Jesus and the Disinherited by Howard Thurman- A Book Review

I read this book over the weekend on my trip to Houston so I could participate in the Curriculum Share time with Abbey and her housemates. Mission Year requires that all of the program participants read a series of books that speak to poverty, the inner city, injustice, love and more.

Jesus and the Disinherited by Howard Thurman was reportedly carried around by Martin Luther King, Jr. everywhere he went. He found inspiration within its pages to lead a Civil Rights Movement that our country desperately needed. As I read, I had to keep reminding myself that this book was first published in 1949. Sadly, it seems that not much has changed, aside from some of the language Thurman used which was common to his day.

Abbey was surprised to see the dozens of highlighted quotes in my copy and I was thrilled to engage in this conversation with the Mission Year folks...book studies/clubs are sort of my thing. But if this book were required reading for anyone that serves alongside the "disinherited" of our culture, I believe we would approach ministry with more compassion and depth of knowledge than is often seen. The grandson of a former slave, who grew up in Jim Crow Florida, and was a highly educated, intellectual and close follower of Jesus, has much to say to us even today. 

"FEAR is one of the persistent hounds of hell that dog the footsteps of the poor, the dispossessed, the disinherited...The ever-present fear that besets the vast poor, the economically and socially insecure, is a fear of still a different breed. It is a climate closing in; it is like the fog in San Francisco or in London. It is nowhere in particular yet everywhere."

There are numerous quotes that I will return to over and over again, but the most profound image I was left with is a hypothetical story that Thurman relates in an attempt to help the reader understand the mindset of the dispossessed:  What if you were one of five children and all the children in your family received a new pair of shoes, except you? You might be upset, but you'd probably console yourself by saying, 'Well, I'll get my turn next.' But then comes the day when everyone in your family has a large slice of cake and again your are skipped over. This pattern continues time after time with no one else being denied gifts, treats and small pleasures, except you. Your indignation, anger, hatred and even shame begin to rise until you start to question if it's because you are somehow "not worthy" or possibly "less than" and you, in fact, deserve the slights and betrayals.

This is the life of the perpetually disinherited. As the third of four children, I have always had a profound (too profound, actually!) sense of fairness. In my mind, absolutely everything should always be fair and equal. This has, as you can imagine, provided me with hours and hours of frustration, lost relationship, pain, anger and hurt over the years. When someone says, "Well...life's not fair!" I want to scream, "But it should be!"

Somehow, in many of our American Christian churches, we've bought into this idea that everyone can succeed if they just pull themselves up by their bootstraps and that each person has the same opportunities as the next. My reply...and after reading Thurman's book, I think he'd agree...is always, "But you're under the assumption that everyone has a pair of boots."