What do I have GIVENNESS NOW to?

Become like a dying Byrd.

“I first heard of Howard Thurman when I was a student at Harvard Divinity School.

In 1953 God had not yet died and there was much excitement in the theological world.  There were giants - Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, Rudolf Bultmann, and Paul Tillich.  I wandered into Cambridge trailing broken chains, a wild-eyed fugitive just escaped from the prison of fundamentalism.  

 
I needed someone with a sharp intellect to help me chisel off the broken shackles.  In Tillich I found a “savior” (a word, he reminded us, that came from salvus - to make whole or healthy).  He showed me how a man could think passionately, deeply, and clearly about the complexities of the human condition.  He exhibited a love for reason, an eros for Logos.  

But my spirit was not satisfied.


At Harvard the mind was king, and tyrant.

I was already reading the mystics - Johannes Eckhardt, Jakob Bohme, and D.H. Lawrence - and wondering how the demands of my mind could be harmonized with the longings of my heart and the desires of my body.  

About that time word drifted across the Charles River that Boston University had a mystic who was teaching a course called “Spiritual Resources and Disciplines.”


The first day of the seminar, Howard Thurman, then Dean of Marsh Chapel, arrived in class - a large black man with three prominent bumps on his forehead and a habit of silence so deep that it quieted everyone with whom he came in contact.  He sat on the edge of the table for an eternity or so, not saying a word, looking at the dozen members of the class - 

I mean really looking.



Finally, in a slow rich voice, he began to read from Admiral Byrd’s account of being alone and near death at the North Pole.  When he finished he paused and asked, “If you were alone, a thousand miles from any other person, it was fifty degrees below zero, and you were dying, what would have happened to allow you to die with integrity and a sense of completion?”


The question dropped down beneath all the manufactured certainties of my mind and exploded in my gut like a depth charge.  I knew I was in the presence of a man who thought with his mind, heart, and body stretched to their fullest.”  Sam Keen, Fire in the Belly

Sit on the edge of a table for an eternity or so.  

Don’t say a word.  


Look.


I mean really look.  



And ask a question that drops down beneath all the manufactured certainties of your mind and explodes in your gut like a depth charge.




…satisfy my spirit.

I have a GIVENNESS NOW to become like a dying Byrd.