Welcome.

Thank you for being here for this world premiere of Craig Hella Johnson’s oratorio, Considering Matthew Shepard.

Let’s imagine that we are in a church in Italy where we are about to hear one of the early oratorios. The year is 1619. Giovanni Anerio, a composer who three years earlier had become a priest, is presenting his Conversion of St. Paul: Saul travels down a road, sees a great light, hears a voice, is knocked down, gets up blind, goes on to Damascus where his sight is restored after prayers. Saul the persecutor becomes Paul the Apostle.

In this oratory there are four soloists: a narrator called Historicus, St. Paul, a Voice from Heaven, and Ananias of Damascus, a disciple of Jesus. There is also a four-part chorus that sing the words of the people in the street.

At least by 1624 there were also secular oratorios. Monteverdi composed the oratorio Tancredi & Clorinda, a romance of attraction and conflict between a Christian knight and a beautiful Muslim warrior woman, set against the backdrop of the First Crusade.

Over the centuries, the musical composition form of the oratorio evolved. One of the most popular oratorio forms was the Passion Oratorio, a composition focusing on the suffering and death of Christ, often performed during Holy Week. When Johann Sebastian Bach becomes musical director and cantor at St. Thomas in Leipzig in 1723, he adds his own genius to the passion oratorio form. (Some of us will likely be listening to Bach’s St. John Passion or his St. Matthew’s Passion over the next few weeks.) Bach stretches the oratorio form, emphasizing the operatic aria, increasing the significant of the chorale or hymn, adding sections designed to provide time during the oratorio for contemplation and reflection. He uses the narrative (or narrator) prominently as a framework. He composed opening and closing choruses.

Bach and his contemporaries (and many who came afterward) provided examples of ways the oratorio form could stay true to itself at the same time it could be creatively expanded. Think Handel’s Esther or his Messiah (or any of his other 25 or so oratorios), Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, Mendelssohn’s Elijah. There was Telemann, Beethoven, Schumann, Elgar, Ralph Vaughan Williams and many others.

The oratorio form continues to be popular. Paul McCartney (Yes, that Paul of the Beetles) in 1991 wrote Liverpool Oratorio at the invitation of The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra for their 150th anniversary. McCartney’s composition is a story that follows his own lifeline: school years, early career and marriage difficulties, ending with the birth of his first son. Liverpool Oratorio spent many weeks at the top of classical music charts worldwide.

In 2007 American composer David Lang composed The Little Match Girl Passion based on Hans Christian Andersen’s story of a poor little girl trying to sell matches on Christmas Eve, afraid to go home because her father will beat her for not selling enough. She dies while she is still on the street. Her grandmother comes to carry the little girl’s soul back with her to Heaven. Little Match Girl Passion has songs like “It Was terribly Cold,” “In An Old Apron,” “She Lighted Another Match,” “We Sit and Cry.” Lang won a Pulitzer in 2008 for The Little Match Girl Passion and a Grammy in 2010.

Craig Hella Johnson carries forward this long tradition in tonight’s oratorio.

Considering Matthew Shepard is an American contemporary fusion oratorio.

It is very American with its inclusion of blues, gospel, cowboy song, folk ballads, theater songs, jazz, country. It is very American in its location… the waving grasslands of wide Wyoming. It is very American in its central character, Matthew Shepherd. Though Matt knew five languages and had graduated from high school at The American School in Switzerland (his father Dennis worked as an oil industry safety engineer for Saudi Aramco), Wyoming was the place Matt was born and the place he thought of as home.

CMS is both American and contemporary in its subject matter. It is based on the true story of the death of 21-year-old Matthew Shepard in October 1998. Matthew was kidnapped, beaten, tied to a split rail fence of lodgepole pine, and left in a field near Laramie, Wyoming. He died six days later, never having regained consciousness. (In 2009 President Obama signed into law THE MATTHEW SHEPARD AND JAMES BYRD, JR., HATE CRIMES PREVENTION ACT.)

Tonight’s oratorio is also contemporary in its fusion of styles and elements of music. CMS follows the traditional passion oratorio structure: Prologue, Story of suffering and death (Passion), Epilogue. There is Narrative Text that outlines the story. Into this traditional framework Craig Hella Johnson has fused chants, cantor and audience response, simple songs, solo arias, trios, quartets, a turba chorus (voice of the people), a chorale. There are classical music and country. There are Gregorian chant and gospel hymns. There are drums and chimes and marimba, violins, cello, clarinet, viola, guitar, double bass, and piano.

The libretto or text of CMS is also a fusion. Craig and/or Craig and his co-writer Michael Dennis Browne have written the original pieces in the libretto. Craig has fused this original material with other borrowings into a libretto whole. There are the American poets John Nesbitt, Sue Wallis, Lesléa Newman, Michael Dennis Browne, and W. S. Merwin. There is the ancient voice from Genesis in the Hebrew Bible, Persian poets Rumi and Hafiz, Bengali poet Tagore, Dante and William Blake plus German poet, musician, artist, writer of medical texts, gemnologist, mystic, preacher, and advisor to Popes and Kings, Hildegard of Bingen. There are also the writings of Matthew Shepard himself. (You will hear several lines from Matt’s journals in the song “Ordinary Boy” and from Matthew’s mother, Judy and his father, Dennis.)

There is another way this is a very contemporary oratorio… contemporary as in right at this moment. We in the audience are invited to be participants in this story as it unfolds in tonight’s performance. Early in the Prologue, in a piece called “We Tell Each Other Stories,” we hear these words:

we tell each other stories so that we will remember… always telling stories… where and whom we came from… who we are…

This invitation for each of us to participate is very direct:

 I am open to hear this story about a boy, an ordinary boy
Who never had expected that his life would be this story,
(could be any boy) 

I am open to hear this story. 

Open, listen.
All.

The first word sung in the oratorio is ALL. The title of the last movement of the oratorio is “All of Us.” WE are part of this story from the beginning to the end.

The Passion section of the oratorio uses four poems by Lesléa Newman as structural pillars for telling the story. In each of these poems the fence to which Matthew was tied speaks as if a person. There is “The Fence (before),” “The Fence (that night),” “The Fence (one week later),” “The Fence (after).” Other Newman poems are also part of the story. One of these is called “A Protestor.” The headnote for this poem refers to signs held by anti-gay protestors at Matthew Shepard’s funeral and the trials of his murderers. I’d like to look for a moment at the musical setting for this poem.

