THE YEAR 1993 did not start well. In fact, New Year’s Day found me ill at ease, hurting, coughing, and feverish, on an airplane bringing my family back a day early from Miami.
I had planned to work hard while in Florida. My main task there would be to teach my annual Christmas tennis clinic at the Doral, where I am now international tennis director—having relinquished my leadership of the main tennis program some time ago. I looked forward to working diligently with the guests. But I also hoped to squeeze in as many rounds of golf as I could, on one or another of the four excellent courses at the Doral.
A cold front was pushing its way south across the eastern United States, but near Miami we were bathed in sunshine and warm weather. Although Camera had been reluctant to leave her Christmas tree and most of her presents behind, she seemed ecstatic to be in the sun. Her happiness made Jeanne and me feel all the more blessed.
In fact, I was out on the golf course with Jeanne’s father, John Moutoussamy, and a Canadian friend, Stanley Kivenko, when I first noticed that I was having some difficulty breathing. I couldn’t understand why; we were riding comfortably from tee to tee in a golf cart, so there was no reason for me to feel tired. Then I started to cough. The cough persisted. From the seventh green, as I waited to putt, I took out my cellular telephone and called my main AIDS physician, Dr. Henry Murray, in New York. He advised me to see a doctor as soon as possible.
Later that day, I went to see my AIDS physician in Miami, Dr. Barry Baker. After examining me, he ordered a chest X ray. It revealed nothing out of the ordinary.
The next morning, I went to Miami Baptist Hospital to seek the advice of Dr. Michael Collins. Fourteen years ago, in New York, Dr. Collins had treated me for the heart disease that had started my sorry medical record. He examined me, and ordered an echocardiogram, which uses sound waves to study the action of the heart. At this point, I still assumed that the cause of my shortness of breath was a lack of blood going to the heart, depriving the heart of oxygen. In New York, I had found out that one of the arteries leading to my heart had virtually shut down, and I had thought of having it opened in Miami. Dr. Collins and I would have to decide on one of three procedures. In an angioplasty, he would insert a balloon into the artery and then inflate the balloon. He could use a laser beam to melt the deposits clogging the artery. Or he might perform yet another invasive procedure, using a sort of Roto-Rooter on the deposits.
After his examination and the echocardiogram, however, Dr. Collins decided that the problem was not with my heart but in my lungs. What exactly was wrong, he couldn’t say. Clearing the artery should wait until my lungs were healthy again.
The next day, still coughing and short of breath, I tried to get another X ray of my chest. However, when the physician learned that I had just had one, he refused my request; chest X rays are not done every day, he insisted. His refusal actually lifted my spirits, and I went out cheerfully to play a round of golf with a foursome that included former American tennis great Butch Buchholz, whom I have known since my senior year of high school in St. Louis, Missouri. Again I enjoyed the outing in the warm sunshine, but again I was bothered by an inexplicable shortness of breath. I began to think that perhaps a cold was coming on. Perhaps I had simply breathed too much bitingly frigid air on Christmas Eve in New York. I told myself not to worry. With the daytime temperature in Miami resolutely in the eighties, I looked for my symptoms to lift within a day or two.
That night, when we had dinner at what some people call Miami’s most famous restaurant, Joe’s Stone Crab, I enjoyed feasting on the delicious specialty of the house. Later, I went to bed feeling pretty fine, except for some slight coughing and just a hint of congestion.
On New Year’s Eve morning, I went out for my last day of tennis clinics for the Doral. Even with my cough and chest pains, I looked forward to a full two days of golf before we headed back to the wintry cold of New York. After my last clinic, I headed for the links. I played a decent round, but found myself depending on a golf cart to move myself to the ball. I was beginning to recognize that in addition to anginal discomfort, the mere act of drawing air into my lungs was causing me some pain. I certainly could not take any deep breaths.
After finishing my round of golf, I stopped by the hotel swimming pool to catch a glimpse of Camera enjoying the water and the warm weather. Then, feeling drowsy, I quietly retired to my room alone for a nap.
