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394-361_B.mp3
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It does not mean that I can get rid of my responsibility for the choices. And that seems so unfair.
And I build some sort of immunity that keeps me from-- do you remember in-- forgive me for
asking you that way, because that's presumptuous. But in Hunchback of Notre Dame, who wrote
that?
Hugo. Victor Hugo.
Yeah, Hunchback of Notre Dame, you remember in that, that marvelous picture, way up in a
little cell, under one of the towers of Notre Dame. The priest is attracted by music that comes up
from the square in front of the cathedral. And when he walks over to the window and looks
down, he sees this beautiful gypsy dancer.
And something in him screamed, yes, as he staggered back from the window. And he took a
rusty nail, which was on the desk and carved in the cement wall ananke, which is "fate." And
then he realized what was happening to him, and he began to celebrate his emotions with a
fantastic series of unholy thoughts, feelings that finally burst out in words, and he said, ah, she is
so beautiful. So beautiful is she that if she had been on Earth when Jesus Christ was being born,
he would have selected her for his mother. So beautiful is she that the sight of her is more to be
desired that the sight of God.
And then suddenly, he realized what he said and what it meant, and then became shadowed with
repentance. And he talks to God now. He says to God, it's not my fault. As long as you sent
phantoms of the devil to me, in the form of these beautiful gypsy dancers, I could withstand that.
But when you sent the devil himself to me in this beautiful gypsy dancer, I had it, and you know
it, because you know that you did not make me and the devil of equal disgrace, so it's your fault.
And he became a priest again. Now-- what I'm trying to find the words to express is that I am
responsible for my journey, and in a very real sense, I did not choose my journey.
So that somewhere, there has to be either compassion, mercy, understanding, or a recognizing of
the fact that God could be mistaken. I must be responsible for my journey, and ultimately, I'm
not responsible for my journey, so that all religions of whatever kind they may be has to make
provisions for these two things to be resolved.
I live my life with a sense of absolute responsibility and freedom, and there is no such a thing as
having no responsibility and of being free. Yes.
Could it be that we have a responsibility to attain what [INAUDIBLE] called hinds' feet, or
tracking with it, so that our subconscious and our conscious are in perfect alignment, and that our
goal is to be to this place where the spontaneity or involuntary or intuitiveness of God is what is
coming through, and our only responsibilities would be to say yes and move out with it?
Yes. But the dilemma for me is that where I am staking my life, I want to be sure, or else be
shadowed by something that will take responsibility for my duties. You see, what's worrying me
is where my life is that I insist on being my own person.
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But you can say yes or no. I can say yes or no.
Ah, now you're getting it.
But I choose by the divine grace of God to will, to say, yes, and that is the only freedom there is.
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But suppose I just elect to say yes and leave out the divine grace of God and all the sanctions, all
the sanctions that I must have. You put your finger on something. When I became ill some years
ago, and the doctors didn't know what, whether there'd be a tomorrow and so forth. I wanted time
to deal with this. I wanted time to think about it, to feel my way all the way through it, to
discover how I would vote.
Now, my vote had nothing to do with what happened. That's irrelevant. And then I had to get that
straight first. Something deep at the core of me had to be honored. I had to say yes or no, having
nothing to do with living or dying. I had to separate myself from that. Now, once I said yes or no,
all the subsequent unfolding was working on another kind of agenda, just as if it was a dog or a
cat or my daughter, my sister, my friends.
But I had affirmed the grounds of my integrity, and I had to separate that from my feet, from my
destiny, when all the time I associated destiny with my choices. But I don't really see what I'm
talking about. Let me try it again. I feel so many vacuums.
Now, yes, there is a sense in which I think a person lives as if there was no other living thing in
existence, except himself or herself. A deep, central, frontal intimate sense of absolute privacy,
where my thoughts are as elemental as thought itself, where my feeling tones are so
devastatingly mine.
That the power of veto has certification rests there, not because it makes any difference outside
of that tight circle in which I lay claim to my own life, as if no one and no thing existed except
that, the only reality. Now, once I pitch my tent there, what happens to me is important, whether
it makes any difference, going up or down, no. But the grounds of my very being affirm
themselves or itself.
