The Experience of Love – Howard Thurman — A Brief Reflection

The experience of love is either a necessity or a luxury. If it be a luxury, it is expendable; if it be a necessity, then to deny it is to perish. Ultimately there is only one place of refuge on this planet for any person — that is in another person’s heart. To love is to make of one’s heart a swinging door. (A Strange Freedom: The Best of Howard Thurman on Religious Experience and Public Life, p. 184)

Thurman has been a longtime spiritual mentor of mine. I first met him through his writings and cassette tape recordings (yes, that long ago!) of his talks during my time at United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities in the early eighties. Like my other spiritual mentor, Thomas Merton, Howard Thurman’s writings are just as prophetic and relevant today as they were when they were alive and writing decades ago.

In today’s world and especially in the US, division, both real and manufactured, is a tool used for fear mongering and oppression. A society which is united is a society that is a threat to a small group of individuals who consolidate their power through the lies of scarcity and manufactured hatred. I see that most clearly today in the immoral and illegal actions of ICE and the unconstitutional use of the National Guard and Active Duty military personnel in US cities by an administration bent on the ruthless consolidation of power into the hands of the corrupt politicians.

Today they continue to work at dividing people through the use of fear, bullying, and intimidation along with the unethical use of force. Their goal is to build walls of isolation that weaken the will of the governed and sow seeds of disunity and fear.

Thurman challenges me to step back and evaluate my own heart and my own actions. Am I closed off walled in community of one? Or am I seeking to do the work of taking down the fear-based and isolating walls that I have built up? Is my heart a closed or a swinging door? Am I willing to love boldly and stand up to the bullies? Am I willing to do as Jesus commands and offer a better way to live? A way where love isn’t a luxury but is rather a necessity?

In his Asian Journal, written during his 1968 trip to Asia, Thomas Merton wrote about unity, community, and communion.

The deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless. It is beyond words. It is beyond speech. It is beyond concept. Not that we discover a new unity, but we discover an old unity. My dear brothers and sisters, we are already one. But we imagine we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be, is what we are. — The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton, p. 308

Are you willing, dear reader, to be a part of building a beloved community, or as Merton called it, Communion… our original unity? On this day, this is my hope and my prayer as I seek to live differently from much of the world around me.