Howard Thurman – Author, Educator, and Civil Rights Leader

The Growing Edge is a book of Howard Thurman’s sermons. For Thurman, the sermon is an act of worship in which the preacher exposes his spirit and mind as they seek to reveal the spirit of the Living God upon them…

Parker J. Palmer and Carrie Newcomer: Look Well to the Growing Edge

[Post by Parker J. Palmer and Carrie Newcomer on the On Being Blog introducing their project: The Growing Edge.]

Parker J. Palmer is a columnist for On Being. He is a Quaker elder, educator, activist, and founder of the Center for Courage & Renewal. His books include A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life, and Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation. His book On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity, and Getting Old will be published in June.

Carrie Newcomer is a Grammy-winning singer-songwriter. Her albums include Kindred Spirits, A Permeable Life, and The Beautiful Not Yet, and two books of poetry and essays.

Given what’s going on in the U.S. and around the world, it’s easy for some of us to think apocalypse 24/7 and fall prey to the anger and paralysis that comes with it. We live in a era when, to quote Howard Thurman, the “times are out of joint and [people] have lost their reason” while “worlds crash and dreams whiten into ash.” Without turning away from all the dying and grieving—which, rightly held, can redouble our commitment to life—we must learn to “Look well to the growing edge!”

When Howard Thurman calls the growing edge “the basis of hope in moments of despair, the incentive to carry on”, he’s not indulging a cheap fantasy. Those words came from a black man born into a culture of white supremacy, only one generation away from his grandmother’s experience as an enslaved human being. He stood in a long lineage of lived testimony to the fact that new life beckons to us even in the midst of horrors.

“As I’ve come to understand that life “composts” and “seeds” us as autumn does the earth, I’ve seen how possibility gets planted in us even in the hardest of times.”

—Parker Palmer [Quoted by Fr. Richard Rohr in The Abyss of Grief (see link in Resources)].

Additional Howard Thurman Quotes

“Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

—Howard Thurman [As quoted in Violence Unveiled (1996) by Gil Bailie] p. xv.

“In the conflicts between man and man, between group and group, between nation and nation, the loneliness of the seeker for community is sometimes unendurable. The radical tension between good and evil, as man sees it and feels it, does not have the last word about the meaning of life and the nature of existence. There is a spirit in man and in the world working always against the thing that destroys and lays waste. Always he must know that the contradictions of life are not final or ultimate; he must distinguish between failure and a many-sided awareness so that he will not mistake conformity for harmony, uniformity for synthesis. He will know that for all men to be alike is the death of life in man, and yet perceive harmony that transcends all diversities and in which diversity finds its richness and significance.”

—Howard Thurman [The Search For Common Ground : An Inquiry Into The Basis Of Man’s Experience Of Community (1971)] p. 6.

“Community cannot feed for long on itself; it can only flourish where always the boundaries are giving way to the coming of others from beyond them — unknown and undiscovered brothers.”

—Howard Thurman [The Search For Common Ground : An Inquiry Into The Basis Of Man’s Experience Of Community (1971)] p. 104.