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Thank you for joining us for our 2nd wester Veldt lecture. Our Western belt lecture this year is Dr Danielle McCray, Assistant professor of Politics at Yale Divinity School. Previously, she served as assistant professor of

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Politics and director of multicultural ministries at Virginia Theological Seminary just outside of Washington. D. C. Dr Mccrae, earned her doctor of theology degree from Duke Divinity School, where her dissertation focused on Julian of

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Norwich as a preacher. She has a master of divinity degree, a master of divinity degree from Virginia Theological Seminary and a juris doctor degree from Harvard Law School. Her bachelor degrees from Spelman College. Her

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research interests are in the area of preaching, christian spirituality and ecclesial ology, with a special focus on the spirituality of risk taking. Yesterday we were blessed with getting to hear from Dr Mccrae about Polly Murray

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. A saint whose spirituality of risk taking included resisting inventiveness and tenderness. We are eager to hear how she will continue to bless us with her wisdom this morning. Please join me in welcoming dr mccrae.

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Thank you, Caroline. I have learned so much over the last couple of days and I'm just very grateful to be here. I've learned so much from ted and jerry and Jill. And it's I I

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just have a full heart and want to let you know how honored I am and how grateful I am to serve as the Western Belt lecturer In recent days I have discovered a new the virtue of christian gentleness

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. Okay. Mhm. While we may manifest that gentleness in different ways, I see it as an essential aspect of christian life and human flourishing. And I'm eager to study people who embody that gentleness.

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Despite what we see in our current President and administration , I am convinced that gentleness and strength go together and that the best christian leadership reflects both gentleness and strength. Howard thurman was an exceptionally gentle person,

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and that gentleness was not diminished. That gentleness did not diminish his influence or compromise. His contributions to the world. His gentleness actually added to his credibility as a preacher, teacher, theologian, and pastor

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, and it helped him establish a reputation as an authority on the inner life and an authority on christian spirituality. Howard's gentleness reflected the role of scrutiny in his life. He was one of those rare souls

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who invited scrutiny. And while there were occasions, many occasions when he experienced scrutiny as a curse and a painful experience, he also found that it yielded faith, hope and love in his life, that

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the process of being under the scrutiny of others actually helped him progress in propagation, illumination and union with God. Using thurman's correspondence, archival materials and writings as my foundation, I want to reflect on the

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role of scrutiny on his growth as a witness for jesus christ first a few biographical details. Howard Washington thurman Was born in Daytona Florida in 1899. He served primarily in the roles of pastor, teacher and

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spiritual writer, but many of his contemporaries considered him a mystic and a profit. Howard has ended Morehouse College in Atlanta, graduating in 1923 And then went to Rochester Seminary and finished in 1926. He pastored

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a church in Oberlin Ohio for a couple of years and then he joined the faculty at Howard University where he taught theology and served as Dean of Rankin Chapel . Howard's life was changed forever in 1935 when he

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led a delegation from the Y. M. to India. Uh They went to India and what is now Myanmar and Sri Lanka in India. He met Mahatma Gandhi and this meeting sparked a restlessness with western

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Christianity. He was convinced of the bankruptcy of western Christianity because of the influence of white racism. And he started talking about his faith as the religion of jesus. He saw himself as practicing the religion of

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jesus in lieu of calling himself christian. He is probably most famous for his book, Jesus and the disinherited, A Christian call to resist racism and violence . Yet he wrote some 20 other odd books,

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collections of sermons, reflections on the life of prayer , reflections on spirituality. In 1944, he left the security of his position at Howard University and moved to san Francisco to start the Church for the fellowship

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of all peoples, the first of its kind because of its intention to be racially integrated, intercultural and interfaith. Howard ended up leaving the Fellowship Church in 1953 to become dean of Marsh chapel at Boston University

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. He was the first african american dean in a role of this kind, 1965. He retired from Boston University to establish the Howard thurman Educational Trust where he served until his death, 1981. That's sort

