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| Source: Boston University Archives |
The Wisdom of Grandmother Nancy
Howard Thurman’s grandmother, Nancy Ambrose, was a very important person in his life. She had been born into slavery on a large plantation in South Carolina. She was a midwife in Daytona Florida, and people called her “Lady Nancy[i]”
As Thurman was growing up just at the start of the 20th century, he lived with her and his mom, (his dad died when he was 7) and called her the “anchor person in our family.”
One of Thurman’s responsibilities growing up was to read to his grandmother from the bible each day. She told him that “Whenever her owner’s wife saw her little daughter trying to teach … grandmother the alphabet or one, two, three, she would chastise the child and send her to bed without supper.” grandmother said: “I saw there must be some magic in knowing how to read and write."
Remembering her, Thurman recalled the stories she would tell occasionally about her time as an enslaved person, about how “sometimes the plantation owner’s minister would be permitted to hold a religious service for the slaves, and he always preached from the same text: ‘Slaves, be obedient to your masters, for this is right in the Lord.’ … grandmother said that she made up her mind then and there that if she ever learned to read or if freedom ever came she would never read that part of the Bible.” …”. So all the years that I was growing and had the job of reading to her every day, I could never read any of the Pauline letters, except now and then the 13th chapter of I Corinthians.[ii]
Thurman told a reporter many year’s later, in his own words:“My grandmother’s second story is even more important to me, but in a different way. She would talk about the times when a slaver preacher was permitted to hold services for the slaves of her master’s and all the neighboring plantations.
I don’t remember how often this happened, but that that it happened at all was tremendously important. And then my sister and I would be every still, because we knew what she was going to tell us – this: “It didn’t matter what the text was, the minister always ended up at the same place.”... Then she would say: “he would stand up, start very quietly and then look around to all of us in the room and then he would say, ‘You are not slaves, you are not n____ – you are God’s children’. . .” And you know, when my grandmother said that she would unconsciously straighten up, head high and chest out, and a faraway look would come on her face.” [iii]
That phrase “you are God’s children” and that strength he saw in his grandmother inspired much of his writing and work. The same writing which inspired Martin Luther King and many others who made a huge difference in our country.
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| Image Source: Journey Films |
Rev. Howard Thurman was a minister, a professor, a writer. He was raised Baptist, and preached and taught in the Baptist tradition, but also helped found the Church of the Fellowship of All Peoples in San Francisco -- the first, interracial, intercultural chapel in the united states. This is how I was introduced to Thurman’s work during seminary, as their current minister Dorsey Blake was a professor at my school. Blake told us that many white seminary students were drawn to Thurman for his mysticism, but he wanted us to understand the racial context our of which they grew. For Thurman mysticism and the work for social change flowed naturally from one another.
Thurman had visited Mahatma Ghandi with a delegation to India in 1935, which was formative in his life and thought, and was part of the connection between the American civil rights movement and the philosophy of non-violent resistance.
It is said that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King kept a “well thumbed copy” of “Jesus and the disinherited” in his pocket during the days of the Montgomery bus boycotts. [i] which Thurman wrote in 1949, so today I’d like to share some readings from that important work with you. To share the beauty and care of his words with you today. Thurman begins:
“Many and varied are the interpretations dealing with the teachings and the life of Jesus of Nazareth. But few of these interpretations deal with what the teachings and the life of Jesus have to say to those who stand, at a moment in human history, with their backs against the wall.”Thurman is noticing that much of what the church offered folks “with their back against the wall” is a call for the more fortunate to help them in their need. Unfortunately, Thurman notices, this can give the folks helping a sense of pride and superiority to those one his helping.
To those who need profound succor and strength to enable them to live in the present with dignity and creativity, Christianity often has been sterile and of little avail. The Conventional Christian word is muffled, confused, and vague. Too often the price exacted by society for security and respectability is that the Christian movement in its formal expression must be on the side of the strong against the weak. This is a matter of tremendous significance, for it reveals to what extent a religion that was born of a people acquainted with persecution and suffering has become the cornerstone of a civilization and of nations whose very position in modern life has too often been secured by a ruthless use of power applied to weak and defenseless peoples… "
"It is not a singular thing to hear a sermon that defines what should be the attitude of the Christian toward people who are less fortunate than himself. Again and again our missionary appeal is on the basis of the Christian responsibility to the needy, the ignorant, and the so-called backward peoples of the earth. There is a certain grandeur and nobility in administering to another’s need out of one’s fullness and plenty. . . . It is certainly to the glory of Christianity that it has been most insistent on the point of responsibility to others whose only claim upon one is the height and depth of their need. This impulse at the heart of Christianity is the human will to share with others what one has found meaningful to oneself elevated to the height of a moral imperative. But there is a lurking danger in this very emphasis. It is exceedingly difficult to hold oneself free from a certain contempt for those whose predicament makes moral appeal for defense and succor. It is the sin of pride and arrogance that has tended to vitiate the missionary impulse and to make of it an instrument of self-righteousness on the one hand and racial superiority on the other.”
“…It has long been a matter of serious moment that for decades we have studied the various peoples of the world and those who live as our neighbors as objects of missionary endeavor and enterprise without being at all willing to treat them either as brothers or as human beings. I say this without rancor, because it is not an issue in which vicious human beings are involved. But it is one of the subtle perils of a religion which calls attention—to the point of overemphasis, sometimes—to one’s obligation to administer to human need.This message that is over 70 years old dovetails exactly with our own growing edge as a movement. For so long UU has focused on how we could support those less fortunate than ourselves, but the COIC has asked us instead to take up Howard Thurman’s question- what good is our faith to those who live with their backs against the wall? We are asked now, at this moment in history, to devote ourselves to deepening a theology of liberation, to speak to those of us who are disinherited, the dispossessed. If we are going to live our dream of becoming an anti oppressive faith, this is at the core of our work.
