208 - An Interview With Howard Thurman and Ronald Eyre

An Interview With Howard Thurman and Ronald Eyre

THIS INTERVIEW was prepared for the BBC television series on world religions, known as The Long Search. It followed the first segment of the series on "Protestantism in the U.S.A." In that episode, Ronald Eyre, the entrepreneur for the whole project, discussed three Indianapolis churches, a fundamentalist temple, a mainline Methodist church, and a black tabernacle. This was the context for the interview with Howard Thurman.

Ronald Eyre is a graduate of Oxford University and a writer of TV drama for the BBC. He has prepared a paperback entitled Ronald Eyre on The Long Search (Collins, 1979), a personal account of the filming of the religious series. THEOLOGY TODAY carried a review of the series by Conrad Hyers, Vol. XXXVI, No.-I (April 1979), 78-83.

Howard Thurman, with whom we negotiated about this interview more than a year ago, died April 10, 1981. Dr. Thurman was nationally known as a leading black clergyman and champion of the poor and oppressed. Preacher, educator, and author, he was the recipient of several honorary degrees and, with the Rev. Alfred Fisk, a founder of San Francisco's Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples. He was a pioneer in interpreting the theology of the "Negro Spirituals," and he published his autobiography, With Head and Heart, in 1980. In recent years, be served as Director of the Howard Thurman Educational Trust in San Francisco. Dr. Thurman was greatly looking forward to seeing this interview in print. We publish it as a theological tribute to a gifted and versatile human being who enriched us all with his luminous insight and evident religious commitment.

Eyre: There is no doubt that the fundamentalist phenomenon we have just viewed has power. It attracts people, although many of them looked like fascists or the dispossessed of the earth. Can you tell me, from your point of view, where that power comes from?

Thurman: I think the power comes from the fact that they desperately need something to enable them to deal, day by day, with the raw materials of their environment. When they go to church, this gives them a sense of being on their own ground, their own territory, and it is an opportunity to experience a kind of freedom that literally defies the environment, giving them a sense of being children of God.

Eyre: Don't the fundamentalists have to close their minds?

Thurman: I'm not sure about that. I think it's true they must turn their minds away from the facts in their experience about which they are

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rationalizing, and must deal with the facts of their experience which they cannot rationalize. For instance, you cannot rationalize pain and discrimination. The only way they can deal with these is to find an experience that enables them to absorb violence without disintegration.

Eyre: The fundamentalists I came across were mostly white. Are you talking about black congregations?

Thurman: Yes, in a sense, but not altogether. Because black and white, in the sense in which I am thinking about it, are the poor, the economically poor, the underprivileged poor. If you are white and poor, one of the things that will give you a sense of not being stepped on by life is the fact that when you look around, here is a black person who's poorer than you are and who seems to be on the outside, while even though you are white and poor, you are on the inside. This offers a psychological advantage that makes your experience of poverty a little less devastating than if you were black and poor. But I think generally what the poor experience, whether black or white, in the intensity of religious emotional release, is a sense of being at last at home in the world, at home with the presence of a personal God, their God. And of course if you feel this way, you can stand anything else because other people who are doing these things to you are just mere human beings. But you know the Creator of Existence confirms you, and when you internalize that, you can endure.

Eyre: Why were we attracted to that poor black church in Indianapolis? Is it because we are being sentimental white liberals, do you reckon?

Thurman: No, I don't think that's a true answer. I think you felt that there was a vitality there which you needed in order to validate your own experience of meaning. If these people with all their disadvantages in society could have this experience of inner freedom so manifest in their worship, then there is room for you to have something of the same which would mean validation within the context of your security, or your privilege, or your money, or what have you. Everybody is looking for one thing ultimately, and that is the experience of being completely and utterly understood, held, contained. So that here or there, in one swirling moment you can feel free enough to be yourself, to be utterly exposed, utterly vulnerable, and absolutely secure. That is what everyone is looking for and many find it, I think, in this religious service that you describe.

Eyre: Do the poor have some form of hot-line to the gospel?

