As a background, may I read these two paragraphs from Augustine.
What do I love when I love thee? Not beauty of the body, not harmony of line nor brilliancy of
light so pleasant to thee's eyes, nor sweet melodies of every kind of song, nor the sweet scent of
flowers and perfumes and spices. Not manna and honey. Not limbs inviting to fleshly embrace.
Not these do I love when I love my God. And yet, I love a kind of light and the melody and
fragrance and food and embrace when I love my God. The light, melody, food, fragrance,
embrace of my inward man.
Where there shineth upon my soul what space containeth not and where resounded what time
stealeth not away. Where in fragrance, which a breath scattereth not, where there is flavor that
eating lessen it not and where there is an embrace that cannot be rendered asunder, this I love
when I love my God.
I asked the earth for God and it answered me, I am not he. I asked the sea and the depths and the
creeping things and they answered, we are not thy God. Seek thou above us.
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I asked the breezy gales and airy universe and all its denizens replied, Anaximenes is mistaken. I
am not God. I asked the heavens, sun, moon, and stars. Neither are we, say they, the God whom
thou seeketh.
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And I said unto all things which stand about the gateways of my flesh, ye have told me of my
God. But ye are not he. Tell me something of him. And they cried with a loud voice, he made us.
He made us. He made us.
The decay of the Roman Empire had been set in motion by some forces that were subtle and
some that were obvious. There were many theories about why it had begun to disintegrate, this
empire which seemed to the human mind to symbolize in time and space the sovereignty of the
eternal, the point of referral that stood above all of the traffic of life, all of the conflicts of life.
And little by little, men saw that this empire itself was beginning to disintegrate. The stirring of
populations swinging back and forth across the frontiers, a movement of populations that has
continued down to the present time. This is one of the mysterious things as I think about human
history.
I know the answers that the sociologists give about why peoples start moving, why they get on
the march. But I'm not sure that this answer is a satisfying one. But be that as it may, the empire
was in flux. It had broken itself in twain.
And this, the tensions between the Orient and the Occident, the tensions between great racial
groups that had been rooted in a certain kind of culture and a certain pattern of life, a tension that
had been held at equilibrium as long as the Roman Empire spread its eagles everywhere. And
held, as if it were in one, vast continuum, all of these subtle conflicts.
Now when this outer rim cracked, all the built-in tensions began to emerge. And finally, it
expressed itself in the formal division of the empire between the East and the West.
Augustine, what about him? What words may I use to talk about him? He was a part of this flux.
He lived in North Africa, a North Africa that we cannot imagine now because when he lived
there, it was a lush land, full of all kinds of wonderful vineyards, green fertility, and the gods of
fertility flourished.
This was North Africa when Augustine was a boy. He had a wonderful mother, devout, pious,
who brooded over him with great tenderness, knowing somewhat within herself that if she could
pray long enough, she was a devout Catholic, if she could pray long enough, if she could hold
out without giving up, the pressure of her love would bring her wandering son into the fold.
His father had no interest in these things. His father was a man without any particular religious
convictions or faith. As a matter of fact, he's defined as being a pagan, a familiar phrase
[INAUDIBLE].
He had ambitions for his son. He wanted his son to make a mark in the world. So he put forth all
the effort possible to see to it that his son would get a good education and all the things that went
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along with it. He wanted to protect his son from throwing his life away in riotous living. So very
early, he secured a kind of common law wife for his son.
All the time, his son's mind was growing and expanding, searching, seeking. And his seeking
finally took him away from home.
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He became a teacher at Carthage first and they did not have much discipline in the university.
Students did not pay their bills. Their bills were not due until the end of the semester. So students
would go to classes up to about two weeks before the semester was over. Then they'd change
teachers.
Well, Augustine couldn't live at this rate. So he left and he went to Europe. And I did not fill in
too many details about him.
But there he met a man finally, Ambrose the Great. He must have been a great preacher, for this
was the thing that first attracted Augustine to him. But through the influence of Ambrose, he
began to work out this matter of entering into the fullness of the new life which he found in Jesus
Christ.
