Professional Documents
Culture Documents
on
“The Creative Encounter”, by Howard Thurman
Evidencing its meaning and implications for both the private and the corporate Christian Worship1
Presented to
By
Alcenir Oliveira
For
Christian Worship
ICAM 866
• Introduction
• The inwardness of Religion
• The individual’s self understanding, the search,
encounter and understanding of God
• This self realization and encounter with God and its
meaning and implication with private and public
worship
• The outwardness of Religion
• The perspective of the whole community where the
individuals are in search of God
• The community encounter with God and its meaning and
implication with private and public worship
• The inner need for love
• What the inner need for love has to do with God
• What the inner need for love has to do with private and
public worship
• The outer necessity for love
• What the outer necessity for love has to do with God
• What the outer necessity for love has to do with private
and public worship
• Conclusion
Introduction
The human being life comprises a two side perspective, very clearly stated by
Thurman. First, there is the private side of the individual’s life. It involves his whole
idiosyncrasies and needs. Second, there is the interaction of the individual with others in
the community and the way they interfere with his life and how he influences their world.
In this direction, Thurman develops a great reflection about the individual’s need for
love, as well as the whole community necessity of being cared for.
The inner need for love: What the inner need for love has to
do with God.
Love is essential to the formation of personality, according to Thurman. And much
more, the way a child is loved is going to influence his later love relationship. This ability
to love, like other human faculties, has to be learned and practiced, he adds.
Two elements are essential to understand the inner need for love, based on what
Thurman defends that the emotional formation of the individual has a straight relation
with his ability to love. These elements are the need for personal attention and the need
for emotional stability.
One important aspect brought up by Thurman in this study is the role of love in the
formation of personality. He says that “…the need for love is so related to the structure
of the personality that when this need is not met, the personality is stunted and pushed or
twisted out of shape”. He says that the role of the mother in availing love in the phase of
formation of the personality is indispensable “Something in the nature of being a mother
must be present to deal with that need. This something is mother love. It seems that this
quality is indigenous in the female structure”7. By bring examples of experiments with
animals he assumes that this ability to love is related to birth delivery pain. It is
something that involves the whole emotional structure of the mother which creates a
natural link with the offspring as part the mother’s pain. He concludes that “where birth
pain is absent, there is absolutely no mother love exercised with reference to the
offspring … The unlocking of the mother love complex through pain is beyond
consciousness, beyond the knowledge of the mother, and has nothing to do with drawing
her attention to her offspring”8.
The conclusion he comes to is that love is an essential element in the structure of
personality. Here then associates it as a pattern that comes underneath the response of
human beings to others leading to formation of community and all types of relationship in
society. It seems that he intends to let us get to our own conclusions that the ability to
love is essentially related to the formation of personality since birth.
The need to love is explained by the excellence of the feeling raised by the
acknowledgement that someone cares for someone else with no extras; that the object of
love has no need to pretend in any sense; it awakes the personal importance, the sense of
self worth when the person realizes that he/she is needed, it is the “need to be needed”.
The inner need for love: Its implications with private and
public worship.
Worship – May I infiltrate here! – seems to be all about love. In worship there is no
trade-ins; there is no I pay, I receive; no do or die; no surrender and be compensated.
Worship is about expressing love. “For he so loved the world that gave his life in favor
…!” It means not that a price was paid for a great amount of reward! In the same sense, it
comes to our side in worship. We worship because we love, and we love because we
were loved first. Therefore, we go back to Thurman’s reflection about the formation of
personality and the later ability to love is greatly related to the way an individual was
loved in childhood.
The need for love and its relationship with worship is that in our need for love and
our need to love we anchor in the arms of God and his infinite love expressed in Jesus
Christ.
