Jesus and the Disinherited

Howard Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited was first published in 1949; the version I have is from 1996, with a foreword by pastor, historian, and religion scholar Vincent Harding.

I’d never heard of Howard Thurman, let alone this book, until last December when I interviewed Bo Aganaba on my podcast, Time & Other Thieves (which this blog is a written version of). Bo’s the host of the GoodBeing Podcast, which he had me on last summer. In our December conversation, we got on the topic of heroes, and Bo included Howard Thurman in his list of personal ones. When I said I’d never heard of him, Bo said he was “a Christian mystic during the Civil Rights era. Martin Luther King would carry his book Jesus and the Disinherited around with him for inspiration. Bo said there was an online library of his sermons and recommended I give some a listen so I could hear the quality of his deliver, how he let the silence say so much amongst the wisdom he was sharing. “There’s so many parallels between good preaching and jazz music, and the blues,” Bo said. “The call and response, and the refrain and the coming back to ideas, and the respect for phrasing and silence and how powerful those things can be in the present moment… Because it is pulling you to a sense of presence, it is pulling you into the here and now. And that’s just something that I think, if you allow [it], can be so transformative.”

A few days after publishing the Bo Aganaba episode of Time & Other Thieves, I YouTubed “Howard Thurman sermons,” chuckling at the rhyme (“nothing like a good Thurman sermon”), and started playing one of them. Then I opened another window on my laptop and went to the website of one Vanessa Caruso, on whom I was doing a little background research prior to interviewing her the following day. With Howard Thurman’s voice intoning the gospel as I scrolled through Vanessa’s homepage—it’s a website for her spiritual direction services—I came to a brief “About Me” section, and below that, three identical photos of slightly choppy deep water—either an ocean or a lake. Beneath each photo was some text, meant to be read from left to right: “There is in every person an inward sea…and in that sea there is an island…and on that island there is an altar…” I scrolled down again, to reveal three more of the same water images, with more text below each square: “and standing guard before that altar…is ‘the angel with the flaming sword.’…Nothing can get by that angel to be place upon that altar…” Then three more water images with yet more text below: “unless it has the mark of your inner authority....Nothing passes ‘the angel with the flaming sword…to be placed upon your altar…” And then two more water images followed by a black and white photo, which caught my attention with such amazement, as Howard Thurman’s voice still emanated from my laptop speaker, that I did not finish reading the quote. The black-and-white photo was of none other than Howard Thurman.

“Howard fucking Thurman,” I said, totally amazed. Just a few weeks prior I’d never heard of the guy, and now I’d randomly happened upon his words and image while listening to his voice for the first time.

Here’s that quote again, in its entirety: “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 place 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 Thurman’s Meditations of the Heart, the quote strikes me as an odd one to have on her website, but I trust it spoke to Vanessa. And I instantly emailed her to share the synchronicity I’d just experienced. The next day I messaged Bo Aganaba to tell him about it, and then I ordered a copy of Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited.

When it arrived a few days later, I was surprised by its slenderness. Not counting the foreword, it’s just 112 pages, divided into five chapters and an epilogue. Chapter one is titled “Jesus—An Interpretation,” and chapters two through five are named “Fear,” “Deception,” “Hate,” and “Love.” Those first three are what Thurman calls the “hounds of hell that track the trail of the disinherited,” and the fourth—love—is an escape from, or an answer to, those hounds.

In the first chapter Thurman provides a lot of social and historical context for Jesus, none of which I feel the need to get into here. I’m far more interested in what Christ said and how he behaved than I am in who-all was fighting around him and why. Thurman emphasizes, for instance, that Jesus’ message “focused on the urgency of a radical change in the inner attitude of the people… Again and again he came back to…the ‘inward center’ as the crucial arena where the issues would determine [their] destiny.” This teaching applies as much to modern people as it did to those in Jesus’ day. Back then people were dealing with oppressive Roman rule; now we’re dealing with an oppressive presidential administration. And just as there was no end of external content to worry about and get enraged by when Christ was walking the earth, today the content is also endless. You might even say it’s more endless, if that’s even possible, given the glut of news and other information we’re constantly exposed to on our stupid phones, unless of course we protect ourselves from it.

