Moment of Oneness, July 17, 2024

   

Living from the Stillness Within

Howard Thurman Part I

“Embrace mysticism for compassionate social action”. Lerita Coleman Brown

Opening Meditation Song

Be Still and Know – CeCe Winans

https://youtu.be/3u7et5kpG9o?si=fZ3MLN7kROClI76m  

Opening Prayer: Beloved, help us to withdraw, to detach for a moment and dive into the Great Silence. “Here the Presence of God is sensed as an all pervasive aliveness which materializes into the concreteness of communion: the reality of prayer. Here (You) speak without words and the self listens without ears. Here at last, glimpses of the meaning of all things and the meaning of one’s own life are seen with all their strivings”. Howard Thurman

Silence

Background of Howard Thurman

Known as the Godfather of the Civil Rights movement, Howard served as spiritual advisor to Martin Luther King Jr and many others who were leaders and activists in the 1960”s. Howard Thurman was born in 1899 in Palm Beach Florida and lived in Daytona Beach. His father was a laborer on the railroad who died of pneumonia when Howard was 7. His father who was not a church member was condemned by the preacher giving his eulogy and condemned him to hell. Howard vowed never to join a church. Howard spent long times in nature and had many spiritual experiences. His mother and grandmother nurtured his gift and ingrained in him that he was a child of God, Although African American children were not permitted to go to formal schooling, Howard’s community recognizing his gifts ensured he received private tutoring. He earned high grades at a private school in Jacksonville. Howard worked a job and studied to the point of exhaustion. He was valedictorian of his class. He went on to Morehouse College studying mainly economics and sociology. Again, he was valedictorian of his class in college. He went into seminary at Colgate Rochester. He vowed to feed the spiritual hunger of the masses and he wove spirituality and racial justice together into sacred activism.

Quotes from Howard Thurman

“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do that, because what the world needs is more people who have come alive”

Silence

“We must learn to be quiet, to settle down in one spot for a spell. Sometime during each day, everything must stop and the art of being still must be practiced. For some temperaments, it will not be easy because the entire nervous system and body have been geared over the years to activity, to overt and tense functions. Nevertheless, the art of being still must be practiced until development and habit are sure.”

Silence

“I was a very sensitive child who suffered much from the violences of racial conflict. The climate of our town, Daytona Beach, Florida, was better than most southern towns because of the influence of the tourists who wintered there. Nevertheless, life became more and more suffocating because of the fear of being brutalize, beaten, or otherwise outraged. In my effort to keep this fear from corroding my life and making me seek relief in shiftlessness, I sought help from God. I found that the more I turned to prayer, to what I discovered in later years to be meditation, the more time I spent alone in the woods or on a beach, the freer became my own spirit and the more realistic became my ambition to get an education.”

Silence

“Once the interference that drowns out the hunger has been stilled or removed, real communion between man and God can begin. Slowly the hunger begins to stir until it moves inside the individual’s self-consciousness, and the sense of the very Presence of God becomes manifest. The words that are uttered, if there be words, may be halting and poor, they may have to do with some deep and searching need of which the individual now becomes acutely aware, it may be a sin that had become so much a part of the landscape of the soul, that the soul itself had the feeling of corruption – but this may not last long. On the other hand, it may be a rather swift outpouring of a concern, because here is the moment of complex understanding and the freedom it inspires.”

Silence

Affirmations and Intentions: 

May we be inspired by holy people.

May we have the fortitude to seek silence and alone time with the Holy Presence.

May we discover the direction within to create a peaceful world and bring justice for those in need.

May spiritual guidance be our saving grace.

May all those who hunger for spiritual food be fed.

Silence to add your own intentions.

Closing Prayer: Holy Presence, fill us with your spirit, as we empty our minds and souls of us, of our worries, of our plans, of our puzzling, our musings, our insights; anything that distracts us from your presence within, inviting us to praise in communion with you. Here we are emptied and ready.

Closing Question for contemplation this week.

How would you describe your experiences with silence, stillness, and solitude?

Take a few “pause pockets” – one, two, or three minutes of silence – throughout the day this coming week.