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of the resume. That doesn't tell you the real howard, Right? No resume really gives you the real person. Howard was at times something of a loner and at other times very sociable. Um he

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was a lover of trees. He was so drawn by trees that sometimes he'd just see a magnificent tree and he'd go and walk up to that treat and pat the trunk and just hug on that tree and

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he'd say audibly to the tree, You're doing a fabulous job today. Mm It you're doing a fabulous job, you're glorifying God. Oh, you're wonderful . Sometimes his conversations with trees would last a little

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longer and raise eyebrows of people who were walking by . But he was a lover of trees. He had a live oak tree in his backyard that he considered his best friend as a child. The tree

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would listen to him, He would lean back on that tree and just feel the embrace of God. Howard also liked to dance. He was one who improvised, very playful dancer and um would inspire non

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dancers to get onto the dance floor, which is a gift. Indeed. He also loved to paint . But this is the funny thing, he liked to paint penguins. So it's not just, you

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know, trees right or scenes of nature. He liked to paint penguins and he also played the clarinet , but only moderately well. Uh huh. And being a decent clarinet player was a source of freedom

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in his life. He didn't feel the pressures of perfectionism. Howard had a very vibrant in her life . He was determined to be free. He was to draw on a quotation from Alice walker. He

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was a man whose love outweighed his fears and he wanted to be a man whose love for God whose uh love for himself and his community uh exceeded his anxieties about the world that he was living in.

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As a result, he had an unusual sense of ease under the eyes of other people. He was secure in a way that is unfortunately rare today. Howard was able to bear scrutiny well and not be

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diminished by it. My former home politics colleague and I Rosanna Hook at Virginia Seminary. We used to start our introductory hommel ethics course with a scrutiny exercise . And in that exercise we would put students in

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pairs And asked them to stand about 4ft apart And just gaze at each other for 10 seconds. It was not easy for most people. There was people would giggle or they would twitch or they would cough

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. Um, or they would say this is awkward and it was awkward, right? Um, but gazing at another person for 10 seconds was a stretch . And it was hard because we don't often look

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at each other. Um, not in a, in a simple, directed focused attention. Um, as an act of focused attention. We don't really gaze at one another and just enjoy one another's humanity

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in that way. It's ironic that we are so uncomfortable gazing at one another for 10 seconds when we are so often photographed and recorded. There are electronic records of our lives as we discussed yesterday at the

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panel. There is a lot of viewing and scrutiny that's going on. And yet we're not seen. Ministry requires actually seeing other people and it requires letting ourselves be seen for who we are, not just

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who we want to be or who others want us to be, but who we are. An enormous damage has been done to the human family because of our unwillingness or inability to see one another. That

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damage exists both outside and within the church. And Howard thurman knew the pain of unloving scrutiny very well . one of his earliest memories and first experience of betrayal involves scrutiny gone wrong. He was seven years

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old and his father, Saul Solomon thurman died suddenly after a very short illness. Saul had not been a religious man. Um he would stare in silence sometimes for hours at a time, but he never

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developed an affinity for church or for church folk. And because he situated himself outside the church, none of the pastors in Daytona would preach his funeral. They only managed to get a church funeral because a

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traveling evangelist named Samcro mart volunteered to preach at the funeral. Howard huddle between his mother and grandmother on the front row and listened and he was horrified to hear Samcro mart quote, preach his father into hell

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what was supposed to be the celebration of life of a father and husband became a spectacle. And after the trauma of that experience, Howard decided he would never go to church again. Now that decision never

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to go to church again softened by the time Howard was a teenager. But the experience had a tremendous impact on his spiritual development. He was determined not to inflict that kind of pain on anyone else,

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not to size others up. In an instant like that. He was determined to see other people and he was determined not to dismiss the varieties of spiritual expression that are possible. Howard wanted to be a