My dad recently introduced me to the phrase “Trump derangement syndrome.” The minds of people with this unfortunate condition are consumed with thoughts of Trump. And I’m sure Trump would be delighted to know it! Howard Thurman says that “anyone who permits another to determine the quality of his inner life gives into the hands of the other the keys to his destiny. If a man knows precisely what he can do to you or what epithet he can hurl against you in order to make you lose your temper, your equilibrium, then he can always keep you under subjection. It is a man’s reaction to things that determines their ability to exercise power over him.” That this was one of Christ’s predominant teachings makes it all the more laughable and tragic that the very religion he founded has so often been used as an “instrument of oppression,” to use Thurman’s phrase. Thurman encourages readers to resist the temptation of “believing that it was thus in the mind and life of Jesus.” Rather, “Christianity as it was born in the mind of this Jewish teacher and thinker appears as a technique of survival for the oppressed… [Jesus] announced the good news that fear, hypocrisy, and hatred, the three hounds of hell that track the trail of the disinherited, need have no dominion over them.”

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In the “Fear” chapter of Jesus and the Disinherited, Thurman references the Sermon on the Mount as “the great expression of affirmation and faith…[in which] appears in clearest outline the basis of [Christ’s] positive answer to the awful fact of fear and its twin sons of thunder—anxiety and despair.” Then he quotes the following passage from said sermon:

Therefore I say unto you, take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment? Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they? Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature? And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: and yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith? Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed? (For after all these things do the Gentiles seek:) for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things. But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you. Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take no thought for things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

Thurman then writes,

The core of the analysis of Jesus is that man is a child of God, the God of life that sustains all of nature and guarantees all the intricacies of the life process itself. Jesus suggests that it is quite unreasonable to assume that God, whose creative activity is expressed even in such details as the hairs of a man's head, would exclude from his concern the life, the vital spirit, of the man himself. This idea—that God is mindful of the individual—is of tremendous import in dealing with fear as a disease.

If none of this provides comfort for you because you don’t believe in God, I get it. I actually don’t believe in God, either—at least not God the Father who created the universe and makes judgments on the fate of my soul. But I do believe in God as a kind of energy that informs everything, and I believe that I myself am an expression of this God, as is everything else (including Donald Trump), and I believe that I am in this world right now because I’m supposed to be. I am equipped to be a part of this modern world, because I am in it. I am built for this exact moment in time. No one else can take my place. I am here to do me, to the best of my ability. And I am going to keep doing me—my thing, which is no one else’s thing—until I can’t anymore. If I give too much energy to fear, it will prevent me from doing my thing. So I choose to trust myself and the Universe—God—because the alternative is subjugation. As Thurman says in his chapter on deception, “exaggerated emphasis upon not being killed tends to cheapen life.” It’s a great, sad irony that fearing death—be it actual death or the end of life as we know it—is a death in itself. As Anthony de Mello says in the book Awareness, “You’re not living until it doesn’t matter a tinker’s damn to you whether you live or die.”

Deception, of course, is closely linked to fear, inasmuch as we’d rarely have a need for it if not for being afraid of something. Thurman says, “Deception is perhaps the oldest of all the techniques by which the weak have protected themselves against the strong. Through the ages, at all stages of sentient activity, the weak have survived by fooling the strong.” I like that he emphasizes “at all stages of sentient activity.” It brings to mind young children who lie to their parents and teachers so they won’t be punished for something. Years ago, when I was living in Tucson, I went to a job interview at a functional behavioral analysis office, where the man in charge—himself a total master at working with autistic and neurodiverse children—started by posing the following question: “What are all children masters of?” The answer came to me instantly, though uncertainly: “Manipulation?” Yep. I got the job. But I wound up quitting after the first house visit because I knew I wasn’t cut out for that kind of work. I’ll never forget that man, though. His name has escaped my memory, but his face, his thick gray mustache, and the gentle, natural way he interacted with children, made a lasting impression.