Now, it's cruel to summarize his life in this superficial manner. But this is not to be a biography
of Augustine.
The first and most dramatic influences on his life as far as the things that shaped his mind was
the Manichean philosophy. And let us not be perturbed by the word. But this influenced his life
and at a critical point. And in my judgment, it continued to influence his life and to influence
[INAUDIBLE].
Manichean philosophy recognized some of the realities of human experience, the conflict
between good and evil, between the impulse to do that which seems to be right and the impulse
to do the thing which seems to be evil or which is evil.
And it's projected a metaphysical interpretation of existence that could account for the conflict
that goes on in the human spirit between good and evil. And they said that all of life is divided in
this way, between the powers of darkness and the powers of light.
And these two powers seem to be equally matched in human experience and in the world and in
existence. The human heart is the battleground when the tug of war between these two forces
goes on its way, that they are fundamentally equally matched.
Do you think so, if you were talking about this? Do we get a feel of it in the scripture lesson that
was read? Just the feel of it? There is going on all the time, this tension.
Sometimes, do you feel that the thing that is evil in you is stronger than the thing that is good?
Would you load it a little? What about us? Not what you think you ought to think, but how do
you think about it? What is it?
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Well this was a part of a Augustine. Now there was another influence in his life that was very
crucial, and that was the burying of the philosophy, the influence of [INAUDIBLE], as we
referred to last Sunday, this near-Plutonic influence that the world was created by gods, by the
creative whim.
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But as the world moved farther and farther to the edges of the extent of the mind, the creative
energy, that out of which everything moves, it became more and more material, more and more
contaminated.
And as a matter of fact, there's a hard line between the spirit and matter that the spirit could not
quite ever get into matter. And matter could not ever quite make the move in the other direction.
So that you get a [INAUDIBLE] seed between the things that are material and the things that are
thus spiritual.
And this is a little of the philosophy of the Manichean, that-- and if you somehow are sure that
the material things, your body, your flesh, that if you're sure that these things are set on their
way, that they cannot be influenced. That which is spiritual can't get into it and do anything with
it. And vice-versa.
If this is the case, then in terms of your practical living, you may decide that as far as the
expression of your appetite is concerned, since nothing that is material can have any effect, any
door by which it can reach over into that which is qualitative in life, then it doesn't matter what
you do. It doesn't matter what you do.
Because there is no way, you see, by which any activity of the body, any material functioning
can have any bearing on the other side of the chasm.
And if you tried to live completely on the other side of the chasm, then the less attention that you
give to the demands of your body, the freer you are to give all of yourself to the other side so that
you can either get a libertinism out of this or an asceticism. And these were the things that were
at work in the background of Augustine's mind.
And then, when he became-- however, when he became a Christian, when he felt that the central
thing about man's existence was the fact that there was at work in the material, in the flesh a
creative and redemptive process.
Not merely that God could not be involved in the world, but that God was at work redeeming the
world through the doctrine and the experience of the incarnation through Jesus Christ. And
therefore, Augustine felt that the thing that was most evil in man was not that he was a victim of
this sort of dichotomy that I'm talking about.
But that he had a will that was in rebellion against the will of God, that God was not merely
creator, some impersonal, creative force moving and brooding over the stuff of life and making
the stuff of life yield more and more forms and shapes and manifestations. No, not that. But God
was a sovereign will, holding in the integrity of his whim all existence. And that the only sin of
which man really was capable was the sin of rebellion against this whim.
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Now the sovereign will, this point of referral, this is the step that Augustine takes in his thought
that becomes the-- how shall I say this? That becomes the rallying point for the decaying,
disintegrating empire. Now, let me just pin that down so you can hold it until next Sunday.
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Now, when a society begins to break up, when there is no point of referral outside of the
individual or outside of the liberal, political, or social arrangement, when there is no basis for
integrated behavior which the centrality, you see, the political centrality of the Roman Empire
provided for the whole civilized world at that time.