“A Protestor” is in the key of E-flat Minor. E-flat Minor is played all on black keys of the piano. Sound is prickly. Up on spears. The music opens with a call to arms. Here CHJ has chosen as a call to arms a direct quote of the opening bars of Benjamin Britten’s piece “This Little Babe” from his Ceremony of Carols. (Listen for these opening bars in the opening of a Conspirare recording of “This Little Babe” from their Christmas 2011 CD Something Beautiful.) In the original music that follows this call to arms the message of Britten’s words serve as inspiration: “… come to rival Satan’s hold… with tears he fights and wins the field…” which in turn sound out Britten’s source, 16th century poet Robert Southwell: “come to rifle Satan’s fold. All hell doth at his presence quake though he himself for cold do shake… the gates of hell he will surprise.” So while the protestors have their say in the words of the text, the music itself answers the taunting of the text: you will not break our spirit. We are fighting for Matt. The notes of this piece aim to provide musical protection for Matt. Even while the protestors yell, “The fires of hell burn hot and red/Beneath the Hunter’s Moon he bled/That must have been a pretty sight/The fires of hell burn hot and red”the music answers back… we’ve come to rival Satan’s hold… we’ve come to rifle Satan’s fold.

In a cacophony of words and sound in the piece “Fire of the Ancient Heart” (think drums and chants and outbursts and loud cries), we can begin to have some idea of the personal work it takes to rival and rifle wrong, loss, unfairness, those dark times in all of our lives. The voice of a cantor begins by asking “What have you done?” from Genesis. The choir sings, “called by this candle/led to the flame.” This movement allows us to relive our own experience of “being tried by fire” (and who amongst us has not been in such a fire). Voices sing the words of Rumi, “In each moment the fire rages, it will burn away a hundred veils” and William Blake’s “eyes of flesh, eyes of fire.” The use of percussion and repeated phrases and vocal intensity in this movement suggest a journey of alchemy. The experience of being put through a process where fire burns away the dross so that a substance can be transformed into its potential essence. The movement ends with the words, “Open us, All!” WE are still central in this story.

One of the Essential Questions of CMS is this: Can we look into the pain of senseless acts in the world around us and somehow, as we are asked in the oratorio’s Prologue,

try to find meaning in the living of our days… trying to find the meaning… ?

What meaning can we find in senseless acts of cruelty like the murder of Matthew Shepard, like scenes we witness every day in newspapers, online, and on television? In experiences we may have had in our own lives? Can we find any capacity for compassion?

In our story we have 5‘2”, 105-pound, 21-year-old Matt… passionate about human rights, University of Wyoming student representative to the Wyoming Environmental Council, a young man who wants to work for the US Diplomatic Corp when he graduates. We also have a Matt who wasn’t a perfect person. As his mother Judy said in an interview when the movie Matt Shepard Is a Friend of Mine was released, “As the years went on and our work continued, we began to notice that the Matt we knew was overshadowed by the idea of ‘Matthew Shepard’— he wasn’t a perfect person, he wasn’t an angel without flaws. Matt had struggles and hardships and successes like anyone else, which is really what made what happened so tragic.”

We also have Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson who were arrested shortly after the attack and charged with murder, kidnapping, and aggravated robbery. Both McKinney and Henderson, each age 21, came from disadvantaged beginnings: Aaron’s parents divorced, his mother raised him, she died from a botched operation… he once attacked his mother’s doctor in a public place after her death. Russell’s teen-aged mother left him with his grandparents who raised him (he became an Eagle Scout and once had his picture taken with the Governor of Wyoming, was on the honor roll, and was a member of Future Farmers of America). His grandfather died when Russell was 15. He then became a young man without a shape for his life.

In the oratorio we are asked in three pieces that form a unit of sorts if we can identify with these young men in any way. Tagore’s words “stray birds of summer” are set in Gregorian chant providing a vision of young boys who have lost their way. A four-part male chorus muses in “We Are All Sons”: “if you could know for one moment/how it is to live in our bodies within the world.” “I am Like You,” a vocal quartet composed in minimalist style with vertical and horizontal spareness, asks us to consider: “Late one night I had a glimpse/of something I recognized, just a tiny glimpse/I don’t even like to say this out loud, it isn’t even all that true — but I wondered for a moment, am I like you?”

What sustains us as we live through a process of grappling with these hard questions?

Early in the oratorio, in the movement “The Fence (that night)” where the fence tells us about holding Matt all night — “he was heavy as a broken heart” – Hildegard of Bingen’s homage to the evergreen tree has been inserted:

Most noble evergreen with your roots in the sun; you shine in the cloudless sky of a sphere no earthly eminence can grasp… enfolded in the clasp of ministries divine… most noble evergreen tree.

This evergreen tree (and our evergreen hearts) appear and reappear in subsequent movements.

We are told in one of the narrations in the oratorio that Judy Shepard reported that the sheriff’s deputy who was first officer on the scene told her she saw a large doe lying near Matt — as if the deer had been there all night. In “Deer Song” a trio of sopranos, in wafting, floating voices that weave around and entwine, speak in the voice of the deer: “All night I lay there beside you, I cradled your pain in my care… welcome, welcome, sounds the song… always with us, evergreen heart.”

The setting that CHJ writes for Newman’s final fence poem, “The Fence (after)” uses the musical pattern ostinato (think of the word obstinate or stubborn) as the dominate style: a motif or phrase persistently repeats in the same musical voice, usually at same pitch (like a riff or a vamp in rock and jazz). Into this text, an excerpt from another Newman poem, “The Wind,” is inserted, ending what has been sparseness — 1 or 2 notes, phrases, sung into space in repeating patterns —

prayed upon
frowned upon…
adored
abhorred…
broken down
broken up —

with a lilting choral song,

The North Wind
carried his father’s laugh
The South Wind
carried his mother’s song…

Dennis Shepard’s statement to court identified the friends who were with Matthew while he was tied to the fence… the night sky with the stars and moon… the sun on a cool, wonderful autumn day, the ever-present Wyoming wind, the smell of sagebrush, scent of pine trees.

