Over forty years have passed since these eloquent words ignited a passion within me that would spark a journey that would come to fruition in my teaching and publications on the life and legacy of Howard Washington Thurman. I am one of the many men and women who found in Howard Thurman a fount of inspiration and strength during a critical passage in our lives. Thurman and I met at the crossroads in our respective pilgrimages—he, a wise, old sage with little time left, and I, a struggling seminary student who had grown weary of abstract theological discussions that had become stale, irrelevant, and powerless. His wise counsel, his deep, penetrating silences, his wit and humanity—yes, his laughter—all these and more, provided for me an inner healing and new sense of direction that continues to this day.

I first became acquainted with Howard Thurman in 1971 when I served as a chaplain’s assistant in the U.S. Army. It was my weekly responsibility to prepare the Sunday bulletin for the Post Chapel at Fort Riley, Kansas. The post chaplain regularly assigned selections from Thurman’s small collection of meditations, The Centering Moment, for the back of the weekly bulletin. With the exception of one other African American chaplain assigned to Fort Riley, I felt awash in a sea of white clerics and assistants whose religious experiences were foreign to my own. I had been brought up in a small storefront Baptist church on the south side of Chicago, where the faces and deep-structured issues of consciousnesses found little in common with the day-to-day routine of the military religious life and practice. Imagine my surprise and delight when I saw Howard Thurman’s face on the back cover of The Centering Moment. When I read through the meditations, I was struck then, as now, by the quiet cadence and lofty idealism of Thurman’s interpretation of the religious experience—always pointing inwardly and, yet, challenging the human spirit to soar higher into itself and the world of nature, people, and ideas. I did not encounter Thurman again until the beginning of my seminary course on black preaching taught by Dr. Carl Marbury at Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary in 1977. Dean Marbury introduced the class of budding homileticians to a variety of black preaching—but my experience in the class was marked by the evening when he asked students to listen to a long-playing album, “The Third Component,” a sermon by Thurman.

One year later, during my middle year, I would meet the face of the words and the voice that had so enraptured me at Fort Riley and in the preaching class. It was in the living room of my future in-laws, Agnes and Dr. Melvin Watson. Imagine my surprise and delight to be in his and his life companion’s, Sue Bailey Thurman’s, presence in the casual settings of my future bride’s family home. What I remember most was the body-shaking laughter that emanated from this wise sage. Every moment was filled with the humor and deep wisdom that characterized his life and teachings. Serendipitously, Garrett Seminary’s Church and Black Experience program held a consultation with Thurman in October 1978. I was selected as the student chaperone to pick up Thurman at the airport and deliver him to his hotel. Instead, we spent the entire afternoon discussing my plans for the future. Such was the generous and gracious spirit of this unusual man. He asked again and again in probing interrogatives that I later discovered were his hallmark, “Who are you, really? What are you trying to do with your life?” I answered matter-of-factly, in the forgivable arrogance of naïveté, “I want to change the church into a moral force for the transformation of society.” His silences were gentle and mocking—and then he would ask again, “But who are you? Who do you seek to become?”

These haunting questions would find greater significance for me in the following spring of 1979 when I was invited, along with nine other students who were preparing for religious vocations, to a weeklong seminar entitled, “Footprints of the Disinherited” held at the Howard Thurman Educational Trust in San Francisco. The seminar series would be repeated on two other occasions with African American students who, in Thurman’s words, had given the “‘nerve center of consent’. . . to the religious life as a personal commitment. The seminar explored “the grounds and the meaning of religious experience” and “examined the bearing of these elements on the life and the fulfillment of those of us whose roots are in the Black community.” For seven days, October 21-27, 1979, we sat with this master, entranced by his long pauses and careful distillation of what it meant to devote “one’s entire thought and concentration on issues which have to do not only with the meaning of life but with the ultimate destiny of the human pilgrimage.”13 We struggled with what Thurman often referred to as the Angel with the Flaming Sword. Borrowed from George Fox’s personal experience of conversion, the Angel symbolizes our existential quests and yearnings for a sense of wholeness and the unity of consciousness. The encounter with the Angel is simultaneously a trysting with the self that provides the journeyer with a new sense of identity and purpose.14

The time we spent together was life-changing in every sense of the word. It was one of the very few experiences in my life where I felt I was totally engaged and understood. At the risk of overstating this unique experience, I felt as if I had finally arrived “home.” In fact, in Thurman’s presence, poetry poured out of me like a libation to Life. Each day Thurman would begin the seminar with a scriptural passage or one of his favorite contemplative readings; once or twice he read one of his own meditations. The ten of us, six men and four women from all over the country, sat in rapt attention feasting on his every word, listening, watching and thinking.