Now, when this fountainhead broke up, when it broke up, this left a vacuum so that there was no
point of referral, nothing that would give to people a basis for integrated behavior. They had no
sense of cohesion externally. And therefore, their sense of inner cohesion began to break up.
And into this vacuum Augustine projects the sovereignty of God. And this is very interesting to
me. This becomes the foundation of what to me in essence was a new faith. Jesus Christ, the
founder, the apostle Paul, the first great, creative interpreter and the mind and the will and the
brooding of Augustine, the architect for 1,000 years.
Suppose in 1917 in Russia, when there was no point, when the central point of referral had
broken up, what the Tsar symbolized was no more. So there was no basis for integrated action
for this vast land and vast people.
Why was it impossible for someone somewhere in the Christian movement to do, at that critical
time, what Augustine did for the collapse of the Roman Empire. Why?
And they had to find a point of referral in a very crude kind of persuasive dialectic. And another
great moment in the destiny of man passed.
What had we learned in the more than 1,000 years of dealing with this specific responsibility that
had been set forth back in the 5th century?
After the war, when the great German nation, loaded with guilt, began to do this with no point of
referral that was prestige-bearing, of prestige-bearing significance to provide a basis for the
integrated behavior of the nation. Why into that vacuum there did not move that which moved
into the vacuum created by the collapse, the formal collapse of the Roman Empire.
But instead, some resurrection of an ancient folk idiom clothed in new form and manifestation
moved through the central dominating spot in the minds of a nation and provided a rallying point
of dignity and meaning and significance for them.
And here we are now. Do you believe that there is, in the grounds and the experience of your
religion, that which is so utterly significant in its transcendence and eminence and redemptive
character as demonstrated in your own life that you feel that it can provide a point of referral on
the horizon that will be redemptive for our society? And give even to America a basis for
integrated behavior?
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So that in the light of it, it can experience, it meaning America, can experience the kind of
redemption that will make it whole in which even here the bruised reed will not be crushed nor
the smoking flak quenched.
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Or is your personal experience of religion too small that you would not run the risk of giving to it
such a far-reaching assignment? This is the question with which Augustine wrestled. And his
answer was yes, that which moved into my life redeemed my life, made my mind not a seeker
after truth, but put into my mind the kind of quality that enabled me to design truth and to follow
it.
This is of such timeless significance as demonstrated in what I have been through that it can save
not the world, but worlds. And because he felt that way and projected it for 800 years, the
Catholic church moved on the track he laid.
Thou has made us for thyself, he said. And our hearts are restless till they find their rest in thee.
You believe that? I do. I do. I do.
Walk beside us, our father, in the way that we take. And leave us not to the weakness of our
strength or to the strength of our weakness this day and forevermore.
[CHOIR SINGING]
[MUSIC - "BE STILL, MY SOUL"]
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Marsh Chapel, Boston University, Boston, Massachussetts
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1960s
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394-652_A
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Thurman, Howard
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St. Augustine, part 1 (7); St. Augustine, part 2 (8), 1961 Dec 3, 10
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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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Description
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This sermon is the seventh of nine in a series of sermons given in Marsh Chapel that are titled "The Inward Journey." In this sermon, Thurman explores St. Augustine's biography, specifically speaking to the influence of Manichean Philosophy on Augustine prior to his conversion to Christianity. Thurman notes of the dualistic nature of this philosophy, and the ways in which redemption for both the body and the mind are non-existent in this train of thought. Thurman continues by noting the significance of redemption in Augustine's theological imagination, and appropriates Augustine's construction of redemption towards the political landscape of Germany post World War I.
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1961-12-03
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Description by Dustin Mailman
America
asceticism
be still my soul
biography
body
Carthage
creative energy
discernment
dualism
Germany
interconnectivity
libertinism
Manichean Philosophy
mind
North Africa
prayer
redemption
Roman Empire
sovereignty
World War I
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394-651_A.mp3
[ORGAN MUSIC]
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(SINGING) The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. He leads me [INAUDIBLE] He leadeth
me [INAUDIBLE]
Our Father, we turn aside from the things that ordinarily occupy our waking hours, and we wait
in Thy presence, in this sanctuary. Our minds are filled with many things. Some things we have
not thought about for a long time.