Creation holds us.

We are sustained.

We can walk to the fence in the movement “Pilgrimage” (with words reminiscent of the ancient Iris prayer St Patrick’s Breastplate also known as “The Deer’s Song”).

Beauty before me/beauty behind me/beauty above me/beauty below me…

And leave the fence surrounded by beauty

Sigh of sagebrush, hush of stone. Beauty above me, beauty below me, by beauty surrounded… wail of wind… cry of hawk.

And because of the possibility that creation does hold us and we are sustained, we can answer a question that comes at the turning point of the oratorio. In the aria, “In Need of Breath,” a voice representing Matt sings a Hafiz poem:

My heart is an unset jewel… I enter a realm divine… I too begin to sweetly cast light, like a lamp… through the streets of this World.

Matt Shepard, the boy, the son, now becomes Matthew Shepard, the iconic figure who can “cast light through the streets of the world.” This is the beginning of that enormous world-wide story. A story that says, “Don’t leave me here; bring the light. Bring an expanding heart.” The fence has been a witness. Can we ourselves be a witness with an evergreen heart? Can we “like a lamp… cast light through the streets of this world?”

In the title of the oratorio we have been asked to consider Matthew Shepard.

Consider: to think about carefully, care about, to see something as a possibility, reflect upon, deliberate about doing something or about whether to do something. The word consider comes from Latin and means to look up at the constellations, to look up at the stars. So to consider in its original form was to use our eyes. To look. To observe. To look at creation and take note of what we see.

The Epilogue begins. We have reached a new place. A place of hard-won wisdom… a place of clarity of vision… a place on which to stand. This is not a place of stoic resignation. It is not some version of flaccid acceptance. It is a place of personal strength and considered stance. Each in her or his own way. To whatever end… quiet or active… has reached a deeper truth, an expanded heart, an open future.

As the opening movement of The Epilogue reminds us in “Meet Me Here”:

Won’t you meet me here
Where the old fence ends and the horizon begins…

We are home in the mountain
And we’ll gentle understand
That we’ve been friends forever
That we’ve never been alone
We’ll sing on through any darkness
And our Song will be our sight
We can learn to offer praise again
Coming home to the light…

The first musical notes sounded in the oratorio were these from Bach’s Prelude #1 in C Major from The Well-Tempered Clavier Book I.[Notes played over loudspeaker] In the movement “Thanks,” which follows “Meet Me Here,” Craig Hella Johnson has returned to the Bach prelude as the foundation of this musical setting for Merwin’s poem. He inserts throughout the poem random versions of “thank you,” both for instruments and singers, including “thank you” in two Native American languages. These insertions of “thank you” are meant to sound as if they are spontaneous. A kind of “speaking in tongues,” “speaking in thanks.” All the universe in all forms is saying, “Thank you.” Irregular rhythms are mixed in 4/4 time. The Bach prelude, with the key of C Major in which it is written, suggests that all randomness and irregular rhythms can be held in this very stable form. We come back to wholeness, simplicity, completeness.

C Major is a “coming home” key. Bob Dylan calls it “a key of strength, but also the key of regret.” Some call it a simple serious happy key… no sharps and flats. (You remember that just a few days ago the sound of two black holes colliding a billion light-years away was heard and recorded… that sound — or chirp as the scientists called it — can be replicated by running your thumbnail from lowest note on the piano keyboard to… you guessed it… middle C. The chirp abruptly stops at middle C.)

Following “Thanks,” we hear a gospel piece “All of Us” ringing out:

Only in the love
Love that lifts us up…
Out of heaven, rain,
Rain to wash us free;
Rivers flowing on,
Ever to the sea;
Bind up every wound,
Every cause to grieve
Always to forgive,
Only to believe.

Embedded in this gospel piece is the tradition Chorale or Hymn of the oratorio. That chorale says:

Most Noble Light, Creation’s face,
How should we live but joined in you,
Remain within your saving grace
Through all we say and do 

And know we are the Love that moves
The sun and all the stars?

The hymn is a simple, straight forward form. Sung homophonically — same text, same rhythm, a cappella. We’ve just been listening to a fusion of many styles and elements. Here the form is focused, structured. This movement says musically, “We are a choir. This choir is the people who have been expressing all these things in solos and trios and groups and sections. In arias and ballads, in phrases and refrains. Now we are a choir. A choir singing together this hymn.”

This choir, too, is all of us, as the title reminds us. We are the choir. While we express many manifestations in creation, we are also a collective voice. The first verse of the hymn is in B-flat Major; after the first verse the key changes to C Major. So we end where we began. We are in our coming home key again.

Then the reprise. The key is still C Major. The words that we heard at the beginning of the oratorio repeat:

(This chant of life cannot be heard
It must be felt, there is no word
To sing that could express the true
Significance of how we wind
Through all these hoops of Earth and mind
Through horses, cattle, sky and grass
And all these things that sway and pass.)

And, finally, the cowboy yodel that opened the oratorio sounds again:

Yoodle — ooh, yoodle-ooh-hoo, so sings a lone cowboy,
Who with the wild roses wants you to be free.

Enjoy the performance.

Thank you.

Dr. Elizabeth Harper Neeld

The post Considering Matthew Shepard: We Are the Choir appeared first on Elizabeth Harper Neeld.

When The Monday Connection committee asked me to give this lecture, I took a moment to review in the seminary catalog what Monday Connection is all about.

Three times a year, speakers from business, industry and the professions make luncheon presentations about how the lessons learned on Sunday connect with their work on Monday.

