The Unfinished Search for Common Ground: Reimagining Howard Thurman's Life and Work - Softcover

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Walter Earl Fluker is Dean’s Professor of Spirituality, Ethics, and Leadership, Candler School of Theology, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor Emeritus of Ethical Leadership, Boston University. Editor of the Howard Thurman Papers Project, Dr. Fluker is an internationally regarded consultant, lecturer, and workshop leader. He is coeditor of the Orbis series “Walking with God: The Sermon Series of Howard Thurman,” which includes The Way of the Mystics, Moral Struggle and the Prophets, and Democracy and the Soul of America.

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RELIGION / Christian Theology / Ethics

SOCIAL SCIENCE / Activism & Social Justice

SOCIAL SCIENCE / Black Studies

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US$38.00

Walter Earl Fluker, editor

THE UNFINISHED SEARCH FOR COMMON GROUND

Reimagining Howard Thurman

Cover design by:Michael Calvente

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ISBN 978-1-62698-511-7

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Introduction

The Unfinished Search for Common Ground

Walter Earl Fluker

“In quietness and confidence shall be your strength.” Long before I was born God was at work. Creating life, nature and the world of men and things. The worlds were ideas in the mind of God That have been realizing themselves through the ages. God is not through with creation— God is not through with me. —Howard Thurman1

An “unfinished search” is a linguistic conundrum. To search implies that something is “unfinished,” incomplete,” or “ongoing.” So why pin this tautological error to Thurman’s “search for common ground”? First, the search for common ground is a rather general, hackneyed label for all things that need a shared linguistic repository in situations where there are conflicts of interests, opinions, and aggressions that require some premise from which to proceed in rational argumentation (e.g., political compromises, contested social issues, or even in the more grave and weightier contexts of negotiation and diplomacy among nations). One might say, for instance, that the United States’ and China’s search for peaceful coexistence or common ground is unfinished. In this sense, the process of seeking common ground is pragmatic, transactional (quid pro quo), and temporary because the proposed solutions and treatises that ensue are products of the tenuous interplay of power where the grounds of compromise are always shifting and therefore need deliberation, adaptation, revision, and reimagining. I am using the “unfinished search for common ground” in Howard Thurman partly in this sense. Thurman was not a stranger to conflict and aggression. In fact, he believed that “No understanding of the significance of community can escape the place and significance of aggression.”2 Therefore, he argued that those committed to the actualization of community must acknowledge the role of conflict as an essential element in the creation of a just and loving society. For this reason, he believed that democracy, at its best, is a squabble, a contentious exchange of ideas, opinions, values, and practices within the context of civil relations because “this is the kind of world that is grounded in creativity; that is essentially dynamic; that potentials are an important part of any present consideration or predicament.”3

Thurman’s teaching and ministerial positions as professor, pastor, and university chaplain, and his later work with the Howard Thurman Educational Trust Fund served as spiritual and intellectual laboratories in which his vision of community could be tested, revised, and reimagined.4 Yet his creative search for common ground went beyond utilitarian calculi, measurable outcomes, and efficiency that mock the fall of modernity in neoliberal projects where winners take all. 5 With the rise of religious activism in the nation’s highest court and the rampant rage and violence incited by Christian nationalism, Thurman’s religious search for “democratic space,” especially at this moment in the history of this nation and the globe, should be given equal par with social, political, and global contestations that seek common ground because the potential consequences of failing to do so could be devastating.6 I am also interested in “common ground” qua Thurman, as a religious or spiritual quest for knowledge of Presence, integrity, freedom, responsibility, love, and imagination.7 Thurman’s vision of common ground is profoundly religious and metaphysical. On the one hand, it is incomplete, arriving but never quite finished. Yet he believed, paradoxically, that there was an end, a telos, an omega point in which common ground would be fulfilled in time and history. He often quoted the prophet Isaiah, that finally, “The earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.”8 Luther Smith, in his excellent essay published in this volume, writes, “Thurman does not pretend to be a seer who knows if this will occur soon or in one thousand or ten thousand years. But he does believe in a time of finality. We may argue with him about this common ground conclusion. I certainly do. From my personal experiences with him, I believe Howard Thurman would welcome the debate.”9

In this introduction, I join Smith, Thurman, and others in this debate. I believe that Thurman’s search for common ground is unfinished and that however we resolve the apparent contradictions or paradoxes, we are nonetheless summoned by him to continue the search that he has bequeathed to us in his voluminous writings, sermons, and public addresses. Our work is not to accept at face value his claims of “common ground” as an essentialist project that is embedded in modernistic language and paradigms that he also struggled to reimagine for his time.10 I refer here to the ways in which the misappropriation of common ground can be a foil for the ways in which the democratic ideal of “the radical egalitarian hypothesis” has masqueraded—and continues to masquerade—as a shape-shifting national imaginary of a nonracial, colorblind society while the economic, political, and social situations of the poor of all colors and creeds progressively deteriorate.11 Therefore our task is, in some respects, a harder and more complex challenge to seek new and fresh meanings from his magnificent architectonic of common ground. As he often quoted from Hermann Hagedorn, “We died, but you who live must do a harder thing than dying is, for you must think and ghosts shall drive you on.”12

Thurman’s Unfinished Search

A key theme in Thurman was his intensely personal understanding of community, in which he saw himself as both subject and object in a parabolic journey toward community.13 Thurman reflects in his autobiography on a “watershed moment” at an informal retreat in 1925 in Pawling, New York, where he encountered the South African writer Olive Schreiner for the first time. George “Shorty” Collins read her allegory of “The Hunter,”14 a searcher after truth, who while hunting for wild fowl caught a glimpse of a reflection in a lake of an elusive, “vast white bird, with silver wings outstretched, sailing in the everlasting blue.” The hunter was so struck by this reflection that he spent the rest of his life searching for another glimpse of her. After traveling through numerous mountains and valleys of “beliefs, immortality, realism, sensuality, negation and the dark night of the soul,” his white hair, feeble frame, and shrunken face revealed the torturous paths and incredible sacrifices made in his quest for one more glimpse of this beautiful creature. Schreiner writes, “The old, thin hands cut the stones ill and jaggedly, for the fingers were stiff and bent. The beauty and the strength of the man was gone.” In his last breath, the Hunter cries out,

“I have sought,” he said, “for long years I have laboured; but I have not found her. I have not rested, I have not repined, and I have not seen her; now my strength is gone. Where I lie down worn-out others will stand, young and fresh. By the steps that I have cut they will climb; by the stairs that I have built they will mount. They will never know the name of the man who made them. At the clumsy work they will laugh; when the stones roll, they will curse me. But they will mount, and on my work; they will climb, and by my stair! They will find her, and through me! And no man liveth to himself and no man dieth to himself. . . . My soul hears their glad step coming,” he said; “and they shall mount! they shall mount!” He raised his...