Martin Luther King Jr., Jesse Jackson, Marian Wright Edelman, Vernon Jordan, and Vincent Harding. Thurman personally mentored and inspired many social and political activists, among them Pauli Murray, James Farmer, Bayard Rustin, James Lawson, Dr. In him I found support for my desire for intimacy with God and hunger for spiritual community, and I began to consider him a mentor.
My awkwardness as the only African American on a silent retreat or at a spiritual conference dissipated. Once I started reading and listening to Thurman, I stopped feeling strange for seeking silence, stillness, and solitude. Like Landrum Bolling writes, many of us feel like Thurman speaks directly to us - “vividly, intensely, personally.” Each time I play a recording of Thurman reciting one of his many meditations, I smile. It has an almost incantatory quality, a cadence both warm and mysterious. His voice is filled with gravity, but it is not without a sense of joy. The melodious voice of Howard Thurman bellows through the room: “How good it is to center down,” he says.
0 kommentar(er)