That evening, Jeanne, Camera, and I went to dinner in the hotel coffee shop with Jeanne’s parents, two of their friends, her brother Claude, and her sister-in-law. After dinner, we all went over to Claude’s home to bring in the New Year. But midnight did not find me there. At some point, after watching me try to breathe without discomfort, Jeanne suggested that we head back to New York the next day, if she could arrange a flight. I agreed to do so, and around ten-thirty we left Claude’s so that we could call the airlines and pack.
I was drowsy again when I reached our room, but Camera insisted that we turn on the television and watch the ball drop in Times Square to ring in the New Year. Earlier in the month I had taken her there and painted a festive picture for her of the coming New Year’s Eve celebrations. Now, all excited, she was determined to see that ball drop. Although the hour was late, way past her bedtime, Jeanne and I had no trouble giving in to her, and we enthusiastically joined the countdown into 1993. Then we all went happily to sleep.
At five in the morning, I awoke with a start. I was on fire, burning up. I took my temperature: 101.9 degrees. Around eight in the morning, Jeanne called Dr. Murray in New York. He advised that we should see a doctor in Miami, but we both wanted to return home that day.
With the aid of nothing more exotic than Extra-Strength Tylenol, I brought down my temperature and relieved the other symptoms sufficiently to fly back to New York. From the airport, I went straight to New York Hospital, where Dr. Murray was waiting for me. His examination did not settle the matter. Speculating that I probably had a form of atypical pneumonia, he put me on a powerful antibiotic, azithromycin. I started with two huge red capsules, then continued taking the drug through the weekend.
It had no effect on me whatsoever. More feverish than ever, coughing badly, and miserable, I returned to the hospital on Monday. I saw Dr. Thomas King, a pulmonary specialist, who ordered a bronchoscopy; this procedure alone could give the answers we wanted. Dr. King warned me that the procedure, while painless, is extremely unpleasant. A local, topical anesthetic was applied to my nasal passage, and I swallowed a dose to anesthetize my throat. A thick tube, about a third of an inch in diameter, was forced down my nose and into my lungs. At the end of the tube was a tiny television camera. To allow me to breathe, another tube went down my throat into my esophagus.
Dr. King had said that with the tubes in me, I would feel certain that I could not breathe, but in fact I would be able to. He advised me not to panic. I tried to be reassured by his confidence, but a minute or two passed before I gained my own. Listening just outside the door, Jeanne told me later, she heard the most awful gurgling and heavy breathing as I struggled for breath while the camera mucked around my lungs, rummaging in what looked like a dirty sponge.
The procedure lasted between thirty and forty minutes. As he watched the television monitor, Dr. King spoke into a microphone and recorded his observations. That is how I found out I was suffering from the dreaded PCP, or Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, about which I knew something.
Thus far, aside from the toxoplasmosis that uncovered the fact that I have AIDS, I had avoided every one of the opportunistic diseases that, in combination with the presence of HIV in the body, define the condition known as AIDS. Now I had one of the most feared. Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia is a very rare form of pneumonia, found in the past mainly among traditionally impoverished East European immigrants with already severely compromised immune systems. The disease acquired a fresh notoriety with AIDS. In fact, my shivering and burning fever were trademarks of PCP infection. In the last stages of their illness, AIDS sufferers often endure raging fevers all day and all night.
Fortunately, Dr. Murray assured me, my case was not particularly serious. I would definitely survive this bout. And New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center was in the forefront in the world in research on this disease. Eight years ago, I probably would have been dead by this time.
His words encouraged me, but I was still miserable. Sweaty with fever and chills, coughing and shivering, I lay under my blankets, feeling drained and depressed. As if the bronchoscopy had not been enough, the nurses couldn’t find a vein from which to draw my blood for a test. They stabbed my arm repeatedly, coming up dry each time. To complete the test, which had to be done as close to the time of the bronchoscopy as possible, I endured a rectal examination, a procedure that has never lifted anyone’s spirits.
After an hour or so, Tylenol again brought down my temperature and gave me some relief. Then, intravenously, I was put on a regimen of the drug pentamidine, an antiprotozoal agent that has proven quite effective in treating PCP. At one time, I had taken it regularly in aerosolized form precisely to ward off infection from PCP. Now I was to stay on pentamidine for at least two weeks. This was not onerous; the side effects are tolerable. Perhaps the most common of these is an elevation of one’s potassium level above the ideal amount. Another side effect, potentially more serious, is interference with the heart’s electrical system. Yet another is the anesthetizing of the taste buds (in this respect, pentamidine is like chemotherapy). Since I entered the hospital, I had been eating by the numbers.