Thurman: Ha! I think, like all people who are interested in any religion, they feel that in some unique way they have a hot-line to whatever the meaning is in their religion. But I think that because of the fact that Jesus, the founder of Christianity, was himself poor, also a Jew, himself a part of a small minority in the world in which he

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lived (the Greco-Roman Empire) - a minority with its back against the wall, a minority that had no political freedom, noncitizens living outside the normal guarantees of emotional and political security-given this, Jesus and his message addressed the needs of the people of his time. Therefore all people who are in that same psychological or economic condition feel that here is something that speaks to their particular need. Whether I bow my knee formally before any precise altar is completely irrelevant. What Jesus discovered with his back against the wall gives me courage that if I can find a clue to that discovery I can deal with myself with my back against the wall, and not internalize my condition so as to be defeated by it.

Eyre: Does the religion of Jesus require people to approach it through poverty?

Thurman: When you put it that way, there is something about it that makes me draw back. I don't know. I think if you mean that they must sense their own need, I would say "Yes." But that need defines itself, it seems to me, in many different ways and at many different levels.

Eyre: The mainline church people, those who have been privileged in terms of society, seem to have lost heart. Can you account for that?

Thurman: Well, I don't know. Having said that I don't know, now I am at liberty to talk about it! I feel that they have power, or they represent power, and it is a power that is being challenged, not only here but all over the world. It means, then, that as the things on the horizon which give stability and a sense of security-the state, the family, the whole system-as these stabilities are threatened and undermined as a result of what is taking place all over the world, a kind of desperation arises and people are turned inward to examine the roots of their own private sense of being and private sense of security, over and above what may be given by their environment. I think that is what accounts for their poverty.

Eyre: I notice that when a word like dogma, doctrine, theology comes up you tend to shove it to one side. I want to bring it back, but can you show me why you shove it aside?

Thurman: I have a view about that which meets the needs of my own mind and spirit. Dogmas, theologies, creeds are inventions of the mind. Speaking of creeds, this for an aside: What the creed does not say in its text is the point of view of those who lost. You see, a creed is a statement of triumph over a position that was either outlawed or outvoted, even though there is nothing in the creed that tells you who lost. But if you live long enough, if the creed lives long enough, the position that lost finds its way back. In maybe fifty or a hundred years, it creeps in again as a restatement of the original idea. Those who lost have their inning, maybe fifty years, a hundred years after.

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Eyre: So creeds are like the restrictions of a war-time emergency?

Thurman: Well, I say that creeds, dogmas, and theologies are inventions of the mind. It is the nature of the mind to make sense out of experience, to reduce the conglomerates of experience to units of comprehension which we call principles, or ideologies, or concepts. Religious experience is dynamic, fluid, effervescent, yeasty. But the mind can't handle these so it has to imprison religious experience in some way, get it bottled up. Then, when the experience quiets down, the mind draws a bead on it and extracts concepts, notions, dogmas, so that religious experience can make sense to the mind. Meanwhile religious experience goes on experiencing, so that by the time I get my dogma stated so that I can think about it, the religious experience becomes an object of thought. When that happens, the experience goes on "experiencing." Therefore, whatever creed there is, whatever theology there is, must always be a little out of date. The genius of religious experience, it seems to me, is this: it has to have an altar. The mind demands that experience be reduced to manageable units so we can think about it. But, in order for the experience to remain vital, the altar has to be torn down and a new one built. The mind wants to be stabilized, it wants to get something settled once and for all. It is not the nature of religious experience to be stabilized. As long as the experience is vital, the only way it can spread is by contagion-not by instruction, not by addressing the mind, but something one person can catch from another, as you catch the measles.

Eyre: When you speak like this, are you at one with people who would think this way in all traditions?

Thurman: It's the nature of religious experience, it seems to me, of whatever kind, to be fluid, dynamic, moving, surging; it is the nature of the mind to hold things so that there can be a handle. An object of thought must have a this-ness and a that-ness dimension. This is the way the mind works, but life is not lived that way.

Eyre: You have known in your own life, you've told me, what it means to be underprivileged. I'd like you to tell me about the virtues and strengths of being underprivileged.