Now, that may be the great idolatry. I don't know. Thou shall have no other gods before me. I
don't know. But I know this, that the only freedom that I know anything about is a freedom
somewhere deep within whatever it is. I say yes or no to life, not because it influences what
happens, but because it is the ultimate trysting place between me and the creator.
Now, I think that is the very ground and the essence of religious experience. Now, when I
worked that out into the pattern of my life and get it into designs and techniques and methods
and so forth and so on, then that can be communicated. I can talk to you about it. But that's not
how you live. That's not how you live. That's not where you're energized. That's not the thing
that happens to you when you show you can stand anything life can do to you, and it makes no
difference, because life can't touch this. That's eternal.
And you stand at the gate. It's where you say yes or no, not because it makes any difference,
other than yes and no. When that's honored by you-- only you can betray it-- when that's
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honored, anybody can vote, [INAUDIBLE] anybody. You can be victimized by any citizens. The
will of God can come in, [INAUDIBLE] your leadership around, but nothing touches this.
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I think this is the God in you, to use a word that may become really confusing. But it is where the
eternal becomes time bound, right at that little-- and it's the only freedom there is. It's the only
freedom there is. And one of the terrible things to me about all of the paraphernalia of religion
and religious experience, it tends to set up roadblocks, so you can't get back there. You take
refuge in this, saying this creed, this dogma, this doctrine, but in all those places, you have to
rent a room.
And you live there as long as you can pay the rent. But you're not home. There's only one home.
Well, that's enough about it. I'm sorry. But it's true. It's just true, and if it's true, it's true. Can we
stop now, Joyce?
Did anybody else have anything to add to that?
We can take it somewhere else, and it might take time. So I don't want [INAUDIBLE]-Well, don't---this whole thing from yesterday.
Well, you better do it while you have a chance.
OK. Well I asked if you have anymore to say, and you might say, no. And then it would be over.
Fine. No, no, no, it's over.
Something that you said near the end of our session yesterday, and it was disconcerting and also
kind of haunting to me, and that's about being on the scent of the spiritual life, and when you
smell it, you better bird dog it, because if you don't, you lose the scent, but then that was all OK.
Thank you.
But than you also say that whoever can point that out to us as we go along at that moment
becomes our Savior, and that was OK.
All right.
Whoever becomes your Savior, you have to kill.
Yes.
Oh, that was so hard to hear, because the Savior has to die or become a god-Ah.
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--and then in something in between.
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That's it. That's it, you see. The only way that you can keep from killing your savior is to give
him outside of life and death. And why must you kill your Savior? All the religions of the world,
the Savior has to die. And why must he die? Because knowing enough about you to redeem you
gives him power over your life. And with that power, you're never sure he can be trusted not to
make you do with your life what you have no intention of doing, what you don't want to do.
But he deals with you out of his awareness of your vulnerability and your weakness, and your
secret becomes his secret, and is no longer secret. And he can pull this string and make you do
this, or desert you. Because then you were deserted, he found you and gave your name. And
you're never sure that even God can be trusted not to take chances with you that nobody has the
right to take.
But if-- this is the terrifying thing about surrendering a life and commitment, because you give
up the power of veto and certification over your own life, and once you do that, then something
may be required of you that not only is unfair, but you just have no intention of being involved in
doing. But once the Savior becomes God, the Savior always has to escape with his life by
becoming a god. Now, once he's a god, your weakness will not be exploited. Yes.
How did predestination, which I just can't believe in, come into play?
Well, I don't think-- I think that's just a convenient clothes line on which you hang a lot of things
that we can't explain. But the road block that it sets up, I think, in the human spirit is that it
destroys options. And yet, you know, there is an inescapable little feeling that the responsibility
for myself is not absolute and final.