And why are children such master manipulators? Because they have to be! They’re living in a society that doesn’t give a shit about them, a society that forces them into classrooms for the majority of their precious youth and makes them learn things they don’t need to learn—let alone want to learn—and are constantly being told some version of “no.” They are perhaps the most oppressed population on the planet—at least in this country. And they’re getting sicker and sicker, psychologically. This society is making them sick. But do we change the society? Of course not. That would require way too much effort and cooperation. Instead we try to “fix” the children. We should be asking the children to fix us!

But back to the topic of deception, and how it applies to adults. Thurman basically encourages people to practice the opposite of deception, or what he calls (and I love this phrase) “a complete and devastating sincerity.” What does it mean for sincerity to be “devastating” in this context? I looked the word up and ruled out the first two definitions—“causing great damage or harm” and “causing extreme emotional pain.” The third and final definition seems fitting: “extremely effective or powerful.” And yet what Thurman says next does seem to imply some elements of the first two definitions. “The acceptance of this alternative,” he says, “is to be simply, directly truthful, whatever may be the cost in life, limb, or security… There must always be the confidence that the effect of truthfulness can be realized in the mind of the oppressor as well as the oppressed. There is no substitute for such a faith.” He’s talking about having faith in your enemy—faith that they can be a better person, that they are essentially good and have lost their way, that they are no less a child of God than you or anyone else, and that by being your sincerest self, you will play some role in helping them do the same.

The notion of “a complete and devastating sincerity” appeals to me personally in another context, apart from any dynamic between oppressor and oppressed. As you may know, I am passionate about leading and participating in interpersonal process groups, where the name of the game is to say what normally goes unsaid—how you’re actually feeling in the moment, toward a particular person, even if your words might anger them or hurt their feelings. You’re not trying to hurt their feelings, of course, but if you do, it is then that person’s job to say how they feel. And you don’t have to do anything to try and change how they feel. All you have to do is be present for your own experience, without resisting it in all your usual, conditioned, deadening ways, and with practice, your capacity to be truly present for others’ experiences will grow, and you will find yourself relating to people in a most profound way. And in so doing, you’ll be relating to God.

In Jesus and the Disinherited, Thurman asserts that “sincerity in human relations is equal to, and the same as, sincerity to God. If we accept this explanation as a clue to Jesus’ meaning, we come upon the stark fact that the insistence of Jesus upon genuineness is absolute; man's relation to man and man's relation to God are one relation.” Based on this passage, I get the impression that Thurman would have agreed with Ram Dass, who said, “Treat everyone you meet like they are God in drag.” Would you be insincere with God? If so…God help you.

Thurman emphasizes that sincerity should not be viewed as a mere defense of the weak against the strong. What results is far more significant than that. He says, “In the presence of an overwhelming sincerity on the part of the disinherited, the dominant themselves are caught with no defense, with the edge taken away from the sense of prerogative and from the status upon which the impregnability of their position rests. They are thrown back upon themselves for their rating... Instead of relation between the weak and the strong there is merely a relationship between human beings... The awareness of this fact marks the supreme moment of human dignity.”

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The remaining two chapters of Thurman’s book focus on hate and love, respectively. A couple of things that he says about hatred made me think of process groups again. In the first instance, he says that the impersonality of our modern life provides a constant opportunity for “the seeds of hatred to grow unmolested. Where there are contacts devoid of genuine fellowship, such contacts stand in immediate candidacy for hatred.” I think it’s safe to say that “genuine fellowship” is even more rare now than it was in 1949, when Thurman wrote those words. And that’s one of many reasons why I love process groups so much—especially when they’re in person. So much of our interpersonal interactions take place online, via email and text message and social media comments. Even in text exchanges with friends and family, we respond by “liking” or “loving” a comment instead of with actual words. I was in a weekend-long process group on Zoom recently, and one of my fellow group members kept making a heart with his hands in response to things people said. “I find your heart hands irritating,” I said, sticking to the group agreement about voicing feelings as they arose, and simultaneously calling him out for not using his voice. But mostly I was irritated that the social media language of emojis was infiltrating was what supposed to be a more authentic and vulnerable space.

