A Prayer of Thanksgiving

When I was a new chaplain at Big Bend Hospice in 2004, I found in my desk drawer a business card for “God’s Little Helper.” It had the name and contact information of a person I had never met, Rev. Charles Scriven. It did not take long for me to encounter Rev. Scriven at the Hospice House, where he had come to visit a patient that he knew from the community. One of the seasoned nurses at the Hospice House did me the kind favor of introducing me to Rev. Scriven, who over the years became not only an incredible mentor but also a dear friend.  

One of the many things that Rev. Scriven is still teaching me, though he died on Christmas Day in 2023, is to learn from Howard Thurman. Rev. Scriven gave me two of Thurman’s books through the years, “Disciplines of the Spirit,” given to me with gratitude in 2010, and “Meditations of the Heart,” given in 2019 with a blessing, “May our Lord continue to bless your ministry.” 

Both books are filled with words of wisdom about important and real matters of the heart and soul, and practical matters of living well. I received a third book given posthumously September 2025 by his son, Lanse, from his father’s remarkable book collection.  

While I was on a visit to Rev. Scriven’s wife, Jeannetta, in Tampa, his son invited me to his nearby house to see his office adorned with beautiful floor-to-ceiling bookshelves he had built to display his father’s book collection, which was organized by author. He graciously allowed me to pick any one of his father’s books. 

It felt overwhelming as there were so many good books from which to choose, that is, until I remembered Howard Thurman. When I looked for Thurman’s books, I could not find any on the shelves. I asked his son about Howard Thurman’s books, and he directed me to a collection on the back edge of his massive desk. I immediately thought those would not be included in the special offer he was making, but he graciously said, “You may have one, any of them.”  

The choice was difficult. I did not know the content of the book I selected, but the title represented to me what I had learned as most important from Rev. Scriven, and what feels most relevant in our world today. “The Search for Common Ground” was, in Thurman’s words, the most difficult book he had ever untaken. The book embodied an important testimony to his own witness: that “community among all peoples and life forms, where selfhood and interdependency coexist,” is the nature of creation. In short, we need each other. In the foreward, he says profoundly, “I have always wanted to be me, without making it be difficult for you to be you.” 

Howard Thurman, the grandson of slaves, was born in 1899 in Daytona Beach, Florida. His father died when he was only seven and he was raised well by his mother and grandmother. His father had taught him the love of reading which, for Thurman, became a way to stay connected to his beloved father and to endure the hardships of his early life. He was an excellent student who, though weary from literally carrying laundry back and forth between his home, where his mother and grandmother washed, dried, and folded it, to the beach hotels from which he retrieved it, thrived in the classroom. In the afternoons when he helped his grandmother, Nancy, fold clothes in preparation for his trek back to the hotel, he taught her what he had learned in school that day and she taught him that “he was a holy child, precious in the eyes of God.”  

Because black students were only allowed to attend school through the seventh grade, and an eighth-grade education was required to enter high school, Thurman dreaded the end of the seventh grade. He assumed that he would have to get a job. But his principal realized the potential Thurman had and made arrangements to teach him the eighth-grade curriculum necessary for him to go to high school. Thurman passed the test with a perfect score.  

Thurman’s next hurdle was to find a high school that accepted black students and, by the help of a local black doctor in Daytona Beach, he was able to go to a high school in Jacksonville where he excelled. Despite his homesickness, he graduated as class valedictorian. Other sponsors stepped up as he continued his college and seminary education at the top of his class. In time, Thurman became the mentor to many, including Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and an emissary of Mahatma Gandhi, regarding the teaching and implementation of civil disobedience and nonviolent protest. Beyond his university roles and roles as professor and dean at Howard,  Boston University, and Morehouse and Spelman Colleges, he started the first interracial, interdenominational church in the US in 1944, “Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples” in San Francisco, California, which is still ministering to this day.  

In preparation for Thanksgiving, my congregation has been looking at the life and teachings of Howard Thurman and, in particular, what he had to say about gratitude in living. He was a prolific writer and speaker. On the internet you can find multiple ways of learning about his life and teachings, including audio recordings housed at Emory University: video sermons with transcripts; to documentaries at PBS; to books of poetry, philosophy and theology; and quotations from meditations, poems, prayers, and public addresses. This is a good starting place: https://www.bu.edu/thurman/category/meditation/ 

I was deeply moved by the Thurman quotations that my church shared with one another this week:  

“Whatever may be the tensions and stresses of a particular day, there is always lurking close at hand the trailing beauty of forgotten joy or unremembered peace.” 

“Life goes on… Attend to the little graces. Birds still sing. Stars still cast their gentle gleam, …drink in the beauty that is within reach.” 

"Love has no awareness of merit or demerit; it has no scale.... Love loves; this is its nature." 

His “Prayer of Thanksgiving” is eloquent and profound, and I encourage you to read it here and perhaps share it at your Thanksgiving Table: https://www.bu.edu/sth/a-prayer-of-thanksgiving/ 

This Thanksgiving I am grateful that my mentor and dear friend, Rev. Scriven, introduced me to Howard Thurman, whose wisdom deepens my understanding of humanity and God.

I pray that we will find the time to learn from this mystic and sage who steadies us in these uncertain times as we search for common ground.

Happy Thanksgiving to each of you, dear readers.