The most comforting part of my childhood as I grew up was the fact that I had two sisters, one
older and one younger, and whatever my mother caught me in those nice innocent things that I
did as I grew up, I could always say I did it because my older sister made me, and even though
I'm not in that predicament any longer, the mood of it has lingered.
Is there a difference between ordained or preordained and predestination?
I don't know. I don't know. I think that there is a logic in life, I'll put it that way. And I think that- how to put this. I think that as we live, we generate momentum in the direction that we are
going. So that when you stop pedaling and pushing, it keeps going.
I think further that I create my own judgment days that processes are set in motion by things I do
that continue moving long after in me I have changed directions. And I think that it's like going
out and turf riding along the Atlantic coast in East Florida. You go out a certain distance, and the
waves was coming from deeper are on their way to the shore, and the part of the game was trying
to get ahead of the wave that's coming and get to the shore before it does. But you always
underestimate the speed.
And somewhere along the way, the tide catches you and sweeps you on, that there is a-- we set in
motion processes that continue long after we are interested in them. But they take us along,
because this is-- we can't separate ourselves from the momentum, and that's why making critical
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choices, I think, is important, but the delusion is that whether the choice I make will make any
difference that will divert the pattern of choices, that I've made up to that time, they have to
spend themselves, even though I have changed direction.
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And I have to deal with that. And I think this is why in all the religions in one way or another,
the whole doctrine of karma comes in. You-- or the doctrine even of original Christianity, some
aspects of it, the doctrine of original sin. What we don't know is which of the choices we made
give the momentum to the process in which our lives are caught now, because it may be what it
is working itself out in us is the result of a choice we made, having no way by which we could
determine that the choice 10 years after meant this. And the wheels of time move forward
always, backwards never.
This is what I have to accept, not by choice, perhaps, because I don't have any choice. If I could
just get back to the place, where I've made the choice, knowing what I know now. But I don't.
And I have to find some way by which I can introduce a new direction to the old movement, so it
becomes my servant rather than my enemy.
Yeah, that's right. Now-Do we want to take a break?
A break. Ah, yes.
As we sit together in sanctuary, in one way or another, the quest which is ours is the same. We
want to know what it is that ultimately we amount to, what is meaning of the life which is our
lives to live? How can the day's tasks become full of the glory and the vitality, which are ours in
those rare moments, when life is full, and its meaning is clear.
We expose this searching quest and this great hunger to thee, our Father, with the hope that
somewhere in this waiting experience, we may be blessed with thy spirit. Thy spirit. Oh living
God, thy spirit.
The creative encounter integrity, sing your own songs at the river. Sing your own songs. Out of
yesterday's song comes, it goes into tomorrow. Sing your own song. With your life, fashion
beauty. This, too, is the song. Riches will pass, and power. Beauty remains. Sing your own song.
All that is worth doing, do well, said the river. Sing your own song. Certain and round be the
measure, every line be graceful and true.
Time is the mode, time, the weaver, the carver, time, and the workman together. Sing your own
song. Sing well, said the river. Sing well. Our experience together this morning will be divided
into two parts. As a preliminary to the whole, let me reach back and pull together the basic
insight on which we are working these mornings.
We created an encounter that has meaning as an idea and an experience, because of a deeper and
prior experience of man with life, namely that life is a lie, that the most important thing about it
is the fact that it is alive, and it is the aliveness of life that sustains all of a particular expressions
of life, and the aliveness of life is guaranteed and maintained because life lives by feeding on
itself.
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The degree, then, to which the individual at a moment is experienced is able to sense that the
barrier that stands between him and a wider context of meaning is removed, so that that which is
deepest and most frontal in him becomes one with that which is deepest and most frontal in life.
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The integrity of the encounter is in the encounter itself. The integrity seeks to maintain itself in
the way in which the individual finds that his life is altered or structured because of what he
experienced in his creative encounter.
There must be a straight line of continuity between the integrity of the encounter and the life that
flows from the encounter. Now, part one. I'd like to read something. You will pardon-- well, you
will listen. The first robin, it is called. York, Pennsylvania-- this is in quotation-- with the
temperature at 10 degrees below 0, the first robin of the year was seen in New York today. It was
found dead on Penn Common. That's the end of the quotation.