But some word that is heard, some line from some hymn that is sung brings flooding into our
awareness something that has long since been forgotten. And we are reliving it this morning,
even as we wait in Thy presence.
We are reminded of the graces of life that are so commonplace, a part of our daily living that the
graceness of them is lost sight of. That each day, for many days, we have been able to arise from
our beds and be active, to do our work, to live our lives in full function with use of our bodies.
Each day, we have been greeted by a few people who understand us and who salute us. We have
been smiled upon. We have been blessed by many countenances of many of Thy children. These
little graces of life. We have been visited also, our Father, by concerns to which we have
responded, sometimes with enthusiasm and conviction.
And other times, our Father, we have been so overwhelmed with our own personal needs and
disorders and complexities that we have not had any time to give to the needs and disorders and
complexities of other people. And we feel just a little guilty about it, as we sit here in the
quietness, sorting out the details of our lives.
We do not want to have hard hearts. We do not want to close the windows of our spirits to the
cries and to the agonies of those whose needs cry out to Thee. And there seems to be no
[INAUDIBLE] here, no hand to succor. We do not wish to be this way. But our own lives are
hard, and our frustrations are very great.
And thus, our Father, we try as we sit here to loosen ourselves up so that we may become aware
of what it is that Thou art seeking to do in us and in our world so that after this hour together, we
may not only be refreshed and renewed, but we may be on the scent of that which is Thy will for
us.
And to know Thy will, O God, and to sink these little minds and little purposes of ours into Thy
will. This is the heart of our hunger, as we wait, O God of our spirits, as we wait at Thy presence.
Our Father.
[ORGAN MUSIC]
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(SINGING) My soul [INAUDIBLE] my Lord [INAUDIBLE] the presence of my Lord.
[INAUDIBLE] shall soon be [INAUDIBLE] Amen.
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Little sisters, the birds, we must praise God, you and I, you with songs that fill the sky, I with
halting words. Eat not greedily sometimes for sweet mercy's sake, [INAUDIBLE] our insects
bear to take. Let it crawl or fly. See ye saying not near to our church on holy day, lest the human
folks should stray from their prayers to hear.
Now, depart in peace in God's name. I bless each one. May your days be long in the sun and your
joys increase. And remember me, your poor brother Francis, who loves you and gives thanks to
you for this courtesy.
Francis of Assisi is one of the troubadours of God, concerning whom perhaps the minds and the
imaginations of men in our world have been more excited and daring in what they have created
perhaps than any person other than Jesus of Nazareth Himself.
And every one of you, no doubt, has his own set of legendary tales and stories about this
wonderfully human human being. This morning, I want just to lift up two rather simple things
about him in the time that I have. One of the characteristics of religion is its inability to stay
fenced in.
It is always trying to break out, because it is the nature of religion to be creative and dynamic.
And it is also a part of the tendency of mind, whenever it is exposed to experiences that are
creative and open-ended, to try to reduce these experiences to manageable units of control and
order so that they may be used in accordance with a plan generated out of the mind.
So this is the story of religion in our world and in all the worlds of which we are aware. A
creative moment in time, when it seems as if the heavens open and God Himself becomes
articulate in the heartbeats of a human being, so that when men listen, they hear the movement of
the eternal.
And then they take this and they try to put it in a dry cell battery so that whenever they want to,
they can turn the switch and get a light. This is what happened to Francis. He was a man who
came at a time when the springs of creativity and the Church were drying up.
He was a part of a life of ease and comfort and delight. He was a prestige-bearing man. What
more could you ask? He had a wonderful disposition. His [? glands ?] were wonderful, because
he seemed to be happy all the time. Nothing could stop him. He went to the war, to the Peruvian
War, and he was imprisoned for a year. But he just absorbed it with this wonderful spirit of joy
that was in him.
