by Arthur Ashe
First, I believe that I am part of a continuum of life that has existed, exists, and will exist into future generations. At most, I am only a ripple in this mighty river of life, but I am nevertheless a part of it, and a unique part, as well. Second, I cannot believe that life started haphazardly. Life must have come out of a design, from a First Mover, a Prime Cause. I believe in an original source or cause of life, which we call God, and which may have evolved over the billions of years of time. I do not believe that because we cannot scientifically and objectively prove the existence of God, we can therefore dispense with religion and the Bible. I know that I turn my back on God only at my peril. This I shall never do.
IN RECENT YEARS, Jeanne and I have found true solace in the teachings of the preacher, mystic, philosopher, and theologian Howard Thurman. I was introduced to the writings and tape-recorded sermons of Dr. Thurman by my good friend the Reverend Jefferson Rogers, with whom I later worked to help save Thurman’s birthplace from destruction and to restore it as a memorial to him. One day, we hope, it will be on the National Register of Historic Places. I certainly believe that Thurman deserves such recognition. Andrew Young is also a devotee of Thurman’s writings, as is Dr. Paul Smith of the First Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn Heights. In the past months, I have spent some happy hours talking with Paul about Thurman and his works.
Thurman was born in Daytona Beach, Florida, in 1900. His childhood was marred by the death of his father and by Thurman’s sense of being out of place in the world; he took refuge in nature, in the woods near his home, the Halifax River, and the mighty Atlantic itself. However, he shone as a student in high school and at Morehouse College in Atlanta, from which he graduated in 1921. Later, he trained for the ministry at the Rochester Theological Seminary in New York. In 1926, he took his first position, as minister of Mt. Zion Baptist Church in Oberlin, Ohio. In 1932, he joined the faculty at Howard University as a professor of theology and, later, dean of Rankin Chapel.
In 1944, Thurman gave up his professorship to co-found the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples, in San Francisco. By all accounts, this was the first integrated congregation in America—that is, integrated in its leadership as well as in its following. Then, in 1953, in a daring move, Boston University selected Thurman to be dean of its Marsh Chapel. That same year, his influence was so wide that a panel of judges at Life magazine named him one of the twelve greatest preachers in America. Martin Luther King, Jr., it is said, always carried in his briefcase a copy of Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited. Toward the end of his life, Thurman returned to San Francisco. A prolific writer and lecturer, he published more than twenty books before his death in 1981.
For me, Thurman is the supreme example of the black American’s capacity for achieving spiritual growth and maturity despite the incessant blows of racism. Born in the shadow of slavery, black and poor, he developed his understanding of the human and the divine to such an extent that he influenced thousands of people; Thurman became, as Jesse Jackson accurately and elegantly called him, “a teacher of teachers, a leader of leaders, a preacher of preachers.” He did so by opening himself to a wide range of ideas and influences unlimited by race or nationality, borrowed gratefully from this religion or that philosophy. From his childhood, his sense of religion was brilliantly colored by poetry and mysticism. When he found an intellectual basis for this tendency in the book Finding the Trail of Life by Rufus Jones, a Quaker philosopher-mystic on the faculty at Haverford College, he sought out Jones for guidance. In 1929, Jones accepted him as a special student. His months at Haverford, Thurman later said, were “a crucial experience, a watershed from which flowed much of the thought and endeavor to which I was to commit the rest of my working life.”
In 1935, a visit to the “colored” lands of Burma, Ceylon, and India in a delegation of African Americans also proved powerfully influential. In a meeting with Mohandas K. Gandhi, the Mahatma sharply questioned Thurman and his companions about black America, its acceptance of Christianity in spite of the destructiveness of Christians, its need to accept nonviolence, or satyagraha, and to emphasize morality in its quest for justice. At the Khyber Pass, Thurman also underwent a mystical experience, “as close to a vision as I ever had.” This visit to the East was crucial in Thurman’s development of his identity as a Christian mystic and preacher dedicated to the exploration of the complexities of the self and of the divine, as well as to exposing the spurious nature of most of the barriers that separate human beings.
Little in Dr. Thurman’s teaching is clearly original. Like most ministers, he borrows readily from the work of other ministers and thinkers. His power lies, on the one hand, in his eloquent fusions of ideas concerning the self, society, and the divine, and, on the other hand, in the appropriateness of his teachings to the problems that we face every day. Although Thurman was an African American, his writings make few references to race, or concessions to the idea of race. Like Rufus Jones, he spurned social divisions based on race, class, and gender. And yet his mysticism is of a practical, active kind, rather than one that leads to seclusiveness and denial. Spirituality for him must be a dynamic force, gathered and refined in solitude but applied in the world for the betterment of humanity.
The epigraph to one section of his book Meditations of the Heart captures something of both the substance and style of his ministry. In graphic images, Thurman describes the integrity of the self and the determination that should move each individual to guard and nurture that self, which is our one sure conduit to God. Thurman wrote:
There is in every person an inward sea, and in that sea there is an island and on that island there is an altar and standing guard before that altar is the “angel with the flaming sword.” Nothing can get by that angel to be placed upon that altar unless it has the mark of your inner authority. Nothing passes “the angel with the flaming sword” to be placed upon your altar unless it be a part of “the fluid area of your consent.” This is your crucial link with the Eternal.