The first thing that came to mind when I read this description of Monday Connection was the happy juxtaposition of my Sunday and Monday life when I was trying to find a topic for my PhD dissertation. Can you imagine finding a dissertation topic in English literature that hasn’t already been analyzed and discussed? In a field where people have been parsing the language and interpreting the themes at least since Chaucer in the 1400s? It was when our graduate seminar in 18th Century novel read Samuel Richardson’s Pamela that I found my topic. Being the daughter of a minister, I had heard my father read and preach from the King James Bible Sunday after Sunday. So when I started reading Richardson’s Pamela, I recognized at least every few pages that Richardson was quoting a verse or lifting a phrase or even echoing a particular rhythm from the King James Bible. When the professor returned the paper I did on “Biblical Allusion in Samuel Richardson’s Pamela,” he said, “If you change that title to “Biblical Allusion in Samuel Richardson’s Novels,” you will have a dissertation topic. No one has done work on this since 1907, and that study is in German.” It turned out that there were more Biblical allusions in Pamela alone than the German study had found in all three of Richardson’s novels (consisting of a total twenty-one volumes…count them). Sunday had blessedly connected with my Monday work.

But it is a deeper connection that I want to talk about today. My work, since that first day I walked in to teach literature to 14-year-olds in Yakima, Washington (and to find Max Turnipseed, the class clown, climbing along one of the steel girders of the classroom) has been about stories…fiction stories, nonfiction stories, amateur stories, professional stories…stories in books, stories told in every day life. Telling them, reading them, writing them, working to empower others to read and write them. Along the way in my career I did the expected (and, I have to say, really enjoyable) scholarly research. But deep down, always, what has sparked my intellectual curiosity, what has piqued my interest, what has stirred me has been the power of stories.

So I am here to celebrate stories. Particularly to celebrate what a marvelous and amazing thing it is that we human beings tell stories. And to have us remember that our ability to retrieve from our personal story collection just the right story at just the right time is one of the things that helps us shape our world. It may be, as ancient Hasidic writings tell us, that God did create human beings in order to tell stories. It may be that the universe is made up of stories, not atoms, as poets have suggested.

But stories and our ability to tell stories are so much a part of who we are that we forget to take notice. We overlook how the stories we tell ourselves and the stories we tell others help to define our lives. (The exception probably being those people who actually write stories down.) This makes me think of Thomas Carlyle’s remark about human beings’ reaction to the sun at the beginning of the world: the sun comes up and goes down the first day. Absolute astonishment. The sun comes up and goes down the second day…and it ceases to be a miracle. The place that stories hold in our lives is nothing short of exhilarating, if we can only remember. The power of stories to change our lives is nothing short of transformative, if we pay attention.

I think of Martin Buber’s telling a story about his grandfather telling a story: Buber’s story goes like this:

My grandfather was lame. Once they asked him to tell a story about his teacher. And he related how the holy Baal Shem used to hop and dance while he prayed. My grandfather rose as he spoke, and he was so swept away by his story that he himself began to hop and dance to show how the master had done. From that hour on he was cured of his lameness. That’s the way to tell a story!

Perhaps, like me, you have discovered that one way to think fresh thoughts about a familiar subject is to look at that subject from some totally different perspective. In the spirit, then, of 21st century mashups, let’s look at the mashup of artificial intelligence and story. Scientists working in artificial intelligence are studying the way human beings tell stories. Because it turns out that one of the problems slowing the advancement of artificial intelligence in computers is the challenge of storytelling.

Here’s an example:

Imagine that a ship captain is taking a ship into a new port. The captain turns to the artificial intelligence-equipped computer to get information that will allow the vessel to enter the harbor safely. The computer can easily present to the captain what AI scientists call general-world-knowledge: information about water depth, rock formations, appropriate speed, etc. But what about story-based knowledge? Does the computer also tell the ship captain this critical story?

The harbor pilot in this port is known to require bribes. When bribes are not paid, unexpected accidents seem to happen.

So, the AI scientists say, it turns out that intelligent machines are going to have to be good storytellers. They will have to be the repository of an extraordinary large number of stories in order to have something useful to say and to be able to index these stories so they can find the story useful in the moment.

So I think it is safe to say that it is likely to be some time before the intelligent computer will response…”Oh, that reminds me of a story.”

Researchers have become so fascinated with the challenge of artificial intelligence and story telling that a new area of study—called Narrative Intelligence—has emerged over the past twenty years. And just as the study of negative space in design (the space around a subject and not the subject itself) or negative space in music (silence in a musical composition) sometimes is as interesting as the actual subject of an art piece or the notes in the composition, so the role of story telling in human intelligence has become a topic of fascination. One AI scientist has written a book that in the opening pages identifies the problem of story-based intelligence for computers. Then follow 241 pages of discussion of the role of story in the minds of human beings. Only in the last three pages does the scientist return to the problem of story telling in artificial intelligence.

This research is valuable for many reasons, of course, but for us today it can serve to jog our thinking about this amazing thing we human beings do. We tell stories. Listen to this scientist’s conclusion:

A normal part of intelligence is to be able to find, without looking for it, a story that will help you know what to do in a new situation. We must be capable of thinking about stories we have acquired in the past to see if one of them matches closely enough to what we need to know now. Story-based knowledge (that’s AI speak for the stories we have available in our memory bank) expresses our points of view and our philosophy of life. The experiences each of us remembers form the set of stories that constitute our view of the world and characterize our beliefs. In some sense, we may not even know what our own view of the world is until we are reminded of and tell stories that illustrate our opinion on some aspect of the world. The collection of stories we have compiled is to some extent who we are and what we have to say about the world.

It’s good to recollect—to keep handy–stories that excuse our own idiosyncracies. William Stafford, the poet, told me this story; and it’s about Niels Bohr, the physicist. It seems that when Niels was a little kid in school, his teachers insisted that he write the way he was supposed to write: every essay should have a beginning, a middle and an end. There are forms one should follow. And young Niels Bohr, in whose head ideas rolled around like marbles, couldn’t learn to follow these rules.

Bill always paused here in telling this story to remark that he had memorized the last sentence of one of Niels‘ essays in order to give himself permission to write in the way that worked for him.

Niels had ended one of his school papers by writing: And I would also like to mention aluminum.

I pulled the following little story out of my story-based intelligence to use as a cautionary tale while I was planning this talk today:

It is reported that Winston Churchill once sent a dessert back to the kitchen with this message: Tell the chef that this pudding has no theme.

Each of us, of course, is a story teller. And the stories we tell—silently in our heads or publicly to others—do shape our lives. One of the things that happens with us and our stories—and I think this goes a long ways in explaining why it is difficult for us to see stories as the gift and resource they are for our daily lives—is that we have, to quote Dr. Verena Kast, our “usual biographical treadmills and habitual conceptualizations.” I once heard Dr. Kast, a well-known Swiss medical doctor and Jungian analyst, talk about this. She was lecturing on her book, Joy, Inspiration and Hope.

