There are many of us … across the world who claim Howard Thurman as our personal spiritual mentor…. He inspired, challenged, lifted, and comforted us in a thousand ways. —Landrum Bolling
Author and spiritual director Lerita Coleman Brown comments on Howard Thurman’s (1899–1981) gift of mentoring others:
Howard Thurman serves as an exemplar for both the formal ministry of spiritual direction and informal spiritual friendship. Mentoring, at its best, is an exchange. Spiritual guides are vital beacons of light on the spiritual path, and once a person becomes spiritually mature, they naturally begin to serve as spiritual mentors for others. Maya Angelou instructs, “When you learn, teach.” Howard Thurman taught and mentored many, although not always in a formal classroom. Students found they could share their personal issues with Thurman and frequently sought him out for spiritual advice. His timeless sermons, public lectures, and written meditations endure because they continue to feed the hunger of the spirit. [1]
Thurman encouraged the graduates of Spelman College to listen to and to become their unique selves:
The burden of what I have to say to you this afternoon is, “What is your name, who are you and can you find a way to hear the sound of the genuine in yourself?” There are so many noises going on inside of you, so many echoes of all sorts, so [much] internalizing of the rumble and the traffic, the confusions, the disorders by which your environment is peopled that I wonder if you can get still enough—not quiet enough—still enough to hear rumbling up from your unique and essential idiom the sound of the genuine in you. I don’t know if you can. But this is your assignment….
There is something in every one of you that waits, listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself and if you cannot hear it, you will never find whatever it is for which you are searching.… You are the only you that has ever lived; your idiom is the only idiom of its kind in all the existences and if you cannot hear the sound of the genuine in you, you will all of your life, spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls….
Who are you? How does the sound of the genuine come through to you?… Don’t be deceived and thrown off by all the noises that are a part even of your dreams, your ambitions… that you don’t hear the sound of the genuine in you because that is the only true guide that you will ever have and if you don’t have that you don’t have a thing. You may be famous, you may be whatever the other ideals are which are a part of this generation but you know you don’t have the foggiest notion of who you are, where you are going, what you want. Cultivate the discipline of listening to the sound of the genuine in yourself. [2]
References:
[1] Lerita Coleman Brown, What Makes You Come Alive: A Spiritual Walk with Howard Thurman (Minneapolis, MN: Broadleaf Books, 2023), 164.
[2] Howard Thurman, “The Sound of the Genuine,” Baccalaureate Address, Spelman College, May 4, 1980. Text edited by Jo Moore Stewart, Spelman Messenger 96, no. 4 (Summer 1980): 14–15.
Image credit and inspiration: Jenna Keiper, a walk in the fog with Richard, Kirsten, and Patrick (detail), 2019, photo, Albuquerque. Click here to enlarge image. Patrick Boland, Kirsten Oates, and Richard Rohr walk together—students and teacher—navigating a pathway on a cold, foggy morning.
Story from Our Community:
I have been traveling an inner spiritual journey for most of my adult life and I thought I was well on my way to reducing my ego. But recently, I was overlooked by someone and I had my feelings hurt terribly. Everything within me screamed … how I deserved more credit. I was shocked by my own reaction. Fr. Richard’s words in the meditation from March 2020 jumped out at me: “You are not important.” They pierced me to the core! I remembered that my True Self simply desires to be in deep union with God. I still have a very long way to go.
—Jo C.