As a conclusion, as a tool for further use, it is worth to transcribe the words of
Thurman: “There is a direct continuity between the need to be loved, to be deeply cared
for, and the heart, the very pulse beat of the individual’s experience of God in the
religious encounter. Here the individual is laid bare, stripped of all façade – what I am
in and of myself is finally dealt with. … This is the essence of the meaning of the love of
God. In the presence of God, at last, a man is relieved of all necessity for pretending. He
can stand clean … This does not mean that limitations are not overlooked, that sin are no
longer sin, but it does mean that anything less than the very core of one’s being is not
quite relevant”.
The outer necessity for love: What the outer necessity for love
has to do with God.
After discussing the inwardness, or the inner being, and the outwardness, or outer
being, as well as the inner need of love, we come to the higher purpose of Thurman’s
study, which is the outer necessity of love. On our side, therefore, we reach our purpose
which is to evaluate the human necessity in general of love and establish a relationship of
this very human element with worship.
In this regard, Thurman navigates through a sea of possibilities related to the
incentive and or barrier to the patterns of love in shaping the society. He lists what he
calls “a series of cultural patterns” which are: 1) the God-centered culture, where the
significance of personality is measured by the personality’s service and usefulness to
God; 2) the family-centered culture, where the significance of the individual is related to
his/her usefulness to the family; 3) the state-centered culture, where the significance of
the individual is related to the degree to which he contributes to the centrality of the state;
4) the profit-centered culture, where the individual’s significance is based on his
relevance of his contribution to the economic order and its stability.
These four different cultures of organized society are structured, according to
Thurman, based on “an effort to meet certain of the basic needs of the individual; to give
to the individual a sense of belonging, of relatedness, of significance”. He offers grounds
to relate it to the basics of love, the individuals’ need of a feeling of belonging and being
significant, meaningful to the specific group, be it religious, state, family or profit
society.
The outer necessity for love: Its implications with private and
public worship.
This topic is amazingly wide in meaning, such that we could write books about it on
the grounds furnished by Thurman. However, for space and time limitations we have to
keep the boundaries.
The outer necessity of love, topic that is at the top of the sequence very well
established by Thurman, is the point where we could depart for any consideration related
to conflicts of life in society in general. It is a wide field for Psychology and it is not our
goal. Nevertheless, for the purpose of thinking the foundations for worship it is very
meaningful.
There is no need to expand much our analysis, for the development of this essay
lead us to understand in short how important it is for private and public worship to bring
into consideration the outer necessity for love, meaning high need of each and every
individual in society to love and to be loved; to build in their soul a sense of belonging in
an environment where loved is the bread everybody shares with abundance.
Conclusion
I believe that after reading and Thurman every worshiper will not be the same in their
perspective of worship anymore. Worship has not the same meaning of a business
encounter with a variety of individual or corporate purpose, but something that could be
seen as the sum of every individual expression of love in response to a greater love from
God. This way the soul becomes fulfilled with that sense of loving and being loved that
every human being cares for.
It is important to bring to this conclusion Thurman’s view of worship, when he says
that “man builds his little shelter, he raises his little wall; man builds his little altar, he
worships his little God; man organizes the resources of his little life, he defends his little
barrier. All this – to no avail! What man is committed to is … the effective possibility of a
vital religious fellowship which is creative in character, so convincing in quality that it
inspires the mind to multiply experiences of unity”. He goes on saying that he believes
“…that in the Presence of God there is no male nor female, white nor black, Gentile nor
Jew, Protestant nor Catholic, Hindu, Buddhist, nor Moslem, but a human spirit stripped
to the literal substance of itself before God”9.
We can make ours his words by saying that worship happens when we become bared
of all in the presence of God “a human spirit stripped to the literal substance of itself
before God”.
1
Thurman, Howard. The Creative Encounter. Harper & Brothers: Richmond, Indiana, 1954.
2
Ibid p.63
3
Ibid p.65
4
Ibid p.75
5
Ibid p.89
6
Ibid p.90
7
Ibid p.101
8
Ibid p.102/103.
9
Ibid p. 151/152.