One of the findings of Dr. Kast’s research was that we get in a habit of telling the same stories, which means we see our lives again and again from the same perspective. Dr. Kast suggested an experiment: deliberately vary the stories you tell yourself and others by compiling a biography of joy. Remember a time in our lives when we experienced joy and tell a story about that experience. Then remember another time of joy and tell that story. In so doing, she suggested we recover a part of our lives that may have been hidden to us because of our typical biographical treadmill. We see new dimensions of our lives and discover a fresh perspective.

The stories we remember, for example, can also be powerful reminders of who we do and who we do not want to be. Such a story can be like the plumb line a stone mason uses to find the vertical axis through the center of gravity and to lay this center of gravity down as a point of reference.

This story serves as a plumbline for me: It’s a story about a life lived with such authenticity that the authenticity informs even the moment of death.

This story is about Bill Stafford, the poet and friend I mentioned earlier. When Bill and Dorothy were first married, times were hard. Bill had a part-time job teaching and money was tight. One day the young married couple had their first big falling out. Dorothy went for a walk to cool off, and Bill prepared to go teach his classes. When Dorothy wasn’t back by the time Bill had to leave, he cut the one apple they had in two and put the apple on a saucer with this note: With half an apple and all my love.

Fast forward decades later. Bill, now in his early 80s has just died. I called Dorothy, sad beyond words, and she says, “Why don’t you come for a visit?” I go. We are sitting in the kitchen having a cup of tea and she says, “Would you like to see Bill’s desk? It’s where he was working when he had the heart attack. I’d like you to see it.” The small room was as Bill had left it. On the desk was the yellow legal pad on which he had been writing when he died. Down near the bottom of the page—in handwriting that was a bit sideways on the page, squiggly and uneven—were these words: “half an apple and all my love.” To quote from one of Bill’s poems…the authentic is a line from one thing along to the next; it interests us, strangely it relates to what works, but it is not quite the same. It never swerves for revenge, or profit, or fame; it holds together something more than the world, this line.

A story as a plumbline… like the plumb line a stone mason uses to find the vertical axis through the center of gravity and to lay this center of gravity down as a point of reference.

You probably remember Barry Lopez’s National Book Award- winning book Arctic Dreams. Part poet, part philosopher, part naturalist, Lopez wrote in Arctic Dreams about the mysterious connections he found among landscape, memory and imagination when he was on a trip to the Arctic north of Alaska. Reading that or any other of Lopez’s books, you aren’t surprised to learn that, before he became an author, Lopez considered being a Trappist monk and lived for a time at Getsemane Monastery in Kentucky with Thomas Merton.

Lopez wrote another NYTimes bestseller called Crow and Weasel. This is a mythic story about two young Native American boys who leave their village in the plains with the blessings of the elders to go farther than their stories had ever gone…to find out what was so far away that they would never know.

Crow and Weasel travel all the way to the Arctic…through terrible dark forests, often hungry. They see wonderful sights they had never seen before, animals and people they didn’t know existed. Then they start on their way back home to take to their village on the Plains the many lessons learned on their journey: lessons about friendship, respect for others, the importance of gratitude, and the sacredness of relationships.

As they are traveling on their way back home, Crow and Weasel are given hospitality by Badger, who lives in a beautiful lodge filled with painted robes, birdbone breastplates, lances decorated with fur and colored stones, painted shields and medicine bundles. Crow and Weasel, when they start to leave, thank Badger for her wisdom.

“I would ask you to remember only this one thing,” said Badger. “The stories people tell have a way of taking care of them. If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive. That is why we put these stories in each other’s memory. This is how people care for themselves…. never forget these obligations.”

Sometimes a person needs a story more than food.

Selected Bibliography

Tell Me a Story: Narrative and Intelligence (Rethinking Theory) by Roger Shank. Northwestern University Press.

Joy, Inspiration, and Hope by Verena Kast. Texas A&M University Press.

Writing The Australian Crawl: Views on the Writer’s Vocation by William Stafford. University of Michigan Press.

Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez. Vintage Press.

Crow and Weasel by Barry Lopez. Square Fish Publisher.

The post Sometimes We Need a Story More Than Food appeared first on Elizabeth Harper Neeld.

Young Howard

Born November 18, 1899, in Daytona Beach, Florida

Reared by his Grandma Nancy, who had been a slave and was a young woman during the American Civil War Found the protective fold of his neighborhood and nature his “windbreak against existence.”

As a child I was accustomed to spending many hours alone in my rowboat, fishing along the river, when there was no sound save the lapping of the waves against the boat. There were times when it seemed as if the earth and the river and the sky and I were one beat of the same pulse. It was a time of watching and waiting for what I did not know—yet I always knew. There would come a moment when beyond the single pulse beat there was a sense of Presence which seemed always to speak to me. My response to the sense of Presence always had the quality of personal communion. There was no voice. There was no image. There was no vision. There was God. (From Howard Thurman’s book Disciplines of the Spirit)

Nightfall…was a presence. The nights in Florida, as I grew up, seemed to have certain dominant characteristics. They were not dark; they were black. When there was no moon, the stars hung like lanterns, so close I felt that one could reach up and pluck them from the heavens. The night had its own language….At such times I could hear the night think, and feel the night feel. This comforted me…I felt embraced, enveloped, held secure. In some fantastic way, the night belongs to me. (From Howard Thurman’s book With Head and Heart)

Eventually I discovered that the oak tree and I had a unique relationship. I could sit my back against its trunk, and feel the same peace that would come to me in my bed at night. I could reach down in the quiet places of my spirit, take out my bruises and my joys, unfold them, and talk about them. I could talk aloud to the oak tree and know that I was understood. It, too, was part of my reality, like the woods, the night, and the pounding surf, my earliest companions, giving me space. (From Howard Thurman’s book With Head and Heart)

Grades 1-7 (8) in black school in Daytona Beach, Florida
Grades 9-graduation: Florida Baptist Academy in Jacksonville (one of three high schools for black students in Florida). Valedictorian.