Irritation and anger come up a lot in process groups. Indeed, many process group leaders want group members to express aggression. They’ll even do things to elicit that aggression—not in a manipulative way, per se, but maybe they won’t apologize for something that people in the outside world would apologize for. Or they won’t provide some sort of gratification that they know a group member (or even an entire group) is wanting. They’re not doing it to be jerks, so they can get off on your anger like a childish sibling might. Rather, they want you to have the experience of expressing your anger in a new way, which can be especially healing when the object you’re directing said anger to is an authority or parent-like figure, as is the case with the process group leader. Many people were raised by parents who implicitly and/or explicitly sent the message that anger was not okay, and it most definitely wasn’t okay to express anger at the parent. The parent would get angry right back, and then they would dole out a punishment. So to express anger at an authority figure and see that figure maintain a calm and curious attitude (although sometimes responding to aggression with aggression is appropriate in process groups, depending on the situation and the group member) can be profoundly healing. To be joined in your anger with a response akin to “tell me more about how I’ve upset you—I can be infuriating sometimes” is so rare an experience that it can be downright disorienting at first. If the person you’re mad at isn’t defensive, then there’s nothing to fight about, and all that’s left to do is be with your own experience and get to know it better.

Thurman talks about anger in his chapter on hate. He says, “There are some people who cannot tell you face to face precisely what they think of you unless they get angry first. Anger serves as a protection of their finer sense of values as they look you in the eye and say things which, under ordinary circumstances, they would not be able to say.” I agree. And yet I sense that my feeling about this human tendency differs from Thurman’s, in that—dare I say—I have more compassion around it. That sounds arrogant. But it’s based on my experience with process groups, and this time more around being a member than a leader. As a group member, I’ve definitely had to work at voicing my emotions in the moment, even when those emotions aren’t terribly strong. And I know I’m not alone in this, as I see the people in the groups I lead do it all the time. They won’t speak unless they feel that what they have to say is “worth saying.” What makes something “worth saying”? Well, usually a very strong emotion does. And this doesn’t just apply to anger, but to all emotions, to those we label positive and to those we label negative. But when we only verbalize the really strong emotions, we miss out on so many opportunities for connection and intimacy—not to mention that when we wait for emotions to get strong enough to be “worth expressing,” they sometimes get too strong, and we tend to express them in uncontrolled ways that create the opposite of connection or intimacy.

So Thurman is spot on when he says that some people won’t tell you what they really think unless they get angry first, and that they’ll then say things they wouldn’t be able to say under “ordinary circumstances.” But this isn’t always a bad thing. People need to speak their truth, and anger most definitely needs to be expressed, outwardly, at some object other than the self. And that’s what many too many people do: they turn anger that should be directed at another person or event back on themselves. And anger isn’t meant to be directed at the self. (That’s what group psychotherapist Elliot Zeisel says in the YouTube series Group, and I stand by it.) And the good thing about anger is that it does inspire action—or in the context of this discussion, speech—and when that anger is justified, the resulting speech or action can be a righteous thing, if channeled skillfully. And while it’s not ideal to stay silent and simmering until our anger boils over, finally forcing us to speak, it’s better than not speaking at all. And meanwhile we can cultivate more and more awareness of this tendency and start practicing speaking when a given emotion is just a three or four on the Likert scale, rather than a nine or ten. Interpersonal process groups offer just such a practice opportunity.

I think Howard Thurman and Martin Luther King both would have loved them—not only because they give people time and space to explore their emotional experience while in relationship with others and to thereby gain more control over those emotions (and they knew better than anyone that emotions were running the show when it came to societal ills like racism). But they also would’ve loved how creative process groups force us—and allow us—to be. Especially those of us who are facilitating them.