Thurman: For me, the great contribution religion made to my life as a boy growing up in Florida, was this: it gave me a sense of worth, an intrinsic sense of being creditable to myself - a sense that God, who created the ocean, which I loved, and the eclipses, and all the other things in nature, also created me. So that I felt, in all the external world around me, that there was a kind of kinship that was not pantheistic but grounded in a fundamental experience of meaning which was all mine by virtue of the fact that I was created. For instance, my grandmother, a former slave in northern Florida who was a young woman when the Civil War began, had the responsibility for taking care of us. My father died when I was very young, seven years old, and my mother became the breadwinner. But my

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grandmother was the anchor person who held us together. Whenever she observed that the water was getting low in my well, or my sister's well, she would tell us something out of her past. It was the same story. We waited for it. She said that when she was a young woman on the plantation, once a year or maybe more frequently (I don't remember that detail) the minister who was himself a slave on a neighboring plantation was permitted to have a religious service for the slaves. Always, no matter what his subject was, he ended his sermon in the same way. She said he would stand and look at them. Then he would say, "You are not slaves, you are not niggers - you are God's children." When my grandmother would tell us about this, we would all wait for that moment because a faraway look would come into her eyes, with a slight stiffening of her spine, and for me, there was a contagion that came to me as a little child in knowing that the Creator of Existence also created me. Therefore, with that sort of backing, I could absorb all the violences of life. To me this is the genius of any valid religious experience, whether you are poor, rich, or whatever.

Eyre: But if we don't really know who God is, what does it mean to speak of anyone as a "child of God?" Are there other ways to put it?

Thurman: You see, I think that is mostly academic because only in the most superficial sense is a vast concept of any sort an object of thought. It may be a subject of experience. For instance, it I ask you to define your mother, you could say a lot of things. When our younger daughter was very small, she would ask me a question, and I would explain, using all the language that fitted into her little world. Then after I had exhausted everything, she would say, "Now Daddy, for really what does it mean?" So I do not think God is an object of thought; but this does not mean that the mind is not under obligation to define God. It seems to me that this is the paradox: you know you can't, but there is something about the mind that insists that things make sense. It may be because the mind is so new, so young. We just got it about thirty seconds ago, you know, while the emotions are as old as the throb of life. And the mind is trying to find its way. It doesn't know, so it asks all these questions that torment it, and then it waits. Then it gives up waiting and starts all over again. So I don't think that God, as the object of religious experience, is at the same time reducible to any kind of definition. For if I could reduce God, as it were, to a definition, then that means that I would find something else more fundamental, more idiomatic than God, and that would be God for me.

Eyre: Something more fundamental from which to define God?

Thurman: That's what I'm saying.

Eyre: Earlier when we were talking, you mentioned that although in your grandmother's generation there was no possibility of liberty, there was possibility of freedom. Could you expand on that?

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Thurman: Freedom, as distinguished from liberty, is a quality of experience. It is indigenous to the ground of personality. I think liberty, however, is something that is conferred upon you. It is the way-to use a slang phrase-it is the way the cookie crumbles. It is something that the social contract confers upon you and therefore it can be taken away. It can be restricted, it can be proscribed-all sorts of things. But freedom is a quality of being and therefore it is native to the human spirit and cannot be taken away. I think that an individual may lose it, but potentially the power of veto or certification with reference to freedom always remains in the individual. It is not something related to any aspect of environment, and therefore liberty may be restricted for a thousand years but those people who are being restricted may still be free. That is why there is always the threat of the power of the dictator. How does he use this power? He sends abroad a rumor that gives the people under his control a feeling that the most precious thing they have is their physical existence. Once that idea becomes supreme in my mind, then if you want to control me all you need do is threaten to kill me physically and I will obey. But freedom is a quality of being that you cannot touch; nothing external to me can touch it; only I can say Yes or No to it. And that's the mark, I think, of a free person and the genius of religious experience. So, for me, religious experience is not a philosophy, it is not a technique, it is not a skill; it is a sense of being, it is the flavor of my spirit that is uniquely mine, indigenous to me. Nothing can take it away, nor can it be conferred. It is something that I lay claim to, myself; if I do not, I lose it.