Aside from the Bible, Dr. Thurman’s two dozen or so volumes are the most important books to me both in my moments of crisis and in my extended struggle with disease. First, Thurman confirms my faith in God. “There is in God,” he insists, “strength sufficient for all my needs whatever they may be.” He notes how virtually all the religions of the world affirm this point, no matter how each religion interprets or represents God. Divine power is sufficient to aid every human being, no matter what his or her trials and needs. This belief is true of all the major religions, including Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Taoism, and Buddhism. One may doubt one’s acceptance of God, or one’s understanding of God, but one must never doubt God’s sovereign power.
Dr. Thurman’s concept of “centering down” also appeals to me. It is both a practical process I try to employ and an idea about the mind, the soul, and the world. In one of his many prayer-poems, he wrote:
How good it is to center down!
To sit quietly and see one’s self pass by!
The streets of our minds seethe with endless traffic;
Our spirits resound with clashings, with noisy silences,
While something deep within hungers and thirsts for the still moment and the resting lull.
With full intensity we seek, ere the quiet passes, a fresh sense of order in our living;
A direction, a strong sure purpose that will structure our confusion and bring meaning in our chaos.…
Resembling Zen Buddhist teachings about meditation, but also akin to the Christian meditative tradition, centering down is the process of bringing oneself to the state of serenity that would permit the believer to gain insight for the purpose of drawing closer to God. Centering down is not the same as prayer. Rather, it often precedes prayer. Dr. Thurman speaks approvingly somewhere of a rabbi who once suggested to him that genuine prayer is less an agency than the consequence or result of an inward journey or a centering down inside oneself. Prayer then has a chance of developing into a genuine dialogue with God
, rather than the whining and importuning that it often becomes.
Much has happened in my life, but Dr. Thurman’s teaching helps me to maintain control despite these changes. In fact, he insists we remember that the self is not static but constantly changing in accordance with new episodes and facts involving the individual. The self is not a purely ethereal or a purely physical entity but one composed of earthly as well as transcendental properties. Thus any journey into the self, any effort at centering down, must take into account new facts and events in the individual’s life; all important new “self-facts” must be integrated harmoniously into one’s self-image. Such exploration must not be undertaken in willful avoidance of these facts, as if they did not exist. As a devoted pragmatist, I relish the practicality of this teaching, how it respects the concrete aspects of existence even as it facilitates a search for divine grace. In my case, heart disease and AIDS are absolute facts that I must integrate into my sense of my own reality, my self. Mysticism is not escapism, in Dr. Thurman’s view. Mysticism is aware of its own evanescence, its slippery, delusional nature, which can prevent someone seeking grace from ever attaining it.
As I face heart disease and AIDS, perhaps the most important concept offered by Dr. Thurman is the idea of the sacrament of pain, or the ministry of pain, as he calls it elsewhere. No doubt this is his attempt to answer the most haunting and perplexing question of Christianity and of many other religions: Why does a benevolent God tolerate or even encourage the presence of suffering in the world? Collectively, black Americans (and other oppressed peoples) have often asked God this question. “What did we do to deserve slavery? What did we do to deserve a century of segregation? Didn’t our famed love of religion, our adoration of God, count for anything with the divine?” Those questions are woven into the fabric of historical African American religion and religious music In the spirituals or sorrow songs, mainly in coded ways, they are posed again and again.
Dr. Thurman distinguishes between pain and suffering that might be deserved, as a response to evil deeds, and the more enigmatic kind, which seems unearned, gratuitous. He believes that humanity is protected and enfranchised by its participation in this innocent suffering. In his meditation “Pain Has a Ministry,” he raises the possibility that “pain has a ministry which adds to the sum total of life’s meaning and, more importantly, to its fulfillment.” Nevertheless, he sees as a danger the idea that a specific kind of pain might be sent into the life of an individual in order to perform a ministry in his or her life. Indulged, this idea can lead to fatalism and despair. God certainly did not give me AIDS. Still, Thurman writes, “any tragedy has inherent in it positive good.… The pain of life may teach us to understand life and, in our understanding of life, to love life. To love life truly is to be whole in all one’s parts; and to be whole in all one’s parts is to be free and unafraid.”
Believing that pain has a purpose, I do not question either its place in the universe or my fate in becoming so familiar with pain through disease. Quite often, people who mean well will inquire of me whether I ever ask myself, in the face of my diseases, “Why me?” I never do. If I ask “Why me?” as I am assaulted by heart disease and AIDS, I must ask “Why me?” about my blessings, and question my right to enjoy them. The morning after I won Wimbledon in 1975 I should have asked “Why me?” and doubted that I deserved the victory. If I don’t ask “Why me?” after my victories, I cannot ask “Why me?” after my setbacks and disasters. I also do not waste time pleading with God to make me well. I was brought up to believe that prayer is not to be invoked to ask God for things for oneself, or even for others. Rather, prayer is a medium through which I ask God to show me God’s will, and to give me strength to carry out that will. God’s will alone matters, not my personal desires or needs. When I played tennis, I never prayed for victory in a match. I will not pray now to be cured of heart disease or AIDS.