Which leads me to the last passage I want to mention in Thurman’s chapter on hate. He writes, “Above and beyond all else it must be borne in mind that hatred tends to dry up the springs of creative thought in the life of the hater, so that his resourcefulness becomes completely focused on the negative aspects of his environment. The urgent needs of the personality for creative expression are starved to death. A man's horizon may become so completely dominated by the intense character of his hatred that there remains no creative residue in his mind and spirit to give to great ideas, to great concepts... Jesus rejected hatred because he saw that hatred meant death to the mind, death to the spirit, death to communion with his Father. He affirmed life; and hatred was the great denial.”

I don’t think I need to add anything to that.

So now I’ve made my way up to the fifth and final chapter in Jesus and the Disinherited, which is titled “Love.” The passage I marked, I marked because it reminded me Anthony de Mello. I didn’t expect to reference him—a Jesuit priest—twice in this blog post about a Baptist minister’s ideas, but here we are. In his book Awareness, de Mello defines love as “seeing someone how they really are, not how we imagine them to be, and giving them the response they deserve.” In his chapter on love, Thurman writes, “Each person meets the other where he is and there treats him as if he were where he ought to be. Here we emerge into an area where love operates, revealing a universal characteristic unbounded by special or limited circumstances.” These sentiments are the same, no? Read in succession, they amplify each other and help me realize with new clarity that what so often prevents us from loving others are our own arbitrary expectations of how those others should be—how they should think, feel, and behave. I get whacked over the head again and again with this reminder when leading process groups. Certain members really test my patience. And when I realize that my impatience is my own creation—the result of wanting a person to be different than they are (how ridiculous, when you really think about it!)—then I’m able to relax into the moment and practice joining that person, meeting them where they are. It’s so much less stressful that way, and it’s also the most consistently effective way to support the change we’re wanting to see. Carl Rogers famously said, “When I accept myself as I am, then I change.” One could also say, “When others accept me as I am, then I change.” And also: “When I accept others as they are, then I change.”

Of course, accepting someone doesn’t mean taking their shit all the time. You can still tell them how their behavior affects you, and what assumptions you make about them based on how they act or carry themselves, and they can do with that information what they will. But to share that information with the intent to change them probably won’t have the desired result. Likewise, when you try to change yourself or your own experience, you just strengthen unconscious resistances in your psyche. That’s why the psychotherapeutic technique of joining can be so powerful and transformative.

And again, the best way, as far as I can tell, to practice accepting our own and others’ experiences in real time, is the interpersonal process group. It’s a great example of what Thurman refers to in his final chapter when he says that an attitude of loving acceptance must be “rooted in concrete experience. No amount of good feeling for people in general, no amount of simple desiring, is an adequate substitute. It is the act of inner authority, well within the reach of everyone. Obviously, then, merely preaching love of one's enemies or exhortations—however high and holy—cannot, in the last analysis, accomplish this result. At the center of the attitude is a core of painstaking discipline, made possible only by personal triumph.”

Being a member—and a leader—of a process group is definitely a discipline, and often painstaking. It also offers countless and unpredictable opportunities for personal triumph. Is there any more personal a triumph that that which comes with saying the thing you’d normally leave unsaid, and feeling more to connected to yourself and to others as a result? Or maybe you don’t feel more connected to others right away, and it’s just a necessary step toward that eventuality, and meanwhile you can feel that the relationship isn’t destroyed. It has space and time to evolve, to absorb and metabolize new experiences and become…well, just to be always in a state of becoming. There’s no destination. The road of human development is endless, our potential infinite. Nowhere have I tasted this potential more potently (and I see now for the first time that the word potential contains the word potent) than in a process group. I believe that both of the eight-person groups I’m leading right now could continue to meet once a week for the next ten years or more, and each member would still be discovering new depths within themselves and within their fellow members. But I know process groups aren’t for everyone. Each of us must find the discipline that suits us, so that we might experience our own personal triumphs.

I’m going to conclude with one last Thurman quote, which I couldn’t find a way to incorporate into any other part of this blog post: “There is a profound measure of resourcefulness in all life, a resourcefulness that is guaranteed by the underlying aliveness of life itself.”