On the first morning, wrapped in an Aztec-patterned blanket like an ancient chief in ceremonial costume, he unhurriedly sat down in a worn recliner, adjusted his body for comfort with his contorted face expressing a readiness to speak words that were yet in formation, and finally announced that he wanted to tell us a story. He asked us to abandon all theological presuppositions about what we had heard about Jesus and to imagine that we were somewhere else—perhaps in a café far removed from the necessities of thought and worry and to simply relax as a stranger joined us and told us this story—a story that we were hearing for the first time. Thurman proceeded to read, “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. As it is written in Isaiah the prophet, Behold, I send my messenger before your face, who will prepare your way, the voice of one crying in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight’”.15 It took the entire morning, with one break, for him to complete the story of the Gospel of Mark. Beyond the sweet-liquored words and long pauses that drew us into our own rhythms, his deep melodic baritone, the slow cadence and long pauses in-between passages created a liminal space where insights leaped across our minds like dolphins at play in the water. After he was done, my immediate thought was that Jesus was a radically free human being; and that everything that he touched was liberated to live authentically in the world without pretense or fear. I think this was also Thurman’s intention in bringing us together so that as we found our way in the world as a new generation of religious leaders, we might freely tread in the footsteps of those who preceded us and leave our own imprints for those to come.

 "I will fly in the greatness of God as the marsh hen flies, filling all the space twixt the marsh in the skies. What I seek beyond is what I am finding within. The beyond is within. . . I will fly in the greatness of God as the marsh hen flies."

I am Walter Earl Fluker and we'll see you on the run!

Over forty years have passed since these eloquent words ignited a passion within me that would spark a journey that would come to fruition in my teaching and publications on the life and legacy of Howard Washington Thurman. I am one of the many men and women who found in Howard Thurman a fount of inspiration and strength during a critical passage in our lives. Thurman and I met at the crossroads in our respective pilgrimages—he, a wise, old sage with little time left, and I, a struggling seminary student who had grown weary of abstract theological discussions that had become stale, irrelevant, and powerless. His wise counsel, his deep, penetrating silences, his wit and humanity—yes, his laughter—all these and more, provided for me an inner healing and new sense of direction that continues to this day.

I first became acquainted with Howard Thurman in 1971 when I served as a chaplain’s assistant in the U.S. Army. It was my weekly responsibility to prepare the Sunday bulletin for the Post Chapel at Fort Riley, Kansas. The post chaplain regularly assigned selections from Thurman’s small collection of meditations, The Centering Moment, for the back of the weekly bulletin. With the exception of one other African American chaplain assigned to Fort Riley, I felt awash in a sea of white clerics and assistants whose religious experiences were foreign to my own. I had been brought up in a small storefront Baptist church on the south side of Chicago, where the faces and deep-structured issues of consciousnesses found little in common with the day-to-day routine of the military religious life and practice. Imagine my surprise and delight when I saw Howard Thurman’s face on the back cover of The Centering Moment. When I read through the meditations, I was struck then, as now, by the quiet cadence and lofty idealism of Thurman’s interpretation of the religious experience—always pointing inwardly and, yet, challenging the human spirit to soar higher into itself and the world of nature, people, and ideas. I did not encounter Thurman again until the beginning of my seminary course on black preaching taught by Dr. Carl Marbury at Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary in 1977. Dean Marbury introduced the class of budding homileticians to a variety of black preaching—but my experience in the class was marked by the evening when he asked students to listen to a long-playing album, “The Third Component,” a sermon by Thurman.

