Limited Series: Part 4 - SUFFERING: section 1

Readings from "Disciplines of the Spirit" by Dr Howard Thurman (1962)

Hello friends,

Welcome to 2025. I wish you the best year ever.

Thanks for joining me for this limited series. Suffering and pain are not easy topics, but they are ones for which many of us need encouragement and help finding our way. Whether this new year brings you bliss and bounty or pain and sorrow, I can only guess. I do know that we all suffer and hearing some wisdom on this can sustain us. This is the first of 2 more pieces to this chapter from Disciplines of the Spirit (1962)

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As I read a story from Dr Thurman, that I read to you today, I realize that took place well over 100 years ago.

He was thirteen when it happened and I calculated that the time he spoke of would have been Autumn of 1912. The airplane would have just gotten off the ground, as an invention, a few years earlier and the Titanic would have sunk that Spring. Thurman spoke of a little girl who wore a pinafore (held to her dress with pins as was the habit…I found out).

I wondered what her weaponized outfit may have looked like, so I did some digging and here’s a probable specimen below (notice the white aprons on girls below from the same time period).

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This is the youngest photo I could find of Thurman (below) and would have been taken about 4-5 years after the incident. It was the special occasion of high school graduation and he was at the top of the class—a distinction which he repeated at Morehouse College.

High school grad photo: Howard Thurman

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Today the topic was about pain and suffering. The kind that befalls all of us and the kind that happens when when see others as undeserving or less than ourselves.

You don’t have to look far to see abuse like this at work. We all make determinations about who should get what and what fairness looks like. Sometimes we say them out loud, and other times we don’t.

TAKEAWAY:

It’s common for people to speak of freedoms, liberties, and rights, and how they are being denied. But, take notice: often people do not speak of these things as they apply to everyone, rather as they want them to apply to themselves or an in-group.

In doing this, we do not speak truthfully of human rights of freedoms, but of privilege—freedoms and rights that apply to some.