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The Inward Journey
Meditations that address the deepest needs and aspirations of the human spirit. Themes include: The Quest for Meaning, The Quest for Understanding, The Quest for Fulfillment, The Quest for Love, The Quest for Peace, The Quest for God, and Psalm 139.
156 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1961
About the author
Howard Thurman
71 books374 followersHoward Washington Thurman was an author, philosopher, theologian, educator, and civil rights leader. As a prominent religious figure, he played a leading role in many social justice movements and organizations of the twentieth century.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
March 29, 2021
I’ve used this book for my daily devotions over a nearly 5-month period. Like many of Thurman’s other books, it is a compilation of short essays and poetry, loosely grouped by themes. It’s one of those books that’s likely to impact you differently depending upon what you’re going through and what particular wisdom you need at the time. I found several gems here, but perhaps most compelling was Thurman’s poetic reflections on Psalm 139. Those readings in themselves are worthy of repeated study.
June 13, 2026
A POSTHUMOUSLY-PUBLISHED THIRD COLLECTION OF HIS ‘MEDITATIONS,’ ETC.
Howard Thurman (1899-1981) was a Baptist minister and a founder of the first interracial interfaith congregation in the United States, as well as a philosopher and theologian, who was Dean of Marsh Chapel at Boston University (1953-1965) and of Rankin Chapel at Howard University (1932-1944). But today, he is probably best known as a nonviolent protest civil rights leader who was a mentor to a number of other civil rights leaders---notably Martin Luther King Jr.
His daughter (Sue Bailey Thurman) wrote in the Acknowledgments of this posthumously-published 1984 book, “My father and I began this collection during the early days of his final illness. We discussed and roughly sketched its outline. When his health worsened, our preliminary work had to stop, but it was understood between us that I would complete the project alone. A year after his death I was able to return to the book. Soon I discovered that the structure and organization fell easily into place… We finished the book as we had begun---together.”
He observes, “In many ways modern man lives his life as a bystander. Again and again we are several steps removed from the primary experiences of living. When a person becomes critically ill, he is taken from the bosom of his family to a hospital… But it means that all of the experience of tenderness that comes from having to care for the sick is denied us… When there is a death in the family, the body is removed to the funeral establishment. It is no longer the shared responsibility of the members of the family to prepare the body for burial… Life and death are seen more and more as two separate entities; we cling to one and fear the other. All of this adds up to a profound distrust of life itself. Life is seen then as being something to conquer, to struggle with and against. Life is the enemy. It is not to be embraced, to be lived… The experience OF life, not IN life, will teach a man not to fear life but to love life.” (Pg. 23)
He states, “Often, to be free means the ability to deal with the realities of one’s situation so as not to be overcome by them. It is the manifestation of a quality of being and living that results not only from understanding of one’s situation but also from wisdom in dealing with it. It takes no strength to give up, to accept shackles of circumstances so that they become shackles of soul, to shrug the shoulders in bland acquiescence. This is easy. But do not congratulate yourself that you have solved anything. In simple language, you have sold out, surrendered, given up. It takes strength to affirm the high prerogative of your spirit. And you will find that if you do, a host of invisible angels will spring to your defense…” (Pg. 26)
He suggests, “the religious man may recognize that all the world is made up of raw materials which stand in immediate candidacy for the realization of the kingdom, the rule of God… if God is the Creator of life in its totality, then all things are in candidacy for the achievement of the high and holy end. This is not to say that evil has no meaning, but it is to say that, once the evilness of evil is removed [and] uprooted, then the total character is thoroughly altered. The religious man who takes this position is never afraid of life, nor does he shrink from vicissitudes. He seeks at every point the emergence of the will and the mind of God from within himself and within the stuff of life itself. What is revealed in life is one with that which transcends life.” (Pg. 42-43)
He asserts, “The key to the meaning of life is within you… The responsibility for living with meaning and dignity can never be finally taken away from the individual. Of course, there is the fact of limitations of heredity and the like, which may circumscribe decidedly the area of awareness within the individual life… But the fact remains that the judgment which the individual passes upon life and by which life weighs him in the balance, finds it key within the individual and not outside of him. It is the great and crowning dignity of human life.” (Pg. 54)