One year later, during my middle year, I would meet the face of the words and the voice that had so enraptured me at Fort Riley and in the preaching class. It was in the living room of my future in-laws, Agnes and Dr. Melvin Watson. Imagine my surprise and delight to be in his and his life companion’s, Sue Bailey Thurman’s, presence in the casual settings of my future bride’s family home. What I remember most was the body-shaking laughter that emanated from this wise sage. Every moment was filled with the humor and deep wisdom that characterized his life and teachings. Serendipitously, Garrett Seminary’s Church and Black Experience program held a consultation with Thurman in October 1978. I was selected as the student chaperone to pick up Thurman at the airport and deliver him to his hotel. Instead, we spent the entire afternoon discussing my plans for the future. Such was the generous and gracious spirit of this unusual man. He asked again and again in probing interrogatives that I later discovered were his hallmark, “Who are you, really? What are you trying to do with your life?” I answered matter-of-factly, in the forgivable arrogance of naïveté, “I want to change the church into a moral force for the transformation of society.” His silences were gentle and mocking—and then he would ask again, “But who are you? Who do you seek to become?”

These haunting questions would find greater significance for me in the following spring of 1979 when I was invited, along with nine other students who were preparing for religious vocations, to a weeklong seminar entitled, “Footprints of the Disinherited” held at the Howard Thurman Educational Trust in San Francisco. The seminar series would be repeated on two other occasions with African American students who, in Thurman’s words, had given the “‘nerve center of consent’. . . to the religious life as a personal commitment. The seminar explored “the grounds and the meaning of religious experience” and “examined the bearing of these elements on the life and the fulfillment of those of us whose roots are in the Black community.” For seven days, October 21-27, 1979, we sat with this master, entranced by his long pauses and careful distillation of what it meant to devote “one’s entire thought and concentration on issues which have to do not only with the meaning of life but with the ultimate destiny of the human pilgrimage.”13 We struggled with what Thurman often referred to as the Angel with the Flaming Sword. Borrowed from George Fox’s personal experience of conversion, the Angel symbolizes our existential quests and yearnings for a sense of wholeness and the unity of consciousness. The encounter with the Angel is simultaneously a trysting with the self that provides the journeyer with a new sense of identity and purpose.14

The time we spent together was life-changing in every sense of the word. It was one of the very few experiences in my life where I felt I was totally engaged and understood. At the risk of overstating this unique experience, I felt as if I had finally arrived “home.” In fact, in Thurman’s presence, poetry poured out of me like a libation to Life. Each day Thurman would begin the seminar with a scriptural passage or one of his favorite contemplative readings; once or twice he read one of his own meditations. The ten of us, six men and four women from all over the country, sat in rapt attention feasting on his every word, listening, watching and thinking.

On the first morning, wrapped in an Aztec-patterned blanket like an ancient chief in ceremonial costume, he unhurriedly sat down in a worn recliner, adjusted his body for comfort with his contorted face expressing a readiness to speak words that were yet in formation, and finally announced that he wanted to tell us a story. He asked us to abandon all theological presuppositions about what we had heard about Jesus and to imagine that we were somewhere else—perhaps in a café far removed from the necessities of thought and worry and to simply relax as a stranger joined us and told us this story—a story that we were hearing for the first time. Thurman proceeded to read, “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. As it is written in Isaiah the prophet, Behold, I send my messenger before your face, who will prepare your way, the voice of one crying in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight’”.15 It took the entire morning, with one break, for him to complete the story of the Gospel of Mark. Beyond the sweet-liquored words and long pauses that drew us into our own rhythms, his deep melodic baritone, the slow cadence and long pauses in-between passages created a liminal space where insights leaped across our minds like dolphins at play in the water. After he was done, my immediate thought was that Jesus was a radically free human being; and that everything that he touched was liberated to live authentically in the world without pretense or fear. I think this was also Thurman’s intention in bringing us together so that as we found our way in the world as a new generation of religious leaders, we might freely tread in the footsteps of those who preceded us and leave our own imprints for those to come.

 "I will fly in the greatness of God as the marsh hen flies, filling all the space twixt the marsh in the skies. What I seek beyond is what I am finding within. The beyond is within. . . I will fly in the greatness of God as the marsh hen flies."

I am Walter Earl Fluker and we'll see you on the run!

“You must wait and listen for the sound of the genuine that is within you. When you hear it, that will be your voice and the Voice of God.”

Walter Earl Fluker