Howard Thurman’s A Litany of Thanksgiving

Nov 27, 2024

What do we have to be thankful for during this holiday season? Howard Thurman’s answer: everything.

Rev. Dr. Howard Thurman, a spiritual prodigy and one of our nation’s greatest clergymen, was born in Pensacola, Florida on November 18, 1899. Raised, nurtured, and loved by his mother Alice Thurman and his grandmother Nancy Ambrose, Howard Thurman was seven years old when his father, Saul Solomon Thurman, died from complications arising from a bout of double pneumonia. His local pastor’s decision not to officiate his father’s funeral led a young Thurman to vow that, “if he grew up to be a man, [he] would never have anything to do with the Church.” Thankfully, for the world, it was not a vow that Thurman would keep.

It was Nancy Ambrose, his maternal grandmother, born into slavery and already a young woman at the time of The Civil War, whose influence left the deepest and most lasting impressions on Thurman. That reading was forbidden to her as an enslaved person fueled her insistence that Thurman would be educated, and his passion for the power of language and reading. The prohibition against reading being one of many reminders that the American system of chattel slavery may very well have broken the humanity of the enslavers but never that of the enslaved.

There is, on YouTube (its archival function being, without a doubt, this social media platform’s highest purpose), a two-part conversation with an aged Howard Thurman. At the 12:30 mark of the first part of the conversation Thurman is asked by the interviewer, “what was your grandmother like?” Without missing a beat, an uncanny delight and joy in his eyes, Thurman smiling, replies, ‘I wish I could tell you.” But if you make it to the 17:40 mark of the conversation, you will encounter these words that tell us a good deal about Nancy Ambrose. As young Howard prepared to depart his small town to go off to high school–there was no public high school for Black folk in his community and only a couple in the entire state of Florida, so to continue his education, Howard had to leave home– is grandmother delivered to him what he called her benediction for how he should live his life: Look up, always, not down. Look forward, always, never back. And remember everything you get; you have to work for.

Howard Thurman’s grandmother’s words (Look up, always, not down. Look forward, always, never back. And remember everything you get; you have to work for.) remind me of the grandeur of the folk, the enslaved, from whom I am also descended. Indeed by faith our ancestors received approval. And I am also reminded of Albert Murray’s lifelong insistence that the blues is not the creation of a crushed-spirited people. It is the product of a forward-looking, upward-striving people. Small wonder then, given Thurman’s magisterial pedigree, that his personal mentoring changed the lives of Pauli Murray, Marian Wright Edelman, Bayard Rustin, Martin Luther King Jr. and Vincent Harding to name a few, or that his almost mystic spiritualism continues to guide so many as they search for their spiritual center.

In 1923, Thurman graduated valedictorian from Morehouse College. Nine years after graduating, by 1932, he was the first dean of the now, and rightly, hallowed Rankin Chapel at Howard University. Beginning in 1994, Thurman co-founded and co-pastored (with Albert Fisk) the first interdenominational and interracial church in America, the Church for the Fellowship of All People, located in San Francisco. From 1953 to 1965, Dr. Thurman was the dean of Marsh Chapel at Boston University. Another Morehouse alum, one from the generation after Thurman’s, had by that time made his own way to Boston University to pursue a PhD in systematic theology. His name was Martin Luther King Jr.

It was Howard Thurman—classmate of Martin Luther King, Sr.—who wrapped his down-home sanctified and world-travelled ecumenical wings around young Martin Luther King Jr., introducing King the younger to Gandhi's methods of nonviolence and to the untapped power of the Earth’s disinherited. (Howard Thurman’s classic text, Jesus and the Disinherited, published originally in 1949, was a text that King repeatedly turned for guidance and inspiration.). It was Thurman, himself steeped in the clear eyed and coffin-ready Black church tradition, who applied finishing touches to the young prophet’s wings, before he took flight behind, beyond, and between the veil on his way to an awful, shattering destiny. Or was it victory—O death, where is thy sting?

A young man uncertain he was being called to preach, many lifetimes ago I was enrolled at Boston University’s School of Theology, searching for an answer. Which is to say that it was also at Boston University where I had a sustained encounter (my second one) with the life and work of Rev. Dr. Howard Thurman. To have followed in his footsteps (and King’s) to study first at Morehouse and then at Boston University is one of the great privileges of my life. Therefore since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses…

Thinking as I have been about what to write about the Thanksgiving holiday, I was reminded of Thurman’s Litany of Thanksgiving and of the difference his life and witness have made in my own life. For Thurman, thanks-giving was a way of being in the world, captured brilliantly, I think, in this prayer:

Today, I make my Sacrament of Thanksgiving.
I begin with the simple things of my days:
Fresh air to breathe,
Cool water to drink,
The taste of food,
The protection of houses and clothes,
The comforts of home.
For all these I make an act of Thanksgiving this day!
I bring to mind all the warmth of humankind that I have known:
My mother’s arms,
The strength of my father,
The playmates of my childhood,
The wonderful stories brought to me from the lives of many who talked of days gone by when fairies and giants and all kinds of magic held sway;
The tears I have shed, the tears I have seen;
The excitement of laughter and the twinkle in the eye with its reminder that life is good.
For all these I make an act of Thanksgiving this day.
I finger one by one the messages of hope that awaited me at the crossroads:
The smile of approval from those who held in their hands the reins of my security;
The tightening of the grip in a single handshake when I feared the step before me in the darkness;
The whisper in my heart when the temptation was fiercest and the claims of appetite were not to be denied;
The crucial word said, the simple sentence from an open page when my decision hung in the balance.
For all these I make an act of Thanksgiving this day.
I pass before me the mainsprings of my heritage:
The fruits of the labors of countless generations who lived before me, without whom my own life would have no meaning;
The seers who saw visions and dreamed dreams;
The prophets who sensed a truth greater than the mind could grasp and whose words could only find fulfillment in the years which they would never see;
The workers whose sweat has watered the trees, the leaves of which are for the healing of the nations;
The pilgrims who set their sails for lands beyond all horizons, whose courage made paths into new worlds and far-off places;
The saviors whose blood was shed with a recklessness that only a dream could inspire and God could command.
For all this I make an act of Thanksgiving this day.
I linger over the meaning of my own life and the commitment to which I give the loyalty of my heart and mind:
The little purposes in which I have shared with my loves, my desires, my gifts;
The restlessness which bottoms all I do with its stark insistence that I have never done my best, I have never reached for the highest;
The big hope that never quite deserts me, that I and my kind will study war no more, that love and tenderness and all the inner graces of Almighty affection will cover the life of the children of God as the waters cover the sea.
All these and more than mind can think and heart can feel,
I make as my sacrament of Thanksgiving to Thee, Our Father, in humbleness of mind and simplicity of heart.