College Days and Marriage

Graduated from Morehouse College in 1923 with degrees in economics and government. (Summer semester at Columbia in 1922; studied philosophy). Valedictorian.

Enrolled at Rochester Theological Seminary in 1923 (Rochester allotted two spots in the freshman class to black students). Bachelor of Divinity in 1926. Student body president. Valedictorian.

Married Kate Kelly, social worker, 1926 (Kate died of tuberculosis in 1930, after a three-year illness.) One daughter, Olive. Traveled alone abroad in heavy grief. Then…”without knowing when or how, I moved into profound focus….when I returned…I was aware that God was not yet done with me, that I need never fear the darkness, nor delude myself that the contradictions of life are final.” (With Head and Heart)

Career Begins

Pastorate, Mt. Zion Baptist Church in Oberlin, Ohio, 1926-1928) Graduate studies at Graduate School of Theology at Oberlin College.

I began to explore my inner regions, and to cultivate an inner life of prayer and meditation. The experience of religion became increasingly central to my development. This was revealed to me in the gradual change in my attitude toward leading my congregation in public prayer. From the beginning of my ministry I tended to be highly self-conscious in public prayer…But as I began to acquiesce to the demands of the spirit within, I found no need to differentiate human need, theirs and my own….I discovered that at last I was able to pray in public as if I were alone in the quiet of my own room. The door between their questing spirits and my own became a swinging door. At times…a sense of the love of God overwhelmed me. At such moments we became one in the presence of God. At the same time, my preaching became less motivated by the desire to “teach”: it became almost entirely devoted to the meaning of the experience of our common quest and journey.

One afternoon a Chinese gentleman came to see me. I had seen him in church each Sunday morning for many weeks. Always he slipped away quietly without speaking to anyone. Now he introduced himself, saying that he was returning to China and wanted to tell me good-bye and express his appreciation for the experience of worshipping with us each Sunday morning. “When I close my eyes and listen with the spirit I am in my Buddhist temple experiencing the renewing of my own spirit.” I knew then what I had only sensed before. The barriers were crumbling. I was breaking new ground. Yet, it would be many years before I would fully understand the nature of the breakthrough. (With Head and Heart)

Thurman Becomes Professor of Religion and Director of Spiritual Life at Morehouse and Spelman Colleges. 1928-1932

Spring semester 1929 spent at Haverford College studying privately with the Quaker mystic Rufus Jones. Studied mystic religion through works of Meister Eckhart, Francis of Assisi, Spanish mystic Madame Guyon and others.

My study at Haverford was a crucial experience, a watershed from which flowed much of the thought and endeavor to which I was to commit the rest of my working life. These months defined my deepest religious urges and framed in meaning much of what I had learned over the years. (With Head and Heart)

Thurman is called a practical, active mystic, an affirmation mystic.

Thurman believed that it was an individual’s personal and intimate encounters with God that established the foundation (and perhaps even the mandate) for the demonstration of love in community — especially in the community of religious fellowship. (Dr. Liza Rankow)

“Mystical experience of unity—the profoundly moving, if fleeting, “creative encounter” with the realization that all life is one….filled with a sense of the Other. Mysticism is “the response of the individual to a personal encounter with God within his own spirit.” The life of the mystic is worked out in the world of men and things. Each soul must learn, so the mystic thinks, to stand up in its own right and live. [The mystic] knows he cannot escape the fundamental problem of ethics as it works itself out in his time-space relationships….Discipline of some sort becomes necessary and inevitable. Affirmation mystics are concerned with working out in a social frame of reference the realism of their sense of the Other. (Adapted from a Thurman address in 1939, a Thurman pamphlet, Mysticism and The Experience of Love and from With Head and Heart)

“The first dimension is that God must be all-inclusive, all-comprehending, and in a profound sense universal….Prayer is the method by which the individual makes his way to the temple of quiet within his own spirit and the activity of his spirit within its walls. It is also the readying of the spirit for communication with God. It is the total process of quieting down. Perhaps as important as prayer itself is the “readying” of the spirit for the experience. (Adapted from Thurman’s book, The Creative Encounter: An Interpretation of Religion and the Social Witness.)

Married Susie Bailey, international Christian student movement leader, historian, musician, and poet in 1932.

Thurman is named Professor of Christian Theology and chairman of the Committee on Religious Life at Howard University in 1932. In 1936 he became the first Dean of Howard University’s Rankin Chapel.

I spent long hours of quiet in the empty chapel, listening to the silence and gazing through the rose window at sunset, until slowly it was clear to me what I would have to do.

The order of the service was completely redesigned. [Music, poetry, art, liturgical dance, readings added.) Sunday morning service at Rankin Chapel became a watering place for a wide range of worshippers, not only from within the university community but also from the District of Columbia. Despite the fact that the District at that time was as segregated racially as Atlanta or Jackson, the Sunday chapel service provided a time and a place where race, sex, culture, material belongings and earlier religious orientation became undifferentiated in the presence of God. I provided sketches of time for meditation, a quiet time for prayers generated in silence….using Old and New Testament passages…I began to read aloud, the tones of the organ weaving in and out in muted accompaniment. There were periods of silence here and there to allow the inspiration of the words to hold full sway. When the service was over, I left the pulpit, but the audience remained in their seats, in total silence, for several minutes. (With Head and Heart)

In 1935-1936 led the first all black American delegation to make a Christian youth movement “pilgrimage of friendship” to India, Ceylon, and Burma.

Met with Tagore, about whom Thurman said: “He was a poet of India who soared above the political and social patterns of exclusiveness dividing mankind. His tremendous spiritual insight created a mood unique among the voices of the world. He moved deep into the heart of his own spiritual idiom and came up inside all peoples, all cultures, and all faiths.”

Met Mahatma Gandhi and had first formal exchange between an African American religious leader and Gandhi.

…He [Gandhi] said that with a clear perception it could be through the Afro-American that the unadulterated message of nonviolence would be delivered to all men everywhere.