Call me a sentimentalist, if you will, but this seems to me the most tragic news note of the cold
wave. I like people better than robins, and there has been widespread and agonizing suffering,
but you see this was the first robin. He was, by all odds, the pioneer of this clan.
He flew up from the South days, weeks, and months before any reasonable robin weather was to
be expected. Without doubt, the rest tried to discourage him. They spoke of the best recorded
experience of bird time. "Rome wasn't built in a day," some other robin told him. And no doubt
he was advised that if he insisted on such precipitous action, he would split the group, and no
good would come of it.
Somehow I seem to hear him saying, "If 10 will follow me, I'd call it an army. Are there two who
will join up, or maybe one?" But the robins all recoiled and clung to their little patches of sun
under the southern skies. "Later, maybe," they told him, "not now. First, there must be a
campaign of education." "Well," replied the robin, who was all for going to York, Pennsylvania,
without waiting for feathery reinforcement, "I know one who'll try it. I'm done with arguments.
And here I go."
He was so full of high hopes and education dedication that he rose almost with the roar of a
partridge. For a few seconds, he was a fast-moving speck up above the palm trees, and then, you
couldn't spot him even with field glasses. He was lost in the blue and flying for dear life.
"Impetuous, I call it," said one of the elder statesmen while someone took him a worm.
"He always did want to show off," announced another, and everybody agreed that no good would
come of it. As it turned out, maybe they were right. It's pretty hard to prove that anything has
been gained when a robin freezes to death on Penn Common. However, I imagine that he died
with a certain sense of elation.
None of the rest thought he could get there, and he didn't. The break in weather turned out to be
against them. He just guessed wrong in that one respect, I'm told. I wouldn't think of calling him
a complete failure. But news gets back home to the robins who didn't go.
I rather expect they'll make of him a hero. The elder statesmen will figure that since he is dead,
his ideas can't longer be dangerous, and they cannot deny the lift and the swing of his venture.
After all, he was the first robin. He looked for the spring, and it failed him. Now he belongs to
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that noble army of first robins. Many great names are included. The honors of office and public
acclaim, of ribbons and medals, the keys of the city-- these are seldom the perquisites of men or
birds on the first flight. They go to the fifth, sixth, and even 20th robins. There's almost a rule
that the first robin may die alone on some bleak common before mankind will agree that he--
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Time Period
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1980s
Original Title
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Conversations with Howard Thurman (parts 7 and 8), 1980 Sep 19-21, Side B
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394-361_B
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Thurman, Howard
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<a href="http://pid.emory.edu/ark:/25593/rp8k9">MSS 394</a>
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<a href="http://pitts.emory.edu/">Pitts Theology Library, Emory University</a>
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Title
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Conversations with Howard Thurman, September 1980, Parts 7 and 8, Side B
Date
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1980-09-20
Description
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This recording is a part of a wider series of conversations from September to October of 1980 where Howard Thurman met with a variety of young men and women who were discerning their calling to ministry. Thurman poses the intent of this group as an opportunity to "open up for one's self the moving, vital, creative push of God, while God is still disguised in the movement of God's self." In this recording, Thurman explores what it means to live one's life with a robust sense of responsibility and freedom. He notes that there is a crucial decision to be made when considering responsibility and freedom: saying yes or no to the life that rests within oneself. Following these sentiments, Thurman provides space for students to ask questions, to which they asked questions of was it means to "follow the scent of the spiritual life," "why the savior of all world religions must die," and predestination.
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Description by Dustin Mailman
autonomy
awareness
blame
center
consciousness
consent
creative encounter
decision
ecology
education
fate
freedom
grace
hope
Hunchback of Notre Dame
hunger
integrity
Jesus Christ
judgement
karma
kill your savior
older sister
original sin
predestination
quest
religious experience
responsibility
river
Robin
savior
scent
sentimentality
sing your own song
spring
time bound
veto
Victor Hugo
vitality
vulnerability
world religions