Lost and Found...

In a recent get together with my ex-wife she gave me back an item of mine she had found that had been missing for over 10 years. It is a parchment paper of one of uncle Howard Thurman's (my great uncle, actually) texts from Meditations of The Heart titled As Long As A Man Has A Dream In His Heart.

Cousin Sue, as we call her, had inscribed it and given it to me in 1988. In those days, I was a filmmaking student at the Art Institute in San Francisco. My father had lived with them when he was pursuing his PhD in the late 1950's at Berkeley. Cousin Sue suggested to grandma Jessie that he should stay with them in San Francisco. Now in 1988, Cousin Sue and I had become quite close, as I was a searcher of truth and beauty in the world and she was a fellow traveler. She was well into her senior years at the time.

After Howard's death, I spent hours in Howard's study listening to audio tapes and reading his books and sermons. It is not that I was particularly religious. I wasn't. I was really interested, however, in finally understanding, or at least coming to terms with, this thing called religion. After all, it had been around me much of my life. I simply did not really know what to make of it, or how to interpret it. Or what relevance, if any, it should have in my life. My parents were scholars and intellectuals and wanted us to come to our own interpretations and conclusions about life.

Although, I had been to church a few times in my childhood, I was not raised in the church. In fact, church kind of frightened me. I may have had a very general idea of what it was about, in terms of Christ and the resurrection and the be kind to thy neighbor stuff, but I really didn't get all the supernatural business. Did religious people really believe that Christ was the literal incarnation of God? Did they really believe in God as a human-like person that is the orchestrator of existence? Did Moses really part the seas?

As I listened to, and learned from, Howard's books and other writings, I was engrossed by what he and Cousin Sue were about. On the one hand they were family and, as such, I think I somewhat took them for granted. On the other hand, he was a much celebrated and very interesting preacher, theologian, and scholar writing about things I had a growing interest in...the human heart and our interior life, so to speak, as human beings.

Although I loved and performed magic tricks as a kid, I am not a believer in actual magic or the supernatural. As I read and learned as much as I could, which was probably not a ton, I found that I could not get over one thing when it came to religion. As with the bible itself, I think of the supernatural things in the bible to be the interpretation of things that a persecuted people fleeing Egypt, in the wilderness of the desert, interpreted. Not as objective, verified, fact. Sorry, no miraculous parting of the seas for me.

I was not able to accept the supernatural aspects of the bible as objective, or even historical, fact. I could never get there and, in many ways, that seemed to be a requirement of the church and for those that would call themselves religious. Hence I consider myself to be a non-religious, but deeply spiritual believer in human-kind.

My thinking about religion these days (any religion really) is that its value is not in the literalness of the stories and magic in the bible, but that it is (wo)mans best effort to give people a way to think about and interpret their lives. At its best, it is a layman's balm and guide for the human soul. To view it in any literal sense is to miss the forest for the trees and gives rise to "magical" thinking. And today we are suffering a crisis of magical, or just plain crazy, thinking that is completely untethered to the truth.

It is my belief that, not using your critical faculties in evaluating our world and our existence in it, allows people to believe in just about anything. And it causes real problems in society for the ignorance that it engenders in people. People done lost they minds, for some of the crazy shit they believe!

In spite of my relationship to religion, I have truly loved learning about Uncle Howard's teachings and his interpretation of meaning and the inner life of the individual. I think this interest of mine came from my parents and a sense that things really do matter.

At times growing up, I had the distinct feeling that telling the truth mattered greatly. Being able to contemplate and thoughtfully articulate your experience and your take on things mattered. And that I had something of value to offer the world. Indeed, at times growing up, as minorities we felt that we needed to have truth be on our side, as the larger society could and would bring its wrath down upon you if you "F"-ed up. He used to like to tell us that they, the larger society, like to put us (Black folks and minorities) under the jail!

For this reason, my dad especially impressed upon me and my brothers the need to be a straight arrow, morally and ethically (and legally) speaking. So did Mom, albeit in a slightly different way. While Dad was perhaps almost exclusively concerned with our welfare and wellbeing, Mom also wanted us to be engaged with and, in some sense, perhaps be an advocate for our people. While in most ways I am fine morally, ethically, and legally speaking, I am not without my flaws. As far as being an advocate goes, I try and be positive and help people where I can.

Indeed, when I was an adolescent, Dad quite literally used to encourage me to express my thoughts and to think clearly, so that I would get better and better at it. I think I have gotten pretty good at it today. My early family experience and later interest and efforts at being a writer myself is much of what sparked my interest in these sorts of things. I love people and the human drama, just like my dad and mom did. Nothing can stir my juices more than a good story and discovering the things that make us tick.

The link below is to a long, but very interesting article that is essentially a transcript of a series of lectures he gave called Howard Thurman's Inner Life Series. It has a section that discusses his writing from As Long As A Man Has A Dream in His Heart. Look for section: Day 2: The Fluid Area of Your Consent, the Embers of Anticipation.

Generally, the series is about Howard's thinking about our inner lives and how we can use our inner lives to help discover and manifest a better world. One of the many things that makes Howard's series so interesting is that it was created near the time of Russian dictator Josef Stalin's death (1953), when there was much chaos and uncertainty in the world. Not unlike today. We are living amid great suffering (homelessness, immigration crisis, drug abuse, poverty, and more) here at home and across the world. We need to change. Now.

Uncle Howard was a wonderful orator and an inspiration to me. I hope you read the article and are able to find some inspiration from it as well.

https://danheck.medium.com/howard-thurmans-inner-life-series-21409ea81bc8

#diversitytalk, #newleadership, #genuineleadership, and #authenticitymatters