“I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times that I have heard a sermon on the meaning of religion, of Christianity, to the man who stands with his back against the wall. It is urgent that my meaning be crystal clear. The masses of men live with their backs constantly against the wall. They are the poor, the disinherited, the dispossessed. What does our religion say to them?”[in For the Inward Journey p. 121-123]
In Jesus and the disinherited Thurman suggests that :
“Fear is one of the persistent hounds of hell that dog the footsteps of the poor, the dispossessed, the disinherited” [p. 138]. “Always back of the threat is the rumor or the fact that somewhere, under some similar circumstances, violence was used. That is all that is necessary. The threat becomes the effective instrument” [p. 140] “Through bitter experience they have learned how to exercise extreme care, how to behave so as to reduce the threat of immediate danger from their environment.” …” The threat of violence within a framework of well-nigh limitless power is a weapon by which the weak are held in check. Artificial limitations are placed upon them, restricting freedom of movement, of employment, and of participation in the common life. These limitations are given formal or informal expression in general or specific policies of separateness or segregation. These policies tend to freeze the social status of the insecure.
The threat of violence may be implemented not only by constituted authority but also by anyone acting oin behalf of the established order. Every member of the controllers’ group is in a sense a special deputy, authorized by the mores to enforce the pattern. This fact tends to create fear, which works on behalf of the proscriptions and guarantees them. The anticipation of possible violence makes it very difficult for any escape from the pattern to be effective. [p. 141-142]
“Even recourse to the arbitration of the law tends to be avoided because of the fear that the interpretation of law will be biased on the side of the dominant group.” [p. 144]
Again Thurman asks: “The crucial question, then, is this: Is there any help to be found in the religion of Jesus that can be of value here? It is utterly beside the point to examine here what the religion of Jesus suggests to those who would be helpful to the disinherited…No man wants to be the object of his fellow’s pity. Obviously, if the strong put forth a great redemptive effort to change the social, political, and economic arrangements in which they seem to find their basic security, the whole picture would be altered. But his is apart from my thesis. Again the crucial question: Is there any help to be found for the disinherited in the religion of Jesus?” [p. 145]
Though Thurman speaks with more explicitly Christian language than we generally used in our churches today, the good news he offers is our good news too. Thurman was a universalist (small u) which he learned from his grandmother. Who learned it from that preacher on the plantations of her childhood- that each of us is a “child of God”
Thurman’s proposes:
“The core of the analysis of Jesus is that man is a child of God, the God of life that sustains all of nature and guarantees all the intricacies of the life-process itself. Jesus suggests that it is quite unreasonable to assume that God, whose creative activity is expressed even in such details as the hairs of a man’s head, would exclude from his concern the life, the vital spirit, of the man himself. This idea—that God is mindful of the individual—is of tremendous import in dealing with fear as a disease. In this world the socially disadvantaged man is constantly given a negative answer to the most important personal questions upon which mental health depends: “Who am I? What am I?”(I hear in Thurman’s wisdom, the stirring words of the preacher who assured them “you are not slaves. You are God’s children.” )
The first question has to do with a basic self-estimate, a profound sense of belonging, of counting If a man feels that he does not belong in the way in which it is perfectly normal for other people to belong, then he develops a deep sense of insecurity. When this happens to a person, it provides the basic material for what the psychologist calls an inferiority complex. It is quite possible for a man to have no sense of personal inferiority as such, but at the same time to be dogged by a sense of social inferiority. The awareness of being a child of God tends to stabilize the ego and results in a new courage, fearlessness, and power. I have seen it happen again and again.”
Thurman continues “This established for them the ground of personal dignity, so that a profound sense of personal worth could absorb the fear reaction. This alone is not enough, but without it, nothing else is of value.
The first task is to get the self immunized against the most radical results of the threat of violence. When this is accomplished, relaxation takes the place of the churning fear. The individual now feels that he counts, that he belongs. He senses the confirmation of his roots, and even death becomes a little thing.”
When we UUs speak today about a love which holds us all, our love must be big enough to hold this. When Thurman encouraged us to “keep open the doors of our hearts” in today’s reading, it is not about a charity to the less fortunate, but the power of the individual and our relationship to the divine, to choose love instead of hate. We must know so deeply that we count, that we belong, that it confirms us like a tree rooted in a place of belonging, even in the midst of oppression and fear. When our backs are to the wall, our work for justice begins in our own soul – our integrity, our authentic voice. These allow one to be strong and live a life of meaning, and intimacy with the sacred that return power and agency to those of us who have been disinherited.
When we look at God’s universal love, or as the principles say “the inherent worth and dignity” with this in mind, we see how deep and important this theological anchor is to the work of justice and the meaning of our lives. “No easy sentimentality” as Thurman writes, but a blueprint for the future of our faith.
Notes:
The Story of Nancy AMbrose:
[i] https://sojo.net/magazine/november-2020/story-howard-thurman-kept-telling-about-race
[ii] For a quick perspective on the impact of this story, and alternate views on Paul https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhPXBSESGVQ
[iii] https://genius.com/Mary-e-goodwin-racial-roots-and-religion-an-interview-with-howard-thurman-annotated
The Wisdom of Howard Thurman:
[i] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/this-theologian-helped-mlk-see-value-nonviolence-180967821/
I am using the edition included in For the Inward Journey: The Writing s fo Howard Hutmrn, but a PDF of hte whole book can be found here.
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