I do not brood on the prospect of dying soon. I am not afraid of death. Perhaps fear will come to haunt me when the moment of death is closer. On the other hand, perhaps I will be even less fearful, more calm and at peace. I think of my lack of fear as being, in some ways, different from true courage. My bouts of surgery have made me a veteran in fighting death. Familiarity has not bred contempt of death but has given me practice in learning to face it calmly. In any event, the courage I yearn for is that described by Dr. Thurman: “There is a quiet courage that comes from an inward spring of confidence in the meaning and significance of life. Such courage is an underground river, flowing far beneath the shifting events of one’s experience, keeping alive a thousand little springs of action.”
I think that we must do our best to face death with dignity. I hope that I can be strong when my time comes. A true hero in facing death was Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, once vice-president of the United States and, in 1968, candidate for the presidency against Richard Nixon. Ten years later, as he faced the final onslaught of death by cancer at his house on the shore of Lake Waverly, near Minneapolis, Senator Humphrey’s glowing optimism, even ebullience, was an example of true heroism I will never forget. I remember how it was said of him that in his splendid career as a liberal he taught us how to live, and that in his magnificent battle with cancer he taught us later how to die. I hope that I learned something from his example and can emulate it when my time comes.
I believe with Dr. Thurman that “death is an event in life. It is something that occurs in life rather than something that occurs to life.” Death is but one of many occurrences in life, “none of which exhausts life or determines it.” I believe, too, “that what a man discovers about the meaning of life … need not undergo any change as he meets death.” So I go calmly on with my life. Keeping as busy as my health allows, I press on with my modest efforts at striving and achieving.
Above all, I have faith in God. Dr. Thurman has looked at the fear of death and reminded us of the infinite power of divine grace. “When I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,” he writes, alluding to the Twenty-third Psalm, “I will fear no evil because God is with me.” God’s presence “makes the difference, because it cancels out the threatening element of the threat, the evil element of the evil.” God does not promise a pleasant end; far from it. “Of course I may linger, or I may die; I may suffer acutely, or all my days may rest upon an undercurrent of muted agony.” Nevertheless, God is sufficient: “I shall not be overcome; God is with me. My awareness of God’s presence may sound like magic, it may seem to some to be the merest childlike superstition, but it meets my need and is at once the source of my comfort and the heart of my peace.”
Thus far, I have been steadfast. At night, I get into bed and I go straight to sleep. Is this bravery, or only denial? My wife, Jeanne, thinks that I practice denial a fair amount of the time. Wisely, she makes a distinction between good denial and bad denial. The latter is when I walked around with a pain in my chest but brushed off the hurt and declined to go to my doctor. Good denial is my refusal to dwell on the idea of death, or even to accept as a fact the notion that I will die soon from heart disease or from an illness related to AIDS—to me, this is not denial, but a simple acknowledgment of the facts of my case.
I am a fortunate, blessed man. Aside from AIDS and heart disease, I have no problems. My stepmother, about whom I care deeply both for my sake and for my dead father’s, is in fine health; my wife is in fine health; my daughter radiates vitality. I have loving friends in abundance. I have the support of skilled doctors and nurses. I need nothing that money can buy. So why should I complain? And beyond them, I have God to help me.
Perhaps my favorite prayer-poem by Howard Thurman is “The Threads in My Hand.” The speaker of the poem says that he holds only one end of a number of threads, which come to him from “many ways, linking my life with others.” Some threads come from the sick and troubled, some from the dreaming and the ambitious; still others are knotted beyond the speaker’s power to understand and unravel. But one thread is different from all oth
ers:
One thread is a strange thread—it is my steadying thread;
When I am lost, I pull it hard and find my way.
When I am saddened, I tighten my grip and gladness glides along its quivering path;
When the waste places of my spirit appear in arid confusion,
the thread becomes a channel of newness in life.
One thread is a strange thread—it is my steadying thread.
God’s hand holds the other end …
Chapter Eleven
My Dear Camera
BY THE TIME you read this letter from me to you for the first time, I may not be around to discuss with you what I have written here. Perhaps I will still be with you and your mother, sharing in your daily lives, in your joys and in your sorrows. However, I may be gone. You would doubtless be sad that I am gone, and remember me clearly for a while. Then I will exist only as a memory already beginning to fade in your mind. Although it is natural for memories to fade, I am writing this letter in the hope that your recollection of me will never fade completely. I would like to remain a part of your life, Camera, for as long as you live.
I was only a few months older than you are now when I lost my own mother. Eventually I had no memory of what she was actually like, how her voice sounded, how her touch felt. I wanted desperately to know these things, but she was gone and I could not recover that knowledge. For your sake, as well as mine, I hope that I am around for a long time. But we cannot always have what we want, and we must prepare for and accept those changes over which we have no control.
Some of my most important thoughts about you are in this book, only as far away as your bookshelf. And your mother will be with you, alive and well, for a long time, and she knows exactly how I feel about most matters. If you ever want to know what I would think or say, ask her.
