Kelly Miller and Howard ThurmanTheme: The Black Family

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Chapter 6: No Experience Contains All

There is something strange and awesome about the quality of mind that keeps it from coming to rest within any single idea, or any single experience. No deed which we have experienced, however good and wonderful it may be, can quite contain all that we meant by the thing we have done. No word that we have ever uttered can express fully and adequately what we were trying to say. No goal that we have ever set before us and achieved is ever capable of containing all that we were seeking. There always remains a residue that does not ever get contained by any vessel we may use whether it be a thought, a idea, a deed, a goal, a dream, or even a life. The something more cries out for expression and the expression does not ever quite come off.

In the entire gamut of our relationship with one another this experience of man is written large. There is a time when we dream of the perfect relationship--the perfect union, the perfect friendship, the perfect love. Standing in the first full flush of this newness of love we are often so overcome by the vast release of life and joy that we are convince that what others have only felt dimly, is ours in all its glory and completeness. This is good! This is wonderful! There is more to our feelings than we are expressing, there is more in our vision of love than we are experiencing--however slowly something else begins to emerge. We cannot escape the sure persistent sense of inadequacy--however hard we try. Even when our offering of the self is completely accepted and we are to another person far more than he ever dreamed that anyone would or could be to him, the fact remains that what we are giving is only partial, what we are sharing is less, much less, than is our desiring.

Therefore to put into the deed less than the best; to give to the relationship only a shadow of the self; to put at the disposal of the dream only that which is fragmentary and ineffective is to spend one's days stumbling through the darkness. If man's best is never quite within his grasp, the less than best is woefully inadequate. There is ever the hope that what the mind searches for today but does not quite succeed in finding, will be its strength and stay tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

Source: Howard Thurman, The Inward Journey (1961), p. 20-21

Damarius

Typewriter

Kelly Miller, Progress and Achievements of Colored People (1913), 340-343

Chapter 19: A Man Becomes His Dream

It is always miraculous to see a dream take shape and form. Dreams in themselves aremade of the chiffon of men's hopes, desires and aspirings. There may be no limit to theirfabulous unfolding, rich in all the magic of the fantastic. A dream may be held at thefocal point of one's thinking and planning, until at last a man becomes the livingembodiment of what he dreams.

This is the first miracle: a man becomes his dream; then it is that the line between whathe does and is and his dream melts away. A new accent appears in how he thinks, thesignature of his dream must guarantee the integrity of his every act. In some ways heseems to be one possessed; and perhaps this is true. The second miracle appeals whenthe outline of the dream begins to take objective shape, when it begins to becomeconcrete and to take its place among the particular facts of life. This means thatsomething more than the man becomes the embodiment of the dream. Others begin tosee the manifestation and to feel the pull of its challenge. In turn, through sheercontagion, they relate themselves to it and its demands. If the embodiment takes theform of an institution it means that at the center of the institution there is a living,pulsing core which guarantees not only flexibility but also a continuous unfolding in anincreasing dimension of creativity.

Hence, men who have become embodiments of a dream, project an institution whichbecomes the embodiment of the dream which they themselves had already embodied. Itis of the very nature of such a dream that it continues to grow, to develop, to find evermore creative dimensions. Hence the dream is always receding; it can never becontained in a life, however perfect. So it is with the institution which is its embodiment.It must always maintain its dynamic character, and its greatest significance must ever befound in the new heights to which it calls all who share its contagion.

Source: Howard Thurman, Meditations of the Heart (1953), 41-42.