In 1944 Thurman joins Dr. Alfred Fisk as pastor of the first interracial, interfaith, interracial, intercultural church in America: The Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples in San Francisco, dedicated to “personal empowerment and social transformation through an ever deepening relationship with the Spirit of God in All Life.” Eleanor Roosevelt gave the farewell address when Thurman left Howard University.

The core of my preaching has always concerned itself with the development of the inner resources needed for the creation of a friendly world of friendly men….It was important to me that individuals who were in the thick of the struggle for social change would be able to find renewal and fresh courage in the spiritual resources of the church. There must be provided a place, a movement, when a person would declare, “I choose!” (With Head and Heart)

In 1947 Thurman is the first black man to be invited give the Ingersol Lecture at Harvard Divinity School. Topic: The Negro Spiritual.

The genius of the slave song is their unyielding affirmation of life defying the judgment of the denigrating environment which spawned them….These slave singers…take their place alongside the great creative religious thinkers of the human race. They made a worthless life, the life of chattel property, a mere thing, a body, worth living! They yielded with abiding enthusiasm to a view of life which included all the events of their experiences without exhausting themselves in those experiences. To them this quality of life was insistent fact because of that which deep within them, they discovered of God, and His far-flung purposes. God was not through with them and He was not, nor could He be, exhausted by any single experience or any series of experiences. To know Him was to live a life worthy of the loftiest meaning of life. Men in all ages and climes, slave or free, trained or untutored, who have sensed the same values, are their fellow-pilgrims who journey together with them in an increasing self-realization in the quest for the city that hath foundations whose Builder and Maker is God. (With Head and Heart)

Jeremiah 8:22 Is there no balm in Gilead; is there no physician there?
Slave Singer: “There Is a Balm in Gilead.”
Thurman: Jeremiah’s question is a question raised by his entire life. He is searching his own soul. “The slave caught the mood of this spiritual dilemma, and with it did an amazing thing. He straightened the question mark in Jeremiah’s sentence into an exclamation point: “There is a balm in Gilead!” Here is a note of creative triumph.

In 1949 Thurman published his most famous book, Jesus and the Disinherited, “which deeply influenced leaders of the Civil Rights struggle in the 1950s.”

I had continued to struggle with the central issue, which was the apparent inability, the demonstrable failure of Christianity to deal effectively with a system of social and economic injustice with which it existed side by side throughout the Western world….My quest for an answer reminded me again and again of my need to preserve, at all costs, the inspirations and the strength I drew from my commitment to the religion of Jesus. (With Head and Heart)

Living in a climate of deep insecurity, Jesus, faced with so narrow a margin of civil guarantees, had to find some other basis upon which to establish a sense of well being. He knew that the goals of religion as he understood them could never be worked out within the then-established order. Deep from within that order he projected a dream, the logic of which would give to all the needful security. There would be room for all, and no man would be a threat to his brother. “The kingdom of God is within.” “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor.” The basic principles of his way of life cut straight through to the despair of his fellows and found it groundless.

Fear: A man’s conviction that he is God’s child automatically tends to shift the basis of his relationship with all his fellows. He recognizes at once that to fear a man, whatever may be that man’s power over him, is a basic denial of the integrity of his very life. It lifts that mere man to a place of pre-eminence that belongs to God and to God alone.

Deception: …be simply, directly truthful, whatever may be the cost in life, limb, or security. For the individual who accepts this, there may be quick and speedy judgment with attendant loss. But if the number increases and the movement spreads, the vindication of the truth would follow in the wake. 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.

Hate: 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. …Jesus rejected hatred. It was not because he lacked the vitality or the strength. It was not because he lacked the incentive. 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.

Love: It was upon the anvil of the Jewish community’s relations with Rome that Jesus hammered out the vital content of his concept of love for one’s enemy….To love them means to recognize some deep respect and reverence for their persons. But to love them does not mean to condone their way of life. The religion of Jesus says to the disinherited: “Love your enemy. Take the initiative in seeking ways by which you can have the experience of a common sharing of mutual worth and value. It may be hazardous, but you must do it.”

In so great an undertaking it will become increasingly clear that the contradictions of life are not ultimate. The disinherited will know for themselves that there is a Spirit at work in life and in the hearts of men which is committed to overcoming the world. It is universal, knowing no age, no race, no culture, and no condition of men. For the privileged and underprivileged alike, if the individual puts at the disposal of the Spirit the needful dedication and discipline, he can life effectively in the chaos of the present the high destiny of a son of God.

There is no way to balance the debt we owe to the spirit which he let loose I the world. It is upon this that we meditate now in the gathering quietness. Each of us, in his own way, finds the stairs leading to the Holy Place. We gather in our hands the fragments of our lives, searching eagerly for some creative synthesis, some wholeness, some all-encompassing unity capable of stilling the tempests within us and quieting all the inner turbulence of our fears. We seek to walk in our own path which opens up before us, made clear by the light of His Spirit and the radiance which it casts all around us. (For the Inward Journey)

In 1953 Thurman moves to Boston University at the invitation of President Harold Case to become Dean of Marsh Chapel and professor of Spiritual Disciplines and Resources in the School of Theology.

Three Degrees of Separation

Bill Hinson’s widow writes: “At some point during the semester Dr. Thurman invited us to his home for dinner. We had never been in a black person’s home. Bill’s background was that he came out of the turpentine woods of South Georgia. Our only relationship with blacks up until this time had been Bill’s father’s hiring blacks in his turpentine business and both our families knowing blacks as domestic help…Now here was a black man with an intellect and education and spiritual maturity that we could only dream and pray of aspiring to. For us to have the opportunity to be in his home, eat a meal prepared by him, at a table set by him, with more silver and china than we had ever seen, have him be genuinely interested in us, in our backgrounds, in my teaching, etc. had an impact on us that can’t be measured.” (Jean Hinson, 2009)

A footnote: The subject of Bill Hinson’s master’s thesis at Boston University in 1961: the NCAAP and the spiritual leaders of the civil rights movement.

Thurman Begins Active Retirement

Formerly retired from Boston University in 1965 and returned to San Francisco where he founded the Howard Thurman Educational Trust, a charitable foundation that supported religious, charitable, scientific, literary, and educational programs. Also housed Thurman’s private library and more than “800 tapes of meditations, prayers, sermons, lecture and discussion covering over forty years of Thurman’s spiritual pilgrimage.” Howard Thurman Listening Rooms were established throughout the U.S. and in seventeen foreign countries. (HTET now housed at Morehouse College in Atlanta.)