He says, “In the history of the religious experience of the race, doctrines of immortality are expressions of this will to live. They are not counsels of despair but deep affirmations of the core of life, declaring that life is continuous, permanent, timeless, eternal. What a tremendous boon, what a glorious outreach of the human spirit! The will to live says that life IS, and it is not predicated on any other factors. While life cannot be thought of as pure existence, yet it seems always to be MORE THAN that through which it expresses itself.” (Pg. 65)
He acknowledges, “Of course, there has never been a completely satisfying answer to human suffering. It is clear that the profoundly significant reflection upon the misery of life must begin not with an idea of omnipotence but with the concept of love… The reason for affirming that God is love is based upon the fact that, in human experience, men discover that love is the most inclusive and completely inexhaustible aspect of life. Again and again, men have found that they will do gladly, for someone for whom their love is vast… Where love is great, we do for the beloved things which would be completely revolting if love were not. At every level of human life around us, we see this in operation. Therefore, whatever else God is, He must be love. He must be one with the most completely all embracing, all inspiring experience of human life. It is for this reason that, when a man is sure of God, God becomes not only his answer to the deeper needs of life but also sustaining confidence as he moves out upon the highway of life to meet the needs of other men. Wherever such a person goes he IS a benediction, breathing peace.” (Pg 118)
He recounts an encounter with a Hindu, who told him, “I think you are a traitor to all the darker peoples of the earth.” Thurman replied, “We begin with the simple historical fact that Jesus was a Jew. The miracle of the Jewish people is almost as breathtaking as the miracle of Jesus… The second important fact … is that Jesus was a poor Jew… The economic predicament with which he was identified in birth placed him initially with the great mass of men on the earth… The third fact is that Jesus was a member of a minority group in the midst of a larger dominant and controlling group.” (Pg. 124-125)
He explains, “The core of the analysis of Jesus is that man is a child of God, the God of life that sustains all of nature and guarantees all the intricacies of the life process itself. Jesus suggests that it is quite unreasonable to assume that God, whose creative activity is expressed even in such details as the hairs of a man’s head, would exclude from his concern the life, the vital spirit, of the man himself. This idea---that God is mindful of the individual---is of tremendous import in dealing with fear as a disease.” (Pg. 147)
He points out, “One who has no sense of being an object of love is seriously handicapped in making someone else an object of his love. There is much to be said for the Christian doctrine which insists that we are able to love others because He first loved us. A person who has grown up feeling always outside of the reach of other people’s caring has a dual handicap which may be paradoxical in character. On the one hand… he is apt to pass a judgment upon himself which insists on his own unworthiness… On the other hand, there may be a kind of inner compensation for this lack. This inner compensation may easily … make such a person thoroughly self-centered. The result … may be the building of a wall that shuts everybody out.” (Pg. 193)
He reports, “Again and again I have heard many people … speak disparagingly of the otherworldly emphasis as purely a mechanism of escape and sheer retreat… Such an argument must be examined. In the first place, the facts make clear that religion did serve to deepen the capacity of endurance and the absorption of suffering… What greater tribute could be paid to religious faith than this: It taught a people how to … look squarely in the face those facts that argue most dramatically against all hope and to use those facts as raw material out of which they fashioned a hope that the environment … could not crush… In the second place, this religious emphasis did not paralyze action, it did not make for mere resignation. On the contrary, it gave the mind a new dimension of resourcefulness.” (Pg. 215-216)
He observes, “To Jesus, God breathed through all that is: the sparrow overcome by sudden death in its flight; the lily blossoming on the rocky hillside… the little baby in his mother’s arms… the whisper of those who had forgotten Jerusalem, the great voiced utterance of the prophets who remembered…” (Pg. 274)
This book is a fitting end to a ‘life well-lived,’ of one of the 20th century’s most influential religious figures.
Howard Thurman (1899-1981) was a Baptist minister and a founder of the first interracial interfaith congregation in the United States, as well as a philosopher and theologian, who was Dean of Marsh Chapel at Boston University (1953-1965) and of Rankin Chapel at Howard University (1932-1944). But today, he is probably best known as a nonviolent protest civil rights leader who was a mentor to a number of other civil rights leaders---notably Martin Luther King Jr.
His daughter (Sue Bailey Thurman) wrote in the Acknowledgments of this posthumously-published 1984 book, “My father and I began this collection during the early days of his final illness. We discussed and roughly sketched its outline. When his health worsened, our preliminary work had to stop, but it was understood between us that I would complete the project alone. A year after his death I was able to return to the book. Soon I discovered that the structure and organization fell easily into place… We finished the book as we had begun---together.”
