Thinking about something other than dogs. I am thinking about books I have read and stories I have learned from and what they have meant to me and still mean to me.
Ernest Holmes, the founder of Science of Mind, wrote that "Thoughts are things, so we find that different kinds of thoughts become different kinds of things. Thought is always creative: it must always create after its own type. It must always give form to something, and the something to which it gives form is not a thing of itself, because the thought that creates the form is a product of the thinker. The thinker comes first, then the thought, and then the form." And as we read this and others like it, we realize this is how it has always been and we also realize how important our thoughts and stories are.
Holmes wrote that comment about thoughts many years ago, and I find similar thoughts in the writings of Emma Curtis Hopkins, William James, Thomas Merton, Joel Goldsmith, Don Miguel Ruiz, Thomas Troward, Rufus Jones, Howard Thurman, and many many more who have written and talked about the importance of thoughts, creativity and change in every generation.
In the book, Your Mythic Journey: Finding Meaning in Your Life through Writing and Storytelling, Sam Keen and Anne Valley-Fox in their 1989 update of Telling Your Story (written in 1973), say that "We are storytelling animals" and they, like many of the people above as well as our ancestors and the first people on this earth have all used stories to explain who we are, where we come from, why we exist, why we are different, what is important to us, what we want in life, and much much more. Keen and Valley-Fox go on to say that "To be a person is to have a story to tell." And what I like the most about what they wrote is something that fits every one of us and all the people who came before us: "With a little imagination," they say, "each person can find within himself a replacement for the myths and stories lost when we ceased living in tribes."
Don't we all know this? Think of the stories we have all been told and that we have all told: all different, some made up from nothing but our own thoughts and experiences, others about people we have known, or have met or who have passed on, or about people who lived long ago and left their stories for us through pictures carved in rocks, stories told by other people throughout history, stories we read in books. . . . and nowadays many come upon their stories through radios, computers, and televisions.
What would life be without people and could people exist without stories?
Instead of just talking about dogs and all they mean to us, I am going to share some thoughts about stories and writers who have meant a lot to me.
Sunday, June 8, 2014
Monday, May 26, 2014
Howard Thurman Dean of Marsh Chapel Boston University 1953 to 1965
Just a note to explain a change in this blog: This blog is no longer just about the dogs in my life.
I have more that I am grateful for, especially for people of the past and people of the present who have positively affected my life. One of the people I want to talk about will be Howard Thurman, a mentor for many people of the 20th century and beyond. As the Dean of the Chapel at Boston University when I was a student, he unknowingly taught me much about life and mysticism and much more. As he said, "There is in every person an inward sea . . ." But before I get to him, I have some other writers that I want to talk about. . .
I have more that I am grateful for, especially for people of the past and people of the present who have positively affected my life. One of the people I want to talk about will be Howard Thurman, a mentor for many people of the 20th century and beyond. As the Dean of the Chapel at Boston University when I was a student, he unknowingly taught me much about life and mysticism and much more. As he said, "There is in every person an inward sea . . ." But before I get to him, I have some other writers that I want to talk about. . .
Who Was Howard Thurman?
May 26, 2014
I have been remiss for awhile, quite awhile, I think my last post was in September 2010, but here I am, back again. I just finished teaching a class about a favorite person in my life. The person was Howard Thurman, and he was the Dean of Marsh Chapel when I was a student at Boston University in the 1950s and 60s. He preached incredible sermons that packed the chapel with both BU students and people who lived in that part of Boston.
But he was more than the Dean of Marsh Chapel: Much more. He was a teacher. But not just any teacher. He opened us up to our own worlds and our own lives.
And he wrote. Howard Thurman wrote 22 books, and after he died, several of his books were reprinted.
I like to let him do the talking: Here is one of his passages, quoted in his book, Meditations of the Heart: "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." (from Meditations of the Heart by Howard Thurman )
Yes, Thurman was the chaplain of the university I went to and yes, I heard many many of his sermons. But what stands out to me today is that phrase from Meditations of the Heart. He is not about a class to be taught: he is about who we are individually.
I have been remiss for awhile, quite awhile, I think my last post was in September 2010, but here I am, back again. I just finished teaching a class about a favorite person in my life. The person was Howard Thurman, and he was the Dean of Marsh Chapel when I was a student at Boston University in the 1950s and 60s. He preached incredible sermons that packed the chapel with both BU students and people who lived in that part of Boston.
But he was more than the Dean of Marsh Chapel: Much more. He was a teacher. But not just any teacher. He opened us up to our own worlds and our own lives.
And he wrote. Howard Thurman wrote 22 books, and after he died, several of his books were reprinted.
- The Greatest of These (1944)
- Deep River: Reflections on the Religious Insight of Certain of the Negro Spirituals (1945) [also published as The Negro Spiritual Speaks of Life and Death (same year)]
- Meditation for Apostles of Sensitiveness (1948)
- Jesus and the Disinherited (1949)
- Deep is the Hunger: Meditations for Apostles of Sensitiveness (1951)
- Christmas Is the Season of Affirmation (1951)
- Meditations of the Heart (1953)
- The Creative Encounter: An Interpretation of Religion and the Social Witness (1954)
- The Growing Edge (1956)
- Footprints of a Dream: The Story of the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples (1959)
- Mysticism and the Experience of Love (1961)
- The Inward Journey: Meditations on the Spiritual Quest (1961)
- Temptations of Jesus: Five Sermons Given By Dean Howard Thurman in Marsh Chapel, Boston University, 1962 (1962)
- Disciplines of the Spirit (1963)
- The Luminous Darkness: A Personal Interpretation of the Anatomy of Segregation and the Ground of Hope (1965)
- The Centering Moment (1969)
- The Search for Common Ground (1971)
- The Mood of Christmas (1973)
- A Track to the Water's Edge: The Olive Schreiner Reader (1973)
- The First Footprints (1975)
- With Head and Heart: The Autobiography of Howard Thurman (1979)
- For the Inward Journey: Writings of Howard Thurman (1984)
- A Strange Freedom: The Best of Howard Thurman on Religious Experience (1998)
- Meditations of the Heart (1999)
- Howard Thurman: Essential Writings (2006)
I like to let him do the talking: Here is one of his passages, quoted in his book, Meditations of the Heart: "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." (from Meditations of the Heart by Howard Thurman )
Yes, Thurman was the chaplain of the university I went to and yes, I heard many many of his sermons. But what stands out to me today is that phrase from Meditations of the Heart. He is not about a class to be taught: he is about who we are individually.
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