ON THE SIXTEENTH floor of a wing of New York Hospital, I sat in a room named after the late Greek shipping magnate Stavros Niarchos. I didn’t ask for the room; it was assigned to me. Undoubtedly it was the most luxurious hospital room I had ever had, and I have had quite a few. Apart from an intravenous feeding stand parked discreetly in a corner, my iron bed, mechanized and grimly practical, was perhaps the sole reminder that I was in a hospital. The elegant wood floors are stained dark; the ceilings are high; the furniture, which includes a sofa upholstered in leather, would hardly disgrace the living room of a fine house.
Dr. David E. Rogers, one of the most eminent teaching physicians there—he holds an endowed professorship in medicine—stopped by to see me one morning.
“A beautiful room,” he said.
“Yes,” I responded. “It’s really special.”
“I remember this room from my early days here as a doctor. In fact, I had a patient in here once. A young senator. John F. Kennedy, no less. That was a long time ago.”
Through one set of tall windows in this corner room I could see, to the south, the skyscrapers of midtown. I could see the silver chevrons of the Chrysler Building; the blunter summit of the old Pan Am Building, now the Met Life Building; the austere, fluted elegance of the Empire State Building. Directly below my window passes the East River. Mainly a somber brown and green, the dark water glitters and gleams here and there when sunlight flickers off its surface. Moving in each direction, boats ply the river. Downstream, they pass under the latticework of the Queensboro Bridge at Fifty-ninth Street. On Roosevelt Island, directly to the east, the fields were damp green. In the early morning, through the haze of the rising sun, I could see mist rising from the grass. In the evening, darkness swept quickly over the island.
By choice, I had few visitors. At first, Jeanne came three or four times a day; after a few days, when I was better, she came less often but stayed longer, hours on end. I saw Camera only twice. We do not want to disrupt her schedule. Once, after Jeanne and Dr. Murray literally smuggled her into the hospital hidden in their cloaks, I spent a wonderful hour with her in a conference room elsewhere in the building. She was fascinated by a plastic model of a heart I brought her, and by the mice in their cages, used by Dr. Murray and his colleagues in medical experiments. A few friends have come by. Cheerfully bearing belated Christmas presents for everyone, Donald Dell came up from Potomac, Maryland, to see me. My two close physician friends, Eddie Mandeville and Doug Stein, stopped by. Frank Deford visited me, and Alvin Schragis, whose wife’s family owns the Doral. Still another friend, Dr. Paul Smith, who is pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Brooklyn Heights, also came to see me. One day, he brought along Andrew Young, who was visiting New York. Before they left, in a moving moment, Paul, Andy, Jeanne, and I held hands in a circle and prayed.
These are some of my friends, but only a few of my friends, most of whom had no idea I was in the hospital. Jeanne and I kept my illness out of the news, where my name seemed to have been everywhere lately, at year’s end. The honors and awards had come thick and fast. They pleased me, but they were not nearly as consoling as the visits of these friends, and the knowledge that people I have known for a lifetime were thinking about me and wishing me well. Whatever happens, I know that I am not going to be alone at the end. That is not to be my fate. Of course, in a sense, we are always alone at the end.
I have invested in friendship all my life. I have been patient and attentive, forgiving and considerate, even with some people who probably did not deserve it. It did not take an enormous sacrifice, however; for whatever reason, it came almost naturally. I made the investment of time and energy, and now the dividends were being returned to me in kindness.
For once, at Jeanne’s encouragement (or was it her command?), I had left my cellular telephone at home. I made few telephone calls, and received fewer. I remember calling Randall Robinson to tell him that we had to do more about Haiti; we had to press the initiative we had won with President Clinton’s election. The African American community, I thought, had to extend its arms in welcome to the refugees, the same way the Cubans in Miami welcome those refugees fleeing Castro. We had been far too remote from the struggle of the people of Haiti. Randall was in complete agreement with me.