He observes, “In many ways modern man lives his life as a bystander. Again and again we are several steps removed from the primary experiences of living. When a person becomes critically ill, he is taken from the bosom of his family to a hospital… But it means that all of the experience of tenderness that comes from having to care for the sick is denied us… When there is a death in the family, the body is removed to the funeral establishment. It is no longer the shared responsibility of the members of the family to prepare the body for burial… Life and death are seen more and more as two separate entities; we cling to one and fear the other. All of this adds up to a profound distrust of life itself. Life is seen then as being something to conquer, to struggle with and against. Life is the enemy. It is not to be embraced, to be lived… The experience OF life, not IN life, will teach a man not to fear life but to love life.” (Pg. 23)
He states, “Often, to be free means the ability to deal with the realities of one’s situation so as not to be overcome by them. It is the manifestation of a quality of being and living that results not only from understanding of one’s situation but also from wisdom in dealing with it. It takes no strength to give up, to accept shackles of circumstances so that they become shackles of soul, to shrug the shoulders in bland acquiescence. This is easy. But do not congratulate yourself that you have solved anything. In simple language, you have sold out, surrendered, given up. It takes strength to affirm the high prerogative of your spirit. And you will find that if you do, a host of invisible angels will spring to your defense…” (Pg. 26)
He suggests, “the religious man may recognize that all the world is made up of raw materials which stand in immediate candidacy for the realization of the kingdom, the rule of God… if God is the Creator of life in its totality, then all things are in candidacy for the achievement of the high and holy end. This is not to say that evil has no meaning, but it is to say that, once the evilness of evil is removed [and] uprooted, then the total character is thoroughly altered. The religious man who takes this position is never afraid of life, nor does he shrink from vicissitudes. He seeks at every point the emergence of the will and the mind of God from within himself and within the stuff of life itself. What is revealed in life is one with that which transcends life.” (Pg. 42-43)
He asserts, “The key to the meaning of life is within you… The responsibility for living with meaning and dignity can never be finally taken away from the individual. Of course, there is the fact of limitations of heredity and the like, which may circumscribe decidedly the area of awareness within the individual life… But the fact remains that the judgment which the individual passes upon life and by which life weighs him in the balance, finds it key within the individual and not outside of him. It is the great and crowning dignity of human life.” (Pg. 54)
He says, “In the history of the religious experience of the race, doctrines of immortality are expressions of this will to live. They are not counsels of despair but deep affirmations of the core of life, declaring that life is continuous, permanent, timeless, eternal. What a tremendous boon, what a glorious outreach of the human spirit! The will to live says that life IS, and it is not predicated on any other factors. While life cannot be thought of as pure existence, yet it seems always to be MORE THAN that through which it expresses itself.” (Pg. 65)
He acknowledges, “Of course, there has never been a completely satisfying answer to human suffering. It is clear that the profoundly significant reflection upon the misery of life must begin not with an idea of omnipotence but with the concept of love… The reason for affirming that God is love is based upon the fact that, in human experience, men discover that love is the most inclusive and completely inexhaustible aspect of life. Again and again, men have found that they will do gladly, for someone for whom their love is vast… Where love is great, we do for the beloved things which would be completely revolting if love were not. At every level of human life around us, we see this in operation. Therefore, whatever else God is, He must be love. He must be one with the most completely all embracing, all inspiring experience of human life. It is for this reason that, when a man is sure of God, God becomes not only his answer to the deeper needs of life but also sustaining confidence as he moves out upon the highway of life to meet the needs of other men. Wherever such a person goes he IS a benediction, breathing peace.” (Pg 118)
He recounts an encounter with a Hindu, who told him, “I think you are a traitor to all the darker peoples of the earth.” Thurman replied, “We begin with the simple historical fact that Jesus was a Jew. The miracle of the Jewish people is almost as breathtaking as the miracle of Jesus… The second important fact … is that Jesus was a poor Jew… The economic predicament with which he was identified in birth placed him initially with the great mass of men on the earth… The third fact is that Jesus was a member of a minority group in the midst of a larger dominant and controlling group.” (Pg. 124-125)
He explains, “The core of the analysis of Jesus is that man is a child of God, the God of life that sustains all of nature and guarantees all the intricacies of the life process itself. Jesus suggests that it is quite unreasonable to assume that God, whose creative activity is expressed even in such details as the hairs of a man’s head, would exclude from his concern the life, the vital spirit, of the man himself. This idea---that God is mindful of the individual---is of tremendous import in dealing with fear as a disease.” (Pg. 147)
