The Quest for Stability I February 6, 1949 Fellowship Church "There is a sense of fear as of some impending doom around the next turning in the road. There seems to be a climate of disaster that does not quite materialize into cataclysmic incident; only a general loss of morale." If this represented Thurman''s mood in early 1949, he was not alone. It was a feeling of unease widely shared in a postwar America in the early years of the Cold War, a so-called age of anxiety, contributing to what Thurman diagnosed as "a universal urgency for both personal and social stability."1 Thurman delivered three sermons at Fellowship Church on "The Quest for Stability" that February.2 Thurman began the first of these sermons with the New Testament text, "And you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free."3 But truth, he argues, is a "relationship," not "something fixed and permanent." The problem with fixed truths is that they often do not take change into account, and can be bitterly hostile to change, and we "are in the midst of worldwide, world-shaking revolutions that affect almost every single aspect of our common life and of our thinking," revolutions that are "upsetting of age-old supports that have guaranteed the established order.

" He gives the example of the end of British India (and implicitly, the gathering worldwide struggle against colonialism and racism). If one''s beliefs are too brittle, Thurman claims, they are liable to " break down. Then, all the world hath no meaning and there isn''t any validity of any kind of ideals and so I become a person of great instability." So, Thurman asks, "How can we live with dignity and conviction in a world that is undergoing constant dimensions of shift?" For any dogmatic belief, he suggests, "the time will come when either the individual will have to pull down all the shades and enjoy his darkness--which is his light--or let the content of his belief battle it out in the arena with the content of other beliefs, always maintaining a relationship, a personal relationship, to the validity of the belief-notion." For Thurman, truth is both rational and sentient, and it is not a thing per se but is rooted in and beyond the constant change and conceptualizations of order--it has to do with one''s existential encounter with self-fact in respect to something that flows underneath all time-space manifestations.4 For Thurman, we must find our truths in an involvement "always, constantly, inside and outside in a world that is essential process, that is creative, that is movement." Truth is "a relationship that I as an individual maintain with the facts, with the hopes, the dreams, the people in my world," though they are shifting and often inconstant. The way to find stability in one''s life, or in one''s country, is by coming to terms with life''s inherent mutability, its ever-growing edge.

I shall use as a text this morning those rather familiar words, "You shall know the truth and the truth will make you free." And, of course, the moment we say the word [truth] we think not of a relationship, but we think almost at once of something that is fixed and permanent in the sense of solid; something that is inflexible, and therefore, unyielding. Now, I am proposing in our thinking about the quest for stability that in truth, there is our only authentic basis for stability and therefore for freedom. We are all concerned with stability, personal stability, because in one way or another each of us has sometime, if not at the present moment, experienced a deep sense of instability. This sense of instability is dramatized in our world because we are a part of a changing, shifting order. We are in the midst of worldwide, world-shaking revolutions that affect almost every single aspect of our common life and of our thinking. Any fundamental mood in our world towards a larger sense of meaning for people means the upsetting of age-old supports that have guaranteed the established order. Just to illustrate in one simple instance, simple but fearfully complex.

For many years in a country like India, for instance, the people who were indigenous to the land were under the rule of some others, some outsiders.5 The first people--we don''t know very much about them--those who preceded the coming of the Hindus down through the famous Khyber Pass.6 But when they came they pushed the indigenous people farther south and farther south until they couldn''t get down any farther without getting in the ocean; and there they stood their ground a little and burrowed themselves more deeply in the soil and became--so historians tell us--the outcastes of Hinduism. Now, when the invader came, all of the life that had been going on before was upset, and then sometime after the Mohammedans came, the Moslems came down and began moving into the land, and there the whole pattern of life underwent a radical change, a radical shift always in the interest of trying to guarantee the order as it was before the disturbance, and in that effort to guarantee the order as it was before the disturbance, there is built up a resistance to any change, because all change seems to be a part of that which is disorganizing the life, rather than that which will give to it some sense of stability and a new and enlarged sense of order. After the Moslems, the British East India Company came down and the same process took place, and then after many years of stirring and stirring, the British withdrew--and it depends upon your point of view as to whether you say they withdrew voluntarily or through the result of a pressing invitation. But they withdrew, and when they withdrew, then at last those who are now regarded as the native Indians could say, "Well, this is ours now. We can find stability because that which disturbed us is now removed." But deep within the womb of the country there was still another disturbance going on, and so the logic of the freedom of India from Britain expressed itself in the freedom of the Untouchable from within the framework, you see, so that stability then is always the result of the maintenance of a relationship of meaning and value and significance with that situation, individual, group, ideal, or belief that commends itself to us.

Now let''s break that down for a few minutes. The key word in stability is the word loyalty. So that when I say I am a stable individual--not a stable citizen, just a stable individual--I mean by that, that I count. And I count with reference to some group, some unit, some set of individuals with whom I maintain a continuously significant relationship. Now I become so relaxed and adjusted to that continuing relationship that when that relationship shifts because the group itself is undergoing change, then I become unstable. Let me illustrate what I mean. We all want to feel that we count with our families, that there is a group of people made up of men and women who guarantee us, in the midst of whom we have a sense of persona, a sense of being, so that as long as this group remains intact, as long as this group is not upset, then our relationship with it has the possibility of remaining intact; so long as I am true to it, so long as I''m loyal to it. But when there is a change of fortune, or a change of circumstances in one way or another, or a change of mind and attitude within this primary family group, that results in my not being, with reference to it, the kind of person that I was .

Something has happened; my father has lost his job or my mother has become more nervous than ever, and there are other things that have happened that I don''t quite know about, but I know that the family situation wobbles now, so that when I true7 my mind and my life to it, you see, in an effort to feel that I count, then I find that the thing that I''m truing it to is moving all the time, and that throws me in confusion, and the first thing I say is, "Something is wrong with me. Things aren''t as they used to be." Then if I am convinced that I''m all right, then I say something is wrong with the situation, and suddenly I feel that I''m an alien, that I''m a man without a home, that now there isn''t anybody to confer persona on me. So that I become unstable, because now I have no proof, I don''t count! 8 Or it may be that my own self-confidence is in my own right arm. In my own self-confidence I haven''t ever had a family to guarantee me, so that I have to guarantee myself; I know that if I got this, that I''d have to scrap for it, or if I grew up in a situation in which that were true, I would say to myself, and so as long as I have self-confidence, as long as I can depend upon the authentic character of my own prowess, my own power, I don''t lean on anybody. When I''m in difficulties, I think my own way through. If I need this or that, I supply that need; I owe no man anything, I''m a self-made man! And then something begins to happen to me and now I don''t have anybody to blame, since I am self-sufficient, and self-this and self-that. When I am not able to function in my habitual way, then I feel unstable, then my confidence begins to be undermined; and since I have nowhere I can turn for blame, then I begin to be my own whipping post, and my instability deepens because the more carefully I scrutinize myself and the basis of my former self-confidence, the more deeply I realize that I was mistaken.

Or my stability may be in my ideals; in the inflexible character, that I know that for me these ideals, truths, or honesty, or honor or what have you are valid, and therefore all the world may shift, other men may prove false, but my ideals remain. Then, as long as I''m true to my ideals, and my ideals are fixed and unchanging and unyielding, then all I need to do is to maintain a relationship with them and then . I discover that this is the kind of world in which the ideals upon which men have built their lives.