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person who could interrupt the demonic approaches to scrutiny and be a person who offered loving scrutiny in the world . So what were the characteristics of this loving scrutiny ? Howard's understanding of scrutiny? Was in keeping with

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the etymology of the terms rotary latin for search or to sort trash? He saw scrutiny as as, as comparable to having one's trash sorted. This is a partial process. It's incomplete. When viewing someone's

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trash, one can't get a complete picture of life inside the house, one just gets clues of what's going on. All scrutiny can give is a snapshot of a moment in time. What was going on

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that week in the house, The temporal limitations of scrutiny often get lost. And when this happens, scrutiny can easily devolve into a form of fault. Finding Howard would probably agree with Fuko, who in

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his reflection on critique, does not see the task fulfilled in judging or determining whether something or someone is worthy or not. The value of scrutiny rests and bring the framework of evaluation. Interview. The process

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of scrutiny always reveals more about the person who is scrutinizing than the person who is being scrutinized. What are the scrutinize ear's values? What are the scrutinize ear's basis for comparison? What is his or her

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template in the scrutinizing process? This slower process of scrutinizing makes more room for perceiving human emotion. There is, for example, more space to attend two anger. Now, Howard learned a tremendous amount about

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anger from his grandmother Nancy. Ambrose Nancy had been born into slavery and um never learned to read. Yes, she loved hearing the scriptures read to her and with asked Howard to read to her for as

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long as he could. However, she did not like to hear from any any of the pauline epistles . She did. She had endured too many sermons um from the pauline epistles that told her to obey

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. And so she had really written paul out, she would allow one exception. And that was the first Corinthians 13. But other than that, no , no paul's pauline scriptures and Howard could see that

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the anger from that experience was still alive fire for her. He could see it in her eyes when the apostle paul was mentioned. And somehow in the intimacy of reading scripture together, he was able to

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sit with her anger and not run from it and he found her anger to be a powerful teacher for him. Now every case is different and in this case Howard was dealing with a healthy person nancy.

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Her anger was first and foremost informative. And anger is often informative. It's an informative when it teaches us what matters to a person where the boundaries are in a relationship, anger is informative when it shows

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us that a rupture has taken place, his grandmother's anger revealed the wounds she was carrying and the boundaries she had, she had set to preserve her own psychological health. Howard's role was not to solve that

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anger, but to witness it, to attend his grandmother's anger and to attend the underlying causes. Her anger was a means of claiming dignity that had been denied and it was a sign of a vibrant will

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. Her anger was an indication of a well of resilience and she needed that anger to function in the world. Now, I have a friend in Atlanta who teaches sunday school to three year olds and she

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was not long ago teaching them about the parable of the wedding banquet. And uh, she said to them, so how would you feel if you worked all day to prepare a party for your friends and

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none of them came and a three year old sid , I'd be mad as hell. Yeah, yeah , I'd be mad as hell. Yeah. And sometimes sometimes there are very good reasons to be mad

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as hell and practicing loving scrutiny as Howard thurman understood it was a path to attending anger and trying to tease out the sources. Howard had an incident himself when he needed someone to witness his anger. He

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was an undergraduate at Morehouse College and had gone to an integrated Y. M. C. A meeting with some of the most liberal white pastors in Atlanta . The meeting was about integrating a a concert hall

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and at the time the concert hall restricted people of color to the balcony and only white people could sit on the ground floor. And at that meeting, one of the pastors suggested that it would be a

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great idea and a progressive idea to split the room in half and have the people of color sit on the left side of the room and the white people sit on the right side of the room, and

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that way everybody had access to the balcony. But if and Howard was so outraged by this suggestion that he was physically trembling, Mhm. And he had to storm out of that room for the sake of

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his own safety. The college president Morehouse College President actually saw him storm out and followed him out of that room into the vestibule and just put his hand on Howard's shoulder. And that gesture was enough.