On a table in my hospital room, coincidentally, was an invitation to the inauguration of President William Jefferson Clinton on Wednesday, January 20. I was touched and grateful to be invited, but I did not plan to go. I would not have attended the event even if I had been well, which I was not. I looked forward to going home to Jeanne and Camera and spending a few days in quiet reading and reflection, while my strength returned. I meant no offense or criticism of the pomp and splendor of the inauguration; I was a Clinton supporter and I am happy to see him president. But I wanted to be in my own home. Of course, I intended to watch the inaugural events on television.
Stan Smith called, and we talked about tennis matters, which had seemed far away until then. We talked about a certain controversial father of a certain promising young woman tennis player; some people find the man offensive, even intolerable, because of his often harsh behavior both to his daughter’s opponents and to the young woman herself. Because of him, the tennis establishment may move to curb the behavior of relatives of tennis players.
After the telephone call, I lay in bed and thought about tennis. The behavior of some adults is quite amazing. I remember one day years ago, at the Doral in Florida, almost coming to blows with a father. We had organized an informal tennis tournament for kids staying at the resort. One boy, about eleven years old, fought hard but lost his match. He walked off the court disconsolately. I watched him go up to his father, who promptly punched him in the head. I was stunned.
“Don’t do that!” I said, quietly but as sternly as I could.
He turned and glared at me. “Who the hell are you,” he said, “to tell me what to do to my kid?”
“Do it again and I’ll have you evicted from this place.”
“How dare you threaten me?” he shouted. “I’ll report you to the manager!”
“I hope you do,” I said. “You’ll be out of here a lot faster.”
People like that sometimes destroy the joy of sport and the joy in the lives of young people. Victory in a tennis match, money won in a tournament: these are not so important as good health, the honest affection and respect of friends, the love of one’s wife or husband, and the spicy innocence of one’s child or children.
I also remember one evening with Jeanne and Camera at a hotel in Eleuthera, the Bahamas. We were under the stars, the hour was late, way past ten o’clock, and Camera was still up, but what did we care? She was happy after a day in the sun and the sea, and now she was dancing to the music of a calypso band with a little friend she had just met. Jeanne was happy, too, talking easily to the wife of a musician she had met earlier in our stay and liked at once. I was with them, but alone. As I sat in an armchair watching my little daughter dance and my wife’s face sparkle with life and joy, a wave of emotion like one of the waves of the ocean a few feet away from us washed over me, and I started to cry. I cried quietly, but Jeanne turned her face and saw me. The smile left her face but then it quickly returned, not the same kind of smile but another, because she knew that at that moment I was happy. She knew I was crying not only out of sorrow but also out of joy, and that the joy was so powerful that it hurt. My joy was that I was there, on that beach under those stars listening to that music and watching the two people I loved more than anyone or anything in the world, and I did not want that feeling of perfect joy ever to end.
THERE, IN THE corner room on the sixteenth floor of the hospital, as I kept company with the memory or the spirit or perhaps only the ghost of John F. Kennedy, I knew that what matters are the genuine consolations of life. What else will sustain you in the dark hours?
These days I read even more than usual, and I listen to music much of the time. I have always been an avid reader of books and also of newspapers and magazines of all types. I have always craved information, and my strong interest in national and international affairs has only intensified in recent years. I like to know something about everything, from economics and geography to science and philosophy. I want information, not to enliven exchanges at dinner parties or in some other way to show off my collection of facts before less-informed people but because—as I tell myself—if I am proud to be a citizen of the world I must know as much as possible about the world. So I love to read several newspapers a day and several magazines a week, and books fascinate me. I read relatively little fiction, but I like poetry. Biography is a favorite area of mine, and politics, sociology, psychology, and anthropology also appeal to me strongly. Lately, however, I have spent more time reading the Bible than any other single book. I began reading the Bible while I was young, a long time before my illnesses. Now, not surprisingly, its words appeal to me more than ever.
I love almost all kinds of music. Certainly I love the symphonies of Beethoven, which comfort and inspire me. I remember an idyllic day many years ago, an autumn day in Essen, Germany, when I spent the long, serene afternoon playing golf, and then listened in the evening, as if I had never heard the strains before, to Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony. Germany in the fall, and Beethoven’s Sixth: the right music in the right place at the right time. I listen to jazz, too, which I love; the trumpet playing of Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie, both of whom I had known personally, both now gone. Also from my past, from the 1960s, when such music gained a hearing in America, I turn to the recordings of the Red Army Chorus singing religious songs of the Russian Orthodox church. I love to listen to Eric Clapton playing his guitar; the man is a master.
