Howard Thurman
1899-1981 20th century
Going down to one's center: finding again in the inner silence the genuine voice God has placed there.
Who was Howard Thurman?
Grandson of a formerly enslaved woman, raised by his grandmother in Florida, a Baptist pastor and mystic, he met Gandhi in 1936. Dean of chapel at Howard and then at Boston University (the first African American to hold that post at a mostly white major university), he co-founded in San Francisco one of the country's first intentionally interracial churches. Martin Luther King carried his Jesus and the Disinherited on his travels.
In their own words
There is something in every one of you that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself.
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.
How foolish it is, how terrible, if you have not found your Island of Peace within your own soul.