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Somehow, his anger had been witnessed, His anger had just been witnessed. The situation did not change . Um that meeting actually, uh that suggestion actually went forward and they did divide the room half and

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half, but his anger had been witnessed, and that was enough for him to move forward. Howard's vision of loving scrutiny also makes space for perceiving sorrow . Tears are a form of speech. They are

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utterances in their seminal work on tears, in religious imagination, Kimberly Patton and john Hawley suggest that broadly speaking weeping turns a person towards the community and that turning towards the community is done to communicate something vital

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, something upon which life or its very meaning depends the weepers. The weeper voices a rupture and compels her community to accommodate it. This is a moment when reality has proven intolerable for whatever reason, By

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voicing dissent through tears to the community. The loss can be integrated into the person's faith. Tears are a mode of language, and a survey of the role of tears and spirituality suggests the superiority of tears

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to language. Tears maybe an extra linguistic form of communicating that's especially suited for ineffable or sacred experience. Tears are more potent than speech, capable of carrying meaning between humans, between humans and God, and

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across the different chambers of our hearts and souls. Howard understood that tears have power to carry meaning that is too sheer for language. Part of the power of tears issues from emotional transparency, weeping is a

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kind of utterance that doesn't seek to close itself off or sure itself up from critique from critique. Sleeping is better understood as an act that declares fin itude in order to seek knowledge and relief. What we

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see in a weeper, if we can tolerate it is heightened presence. The trembling, the tears and heaving shoulders reveal a body that is speaking in excess . To quote Judith Butler speaking in excess, overwhelming

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any words that might keep the weepers pain at a safe distance. The weeper is scrutinizing the present condition and scrutinizing the situation that precipitated it. Along this line. Betsy Parker, who served as chaplain of

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the ground Zero office of the chief medical examiner office in new york was asked whether weeping was like music , because it conveys meaning without words. And Betsy said weeping is the most deeply communicating sound that the

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human can make and words don't get in the way of the sound of weeping. Words only hide the depth, but when one hears the sounds unobstructed sounds , no words in there. You really feel the

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depths of the emotion that's in the person during his trip to India Howard preached at a cathedral. And after the sermon, a young man came up to him weeping. He was clearly grieved and he said

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, essentially your sermon had a problem. You did jesus wrong in that sermon, you preach the whole sermon and you did not mention jesus by name and Howard was shocked, he said, but but what

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about the content? Yeah. Mm. Did my message adhere to jesus teachings? Did you feel the presence of the holy Spirit during the sermon? And the man said yes, but I needed to hear

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jesus name, I needed to hear the name and Howard was initially put off by that. He was just vexed, but his heart softened as he looked at the man's tears. He gave those tears some

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extended attention. He could see that that man had some sorrow that just needed to be witnessed in that moment. This was not the time for Howard to correct the man or to debate theologies of preaching.

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This was a time to see the man's pierced heart . Later, Howard would pray give me the ear that will not shrink from the word that corrects and admonishes the word that holds up before me. The

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image of myself that causes me to pause and reconsider the word that challenges me to deeper consecration and higher resolve. The word that lays bare needs that make my own days uneasy. That seizes upon every good

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, decent impulse of my nature, channeling it into passive healing into the lives of others. Give me the listening ear through which I may become mindful of expressions of life for into my own. Give me

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the eye that is willing to see my own faults for what they are, the eye that is willing to see the likable qualities and those I may not like. The mistake in what I thought was correct

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. The strength in what I labeled as weakness. Give me the listening ear, the eye that is willing to see that is loving scrutiny. Give me loving scrutiny. Some 20 years later, Howard face

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another sermon situation. There was a woman who came to worship regularly, But by the time he was one or 2 minutes into the sermon, she dozed off to sleep. He saw her do this week

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after week and yet as she exited church, she would come up and shake his hand and say thank you for that servant you and the situation of next him a little, I mean what was she thanking