And then after this, he began to slow up things. Things began to get dingy on his sleeve, and he
couldn't quite be as he was. And then no one seemed to understand it. He would be in the midst
of a party, and everybody would be having a wonderful time and expected him to be his old self.
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And right in the middle of it, he would stop and drop into what may be called a kind of brown
[INAUDIBLE] looking and not seeing. And they said to him, what are you thinking about? Are
you thinking-- are you in love? Perhaps this was the only thing that would make him do this.
And he said-- are you going to get married? Is that what is troubling you?
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You don't want to say goodbye to your life. No, yes, I'm going to get married, but to somebody
far more wonderful than you've ever dreamed. And then, little by little, the hound of heaven
began closing in on him. And he had a vision as he was praying in a church.
And it seemed as if Jesus Christ on the cross opened His eyes and talked to him, telling him what
it is that he must do. And then little by little, he began doing some of these things, trying to find
peace within. One of the things, of course, that he could not understand about himself, that even
though he wanted to, he wanted to give his life to Jesus Christ.
He wanted to do the thing that Jesus Christ would have him do, this utter surrender. And he was
sure that he'd done it, you know? And then one day, he was riding along on his horse. And he
turned a corner, and here was a man full of leprosy. And this was the one thing that he was sure
that God would just be too kind and understanding to demand that of him, because
temperamentally and psychologically, leprosy was always upsetting to him.
It was easy for him-- not easy, but he could do-- all the other things, but this thing, he couldn't
do. And that's always the way, isn't it? When you give your life to God, when you give your life
to a cause, always there's one thing you hope that the cause will not require of you. You'll give it
anything else, but just don't get radical with reference to this thing that I just don't mean to give
up. Or I can't handle it emotionally, because of the way I'm put together.
So leprosy was that for Francis. And when he saw this leper, instinctively he checked the horse
and swung him around and started galloping off in the other direction. And then, he heard the
voice. Ah, Francis, you can give up everything but your own sensibilities.
What do you mean by surrender? Then he pulled the horse back around and went and got down
and went home with the leper. He was trying to convince God now that he really meant business,
but what he was really doing was convincing Francis that he meant business. That's the way we
do it, isn't it?
The climax comes when he feels that now he-- in pursuit of this end, he must renounce
everything. And his father has lost his temper. He wants to disinherit him and decides to
disinherit him. And there is a big ceremony in Assisi, at which time all the public had come to
watch this ceremony, where this prince of the family, as it were, would be publicly disinherited.
And Francis came, and he appeared with all of his clothes in a bundle. And he did not have any
clothes on whatsoever at all. And he said, until today, I have been known as the son of Pietro [?
Bernardina. ?] But from this time on, my only word is, "Our Father, who art in heaven."
Now the unique and exciting thing to me about Francis is that he felt that love was the greatest
and most important thing in the world, and that it was the one thing that had no boundaries, that
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it moved out to include the animals, the birds, the little children, the lepers, the popes, the priests,
that love was the only inclusive insight that the human spirit had ever possessed.
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And that this was not love in general. He felt that the Church of his time had made of love an
abstraction, had made of love a technique, a device, something that could be manipulated on
behalf of the heathen, on behalf of the [INAUDIBLE] and cast down like sheep without a
shepherd. It was something that could be handled with detachment, because it was a principle
which dealt laterally with human beings.
And it was a part of the disposition of the Church to be a dispenser of love so that officially, it
was the great lover of mankind. And all who embraced its doctrine and its dogma would in turn
become lovers of mankind, as a technique, a device, a method by which the implementation of
which, however, would bring into being, something that the Church dreamed of as the Kingdom
of God.
Francis felt, however, that you can't love humanity. Humanity has no existence. Men do not love
in general. They love in particular. So he placed at the center of what had become an ethical
abstraction, an ethical concretion. And it carried with it contagion.
And one of the things-- one of the things that impressed me most about the way this operated
was his insistence that those of his movement should love the rich people. This is very
interesting. And you should love them not because they had money. And therefore, if you loved
them, they would give you some of it.