Traveled around the world. Thurman was teaching in Nigeria when John Kennedy was assassinated and, at the request of the American Ambassador to Nigeria, gave the eulogy at the memorial service for Kennedy in Lagos.

Howard Thurman died after a long illness on April 10, 1981, at his home in San Francisco.

INFLUENCE ON DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.

Selected as one of twelve outstanding preachers in America by Life magazine in 1953. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. listed him, along with Winston Churchill and Albert Einstein, as one of the “ten greatest men of the twentieth century.”

Spoke at more than 200 American and Canadian institutions, including University of Chicago, Yale, Princeton, Harvard. Received honorary doctorates from eleven colleges and universities.

“…arguably the most thoroughgoing integrationist of his generation, a pastor who brought the integration ideal right into the institutional heart of black and white society: the church worship service.”

“…articulated the vision of spiritual discipline that later informed the intellectual and moral basis of the black freedom movement in the South.” “…always preferring quiet pastoral counsel and intellectual guidance to political visibility.” According to historian Lerone Bennet Martin Luther King carried a dog-eared copy of Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited in his briefcase at all times as he worked in the civil rights movement. Many who were in the audience remember King’s paraphrasing and echoing Thurman’s work in his sermons and speeches.”

“For the quiet counsel and reflection he offered to Martin Luther King, Jr., Vernon Johns, James Farmer, Whitney Young, Vernon Jordan, Jesse Jackson, Otis Moss, and a host of other passing through the “dark night of the soul” in the thick of social struggle. Thurman was widely recognized as the pastoral leader of the Civil Rights movement.”

Thurman’s work: Emphasis on character, civility, and community…public language filled with hope and possibility…Thurman’s intellectual vision of human community and American democratic renewal….the ground of a hopeful future. Thurman’s steady insistence on the search for common ground between diverse cultures finds creative resonance at this critical impasse of American history. (Fluker and Tumber)

Arthur Ashe: Days of Grace: A Memoir

Influence of Howard Thurman: pages 320-338

Selections from Howard Thurman’s works:

How Good It Is to Center Down!

How good it is to center down!
To sit quietly and see one’s self pass by!
The streets of our minds seethe with endless traffic;
Our spirits resound with clashings, with noisy silences,
While something deep within hungers and thirsts for the
still moment and the resting lull.
With full intensity we seek, ere the quiet passes, a fresh
sense of order in our living;
A direction, a strong sure purpose that will structure our
confusion and bring meaning to our chaos.
We look at ourselves in this waiting moment–the kinds
of people we are.
The questions persist: what are we doing with our lives?–
what are the motives that order our days?
What is the end of our doings? Where are we trying to go?
Where do we put the emphasis and where are our values
focused?
For what end do we make sacrifices? Where is my treasure
and what do I love most in life?
What do I hate most in life and to what am I true?
Over and over the questions beat in upon the waiting moment.
As we listen, floating up through all the jangling echoes of
our turbulence, there is a sound of another kind–
A deeper note which only the stillness of the heart makes
clear.
It moves directly to the core of our being. Our questions
are answered.
Our spirits refreshed, and we move back into the traffic of
our daily round
With the peace of the Eternal in our step.
How good it is to center down!

1. The most natural thing in the world for man, then, would be to keep open the lines of communication between him and the Source of his life, out of which he comes and into which (it is my faith) he goes.

2. The important thing, however, is the fact that beyond the zero point of endurance there are vast possibilities…this simple fact of revitalizing human endurance opens a great vista for living…it is often at such a point that the spirit in humans and the spirit of God blend into one creative illumination.

3. The assumption is that we individuals are ever in immediate candidacy to get an “assist” from God—that we are not alone in our quest. Through prayer, meditation and singleness of mind our lives may be invaded by strength, insight, and courage sufficient for our needs. Thus we need not seek refuge in excuses but can live our lives with ever-increasing vigor and experience…and with an ever–deepening sense of fulfillment. (From Meditations of the Heart and other collections of Thurman’s prayers and meditation.)

4. There seems to be a vast stirring of energy, malignant and unstructured, that catapults to the surface all kinds of disharmonies, conflicts, and disorders…The stirring of energy in myriad forms of unstructured malevolencies may well be the spirit of Life, of God at work on behalf of new life and perhaps a new creation on this planet. We must find our place in the areas of the new vitalities, the place where the old is breaking up and the new is being born. What a moment to be alive and, more importantly, to be aware! Of course, this we cannot do unless we are able to gather unto ourselves the wise caution of Fenelon, “Accustom yourself to remain at peace in the depth of your heart, in spite of your restless imagination.” God grant this for each of us. (For the Inward Journey)

5. 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. (Thurman speech)

6. The movement of the Spirit of God in the hearts of men often calls them to act against the spirit of their times or causes them to anticipate a spirit which is yet in the making. In a moment of dedication, they are given wisdom and courage to dare a deed that challenges and to kindle a hope that inspires. (Thurman’s Footprints of a Dream)

7. There is something in every one of you that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself. It is the only true guide you will ever have. And if you cannot hear it, you will all of your life spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls. (Thurman speech)

Resources

The Sound of the Genuine: The Papers of Howard Thurman (first of three volumes, edited by Walter Fluker and Catherine Tumber)

Howard Thurman’s Great Hope by Kai Jackson Issa (a children’s picture book)

If you are interested in Thurman’s discussion of the ethical and moral underpinnings of public life, see A Strange Freedom: The Best of Howard Thurman on Religious Experience and Public Life (Fluke and Tumber, editors)

If you are interested in Thurman’s meditations and prayers, you might start with Meditations of the Heart.

If you want to read more about Thurman’s thought on the spiritual disciplines (including meditation and prayer), you might look at The Creative Encounter: An Introduction of Religion and the Social Witness.

For an excellent annotated bibliography of all the works of Howard Thurman: www.howardthurmanfilm.com/thurmanbooks.html

Howard Thurman even has a Facebook page. Check out: https://www.facebook.com/HowardThurman/?fref=nf

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