Gallery
This Gallery is a journey of contemplation, exploration, and discovery. The aim is simple: (1) view the images, (2) read Howard Washington Thurman’s words, and (3) consider how it captures some aspect of how you might draw meaning from the movement of Spirit, religious experience, and conscious and intentional connection to other people and creation.
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Suggested Guiding Questions
Question 1
Which images and thoughts from Thurman below communicate what I am doing as I read Scriptures, rehearse the sacred rituals of my communities, and go about the routines of my daily rounds?
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Suggested Guiding Questions
Question 2
Which images and thoughts from Thurman below are unfamiliar, new, helpful, or challenging to my sense of what I am doing as an interpreter? Why?
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Suggested Guiding Questions
Question 3
What are the conditions for you to interpret writings, rituals, and experiences most sacred to you? What image(s) might represent those conditions?
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Suggested Guiding Questions
Question 4
What might it look like when you read sacred texts, articulate your inner spiritual journeys, and wrestle with the world around you? What images does that wrestling not look like?
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Suggested Guiding Questions
Question 5
If you had to choose an image from the gallery to reflect how you understand the world in meaningful and unmeaningful ways, what might your images of choice be?
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Suggested Guiding Questions
Question 6
Better yet, what images are not included in the current iteration of this gallery that you think might help you and others imagine a little bit beyond what is familiar or posted below?
Thurman Quote: “There were many seasoned men who were also inspiring teachers, touching us at a place in ourselves beyond all our faults and all our virtues. They placed over our heads a crown that for the rest of our lives we would be trying to grow tall enough to wear. This was a gift far greater than the imparting of information and facts.”
Thurman Quote: “There is always in every human relationship and in every private life someplace for humor, for the sparkle in the water of life.”
Thurman Quote: “The only hope for surcease, the only possibility of stability for the person, is to establish an Island of Peace within one’s own soul. Here one brings for review the purposes and dreams to which one’s life is tied. This is the place where there is no pretense, no dishonesty, no adulteration.... How foolish it is, how terrible, if you have not found your Island of Peace within your own soul! It means that you are living without the discovery of your true home.”
Thurman Quote: “...life consists of planting and harvesting, of sowing and reaping. We are always in the midst of the harvest and always in the midst of the planting….Living is a shared process. Even as I am conscious of things growing in me planted by others, which things are always ripening, so others are conscious of things growing in them planted by me.
Thurman Quote: “Memories crowd upon us as we look back over the week just passed: Many high hopes---many dreams unfulfilled; Many blunders made and, in the sharpness of our anguish, we would turn back the wheels of time and try again.”
Thurman Quote: “But life is not like that. The future is never quite a thing apart from all that has gone before. We bring into the present ingredients and cargoes from the past, and these are with us as we take the unknown road. All that we have learned, felt, and thought, all our experience from birth to now; all the love that nourished us at other times, all the yearnings rooted in our spirits--all these are with us as we move into the unknown way.”
Thurman Quote: “‘Howard,’ he said, ‘you must always do your own thinking but remember Wisdom was not born with you. That is all.’ In these nineteen words there was held before me a mirror. What I saw I have never quite forgotten.”
Thurman Quote: “And then, there is the witness of others who have gone along the road we take. True, the road will mean for us something unique but not altogether unique. The generations meet and share, in ways beyond our grasp, the secrets of the new path, the first step, the beginning way. ‘He leads us on by paths we did not know.’”
Thurman Quote: “This is the message of the spiritual. Do not shrink from moving confidently out into the choppy seas. Wade in the water, because God is troubling the water.”
Thurman Quote: “Always we are visited. Sometimes it is by an idea for which we do not seem to have had any previous preparation; sometimes by the penetration of an inspiration that shoots us out of the common path onto a road of high adventure; sometimes by the cumulative energy of a precious memory shedding a quiet haze over the entire landscape along which we walk. …”
Thurman Quote: “I finger one by one the messages of hope that awaited me at the crossroads”
Thurman Quote: “When have you noticed the color in the sky? When have you looked at the shape and place of a tree?...The renewal of mind and body after a night of restful sleep?
Thurman Quote: “Only one end of the threads, I hold in my hand. The threads go many ways, linking my life with other lives.”
Thurman Quote: “The Life in the seed bursts forth in root and stalk and fruit -- the whole process takes place within….Can life’s experience of itself at the level of tree and plant … be also life's experience at the level of the mind?”
Thurman Quote: “A simple but dramatic illustration can be seen by any observer in the world of nature. The roots of trees spread out in many directions--seeking, always seeking the ground of existence for themselves...They were on the hunt--for life.”
Thurman Quote: “No substitute can be found for it - go where we will, knock at every door, our face remains our face. This is an item of our bill of particulars.”
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Share your own images and descriptions with Dr. Smith. Your contributions may be added to the Gallery!
Thurman Quote: “We may be surprised to realize there is a clothesline on which all of our hopes, desires, and wishes hang…”