Not because they would be able to finance your cause. But you should love them because they
were children of God's, in the same way that you should love the birds, the lepers, the saints, the
sinners. And I know the time's up, but I can't close without pointing at least to the second thing
that's on my mind.
When they tried to bring this creative, free-flowing movement under the control of the Church-and bear in mind, Francis did not ever feel that he was outside of the Church, so do not
misunderstand my reference here. But the authority-- Francis felt that the authority was in the
living experience of the living Christ in the hearts of those people who had made the nerve center
of their consent the citadel in which he could live.
This was all the authority that he needed. But the Church had to have the authority located at the
central place of power. And little by little, then, they began to bring in this free-flowing
movement that was spreading itself all over the countryside, to bring it under the subjection and
under the control of the Church so that there would be an organizing principle operating it and
align a chain of command by which authority, earthly authority, could be established.
Or the earthly authority could designate the point at which the divine authority took place. And
Francis was very naive and simple, unsophisticated. He just loved. That was all. Loved. And
when he realized that the politicians, [? concentrated ?] politicians, had taken over his
movement, it almost broke his heart.
4
�Pitts Theology Library
The Howard Thurman Digital Archive
Transcription
thurman.pitts.emory.edu
And he did the only thing that he knew to do-- talk to God. So one night, with the wreck of his
dreams all about him, with his body suffering from the rather persistent ravages of a certain kind
of illness, he prayed all night.
Pitts Theology Library
Emory University
And as morning broke, it seemed that from the East, a seraphim came. And as the sun rose, this
seraphim now was transfixed on a cross in the middle of the radiation of the sun. And in the
contemplation of this, Francis lost all awareness of time and space and circumstance and became
one with this transcendent vision.
And when it passed, according to the records, he had the stigmata-- little blood from his hands
and his ankles and his side.
Is there anything, any kind of inner demand that can [INAUDIBLE] lay hold upon you or me,
that will make us experience through all the reaches of our being that which we profess to
believe and that about which we sing and pray? Blessed Francis, simple lover of men, who felt in
his body, in his mind, in his heart, both their need and their redemption.
And but a word for us at this fateful moment in our time. Forgive us, our Father, for the open
doors of truth into which we do not go. Leave us not to the strength of our weakness, for the
weakness of our strength, but tutor our piety in ways of love, that we may bless even as we are
blessed. O God our Father.
[ORGAN MUSIC]
(SINGING) Amen. Amen. Amen.
5
�
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Audio with Transcription
<iframe width="100%" height="820" frameborder="0" src="/files/players/394-651_A.html" ></iframe>
Internal Notes
Notes for project team
Edited - GL 7/8
Location
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Marsh Chapel, Boston University, Boston, Massachussetts
Time Period
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1960s
Dublin Core
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Identifier
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394-651_A
Creator
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Thurman, Howard
Title
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St. Francis of Assisi (5); Plotinus (6), 1961 Nov 12, 26
Source
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<a href="http://pid.emory.edu/ark:/25593/rp8k9">MSS 394</a>
Format
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audio
Publisher
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<a href="http://pitts.emory.edu/">Pitts Theology Library, Emory University</a>
Coverage
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GEOMETRYCOLLECTION(POINT(-7915565.7490374 5213612.6443988))
Description
An account of the resource
This sermon is the fifth of nine in a series of sermons given in Marsh Chapel that are titled "The Inward Journey." In this sermon, Thurman moves through the entirety of St. Francis of Assisi's biography. Starting with Francis' conversion, to his deep connection to creation, then to his love ethic, then concluding with the implications of his experience with mysticism and contemplation. Here, Thurman is holding up the life of St. Francis of Assisi as an exemplar for the ideal religious life - a life of love, a life of service, a life of responsibility.
Date
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1961-11-12
Contributor
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Description by Dustin Mailman
abstraction
biography
birds
Children of God
contemplation
creativity
ecology
Francis of Assisi
insects
kenosis
legend
leprosy
Lord's Prayer
love
marriage
Peruvian War
poetry
prayer
seraphim
simplicity
Surrender