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him for? But he was praying about that situation and he just started to imagine this woman and as he was imagining her, he was suddenly aware of all the pressures on his on her life. She

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was the caregiver for her husband who was very ill . And he began to see his sermon as a respite for her as a time when she could experience the rest of God. Loving scrutiny changed his heart

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and he began to pray for that woman with a softer spirit. He was convinced that God was doing healing work in his prayers for her. Increasingly Howard felt that offering loving scrutiny was part of his vocation

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. Now in his writings, he tends to use the term witness to describe the scrutiny. He's engaged in his posture of viewing others, is rooted in the gospel and in the way Jesus was able to

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scrutinize others in loving ways. Um is something we also see in the way the three marys witness, Jesus on the cross. The three marys are doing the loving scrutiny. Howard thought to enact an ethical

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practice of viewing something of an ethical practice of viewing and that ethical practice would be very valuable to us . Today. We do so much looking and very little seeing Toni Morrison says, seeing involves bonding.

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Seeing a person involves bonding with a person. It involves actually taking another person in and seeing another person involves being changed by the vision of that person. Howard yearns for a practice of seeing others. That

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is that rich and developed and demanding As a black man who spent the 1st 25 years of his life in Florida and Georgia, Howard knew what it meant to sit under a white supremacist gaze. It meant

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bearing contempt, contempt he could feel. And he said that those 25 years under a hateful gaze, left deep scars on his spirit. They also left in his heart kernels of hatred that made it hard

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for him to see others as equals. He turned to the scriptures to address this issue and felt that he just couldn't turn the other cheek on the matter . Turning the other cheek was chipping away at his

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own dignity and he said, God had to perform a miracle to ship his perspective and give him the desire for the desire to have something other than hatred in his heart. And until that desire shifted,

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all he could do was offer up his frail attempts to see others in a divine light. One of Howard's favorite scripture passages was psalm 1 39. Search me O God and know my heart, try me

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and know my thoughts, see if there is any offensive way in me and lead me in the way everlasting regularly. Howard would begin his sermons with that prayer. And he began to see his preaching ministry

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by the time he was in his 40s or 50s , as a way of scrutinizing scripture, a way of scrutinizing the world and his neighbors and scrutinizing himself . And certainly a key part of that was scrutinizing

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God is impossible. A task is that is these multiple layers of scrutiny pushed him towards a life of integrity. They helped him construct an identity that was not simply the composite of other people's opinions of him

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. And he learned to pray with a different kind of integrity. Now, Howard's prayers would sometimes be inconvenient for people in public worship because he brought such an intensity to the act of prayer. He believed

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that it was close to blasphemy to speak a prayer when one was not actually focused on God at the time, that all of one's energy, all of one's energies should be directed to God when one was

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praying aloud and actually William Stringfellow has a similar view . He suggests that the church often does non prayers . It's a non prayer if we're just doing it for someone else. Or it's an anti prayer,

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if it's if it's something that's actually geared toward an external viewer, ultimately, Howard came to see prayer as central in his life and giving him the courage to face death and death carried the freedom from scrutiny

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. Howard believed that death was something that happened in life that that that that we die and we have a fuller richer life than the life that we can have in these bodies. And he wanted members of

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his church and students at the schools where he taught to be able to face death with courage and with a sense of freedom. And he was particularly concerned about people of color being able and willing to face

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death because he was convinced that once you were willing to die, you had taken away the chief instrument of white supremacy and that is the threat of death . And once we are willing to die, we

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have a freedom that we cannot have in any other way. Howard found freedom and loving scrutiny. And he was convinced that he'd have an experience of ecstatic scrutiny. In death. In death, he could

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look forward to be to beholding God and to be being beheld by God. That is the scrutiny of the mystic to be swept up in being seen by God. And and then finally seeing the beloved Howard's

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posture of loving scrutiny offers a gift to the christian spiritual tradition. And I look forward to talking with you more about how that can be enacted in our