He points out, “One who has no sense of being an object of love is seriously handicapped in making someone else an object of his love. There is much to be said for the Christian doctrine which insists that we are able to love others because He first loved us. A person who has grown up feeling always outside of the reach of other people’s caring has a dual handicap which may be paradoxical in character. On the one hand… he is apt to pass a judgment upon himself which insists on his own unworthiness… On the other hand, there may be a kind of inner compensation for this lack. This inner compensation may easily … make such a person thoroughly self-centered. The result … may be the building of a wall that shuts everybody out.” (Pg. 193)
He reports, “Again and again I have heard many people … speak disparagingly of the otherworldly emphasis as purely a mechanism of escape and sheer retreat… Such an argument must be examined. In the first place, the facts make clear that religion did serve to deepen the capacity of endurance and the absorption of suffering… What greater tribute could be paid to religious faith than this: It taught a people how to … look squarely in the face those facts that argue most dramatically against all hope and to use those facts as raw material out of which they fashioned a hope that the environment … could not crush… In the second place, this religious emphasis did not paralyze action, it did not make for mere resignation. On the contrary, it gave the mind a new dimension of resourcefulness.” (Pg. 215-216)
He observes, “To Jesus, God breathed through all that is: the sparrow overcome by sudden death in its flight; the lily blossoming on the rocky hillside… the little baby in his mother’s arms… the whisper of those who had forgotten Jerusalem, the great voiced utterance of the prophets who remembered…” (Pg. 274)
This book is a fitting end to a ‘life well-lived,’ of one of the 20th century’s most influential religious figures.
July 26, 2020
What are the main ideas?
i struggle to grab onto what thurman’s “main ideas” are here because the book feels like it transcends the idea of main ideas. he says himself in the foreword “there are not many windows in these meditations; they are as the title indicates, in Inward Journey…”
each 1-2 page essay is a short reflection on a thought or two that helped him explore go deep into himself, which is into relationship with the Divine. the chapters of the book each feel like a particular lane into the self. each is framed as a quest, which speaks to thurman’s understanding of the work required to go inside oneself…
the quest for meaning
“…” understanding
“…” fulfillment
“…” love
“…” peace
“…” God
psalm 139
If I implemented one idea from this book right now, which one would it be?
remember that in each and every moment is a possibility to commune with the Divine. find it.
How would I describe the book to a friend?
a beautiful (sometimes bewildering) series of essays designed to help us remember how much access we have to Divinity if we could only remember how to look.
i struggle to grab onto what thurman’s “main ideas” are here because the book feels like it transcends the idea of main ideas. he says himself in the foreword “there are not many windows in these meditations; they are as the title indicates, in Inward Journey…”
each 1-2 page essay is a short reflection on a thought or two that helped him explore go deep into himself, which is into relationship with the Divine. the chapters of the book each feel like a particular lane into the self. each is framed as a quest, which speaks to thurman’s understanding of the work required to go inside oneself…
the quest for meaning
“…” understanding
“…” fulfillment
“…” love
“…” peace
“…” God
psalm 139
If I implemented one idea from this book right now, which one would it be?
remember that in each and every moment is a possibility to commune with the Divine. find it.
How would I describe the book to a friend?
a beautiful (sometimes bewildering) series of essays designed to help us remember how much access we have to Divinity if we could only remember how to look.
July 11, 2020
This is the 3rd volume of weekly meditations Thurman wrote for Marsh Chapel at Boston University. There are 113 meditations divided into 7 sections. Most of them are done as brief essays, but in 2 of the sections they are all done in poetry. These are decades old. Some of them seem somewhat archaic and some of them seem to speak to today's events. Many will be be disturbed by the masculine language of their day. Some of them have very deep insights. They are permeated by Thurman's deep faith in God and in God's presence with us and throughout all creation.
March 13, 2022
A classic journey to inner awareness that is without peer in its genre, Thurman illustrative genius and deep theological rhythm do not disappoint. More than that, the healing help in his voice leads one closer to the divine voice within.
August 30, 2024
A rich anthology of Thurman's weekly meditations. This is a book to linger over. Despite the some aspects of the text feeling dated, Thurman's prose remains beautiful. Every now and then the book became a doorway to God's presence.
December 27, 2020
I enjoyed reading this book from Thurman, in particular his approach to Psalm 139 was quite moving. An appropriate companion for devotional reading.
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