In the end, however, the music that moves me most now, as in my youth, is gospel music. To listen to gospel music is to be invited deep into the roots of African American history and culture, past the blues and the spirituals of the nineteenth century and beyond even that era into our African past. My grandmother used to tell me that some of the black elders in her youth would gather in a circle for what they called a “ring-shout,” accompanied by the beating of a drum in a slow, steady cadence as the elders slowly shuffled about, releasing their rage and frustration in music and dance. I hear those sounds, that rage and that beauty, in gospel music.
Music links me effortlessly to religion and philosophy, or at least to reflection and meditation, which I prize. When I played the trumpet as a boy, I used to think of its place in the Bible, of the playing of Joshua, whose trumpets made the walls of Jericho fall down, and of Gabriel, whose trumpet would announce the end of the world and the coming of Judgment Day.
In the end, as much as I love reading and music, and although love given and received by human beings is perhaps the only sure token of God’s love and God’s grace, I understand that the deepest consolation comes from one’s relationship to the divine.
Some people have curious ideas about God. Many letters I receive speak of passages in the Bible that are supposed to have almost miraculous potential. Read this chapter or this verse and you will surely be saved! Study this book of the New Testament and feel the power of God sweep over you! In the summer of 1992, I had just finished dinner at the Sleepy Hollow Country Club when a man came up to our table. Holding a baby in his arms, he knelt down beside me.
“You are Arthur Ashe, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Arthur, have you taken Jesus Christ as your savior?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I sincerely hope that you have, Arthur. Only Jesus can save you.”
“The church is a very strong influence in my life,” I said.
“Are you a Christian, Arthur? I hope you are a true Christian.”
“I’ve been a Christian all my life. A practical Christian. All my life. I’m fine, thank you.”
With the qualifying word “practical,” I slipped past that man’s zealotry, which was possibly the zealotry of the recently converted. He may be burning with more religious zeal than I can muster, but I do not believe he is any more of a true Christian than I.
As I told him, religion has been a part of my life since my youth. Before I finished high school, I had worshiped for appreciable lengths of time at the churches of at least four different denominations. I had started at my father’s church, First Presbyterian, at the corner of Monroe and Catherine streets in Richmond. At the same time, while my mother was alive, and later, when she was dead, I often went out to her church, Westwood Baptist in Westwood. Shortly after she died, my father brought in a respectable woman of mature years, Mrs. Otis Berry, to take care of us. Mrs. Berry was Episcopalian—not AME, but Episcopalian—and even more devout than my father and mother. She often took me to St. James Episcopal, at that time one of a handful of Episcopal churches in Richmond. Then, in my senior year in high school, in St. Louis, Missouri, I attended a Roman Catholic church. I did so because the people with whom I lived, Richard Hudlin and his family, were Catholic.
I don’t think I was more devout as a child than any other normal boy. I chafed at going to church on Sunday when the sun was shining and summer was at its height, but I had no choice; my father, who himself went only from time to time, and my stepmother, who never missed a Sunday, insisted that I go. At home, the Bible was always at hand.
As I grew older, but still a boy, class and race began to affect my religious zeal. The class divisions among the black denominations and within the black denominations began to bother me. If God and religion were involved, how could churches divide along socioeconomic lines? Why were the Episcopalians more prestigious than the Presbyterians, and the Baptists less? I was also perplexed by the fact that the lower one went on the economic scale, the more demonstrative and impassioned the worshiping often became.
Every Sunday morning I could see and hear on television Dr. Theodore F. Adams, minister of the huge, white First Baptist Church. That church confirmed its domination and its strict racial identity by its presence on Richmond’s Monument Avenue, the avenue of Confederate heroes, with its statues of Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis, J. E. B. Stuart, and Robert E. Lee. Didn’t we in the black churches read the same Bible as the whites in First Baptist? Didn’t the whites know how Jesus felt about the equality of human beings, about justice, and about the meek inheriting the earth?
By the time I reached junior high school and took the ponderings of our Sunday school more seriously, such thinking began to complicate my faith, though not to wreck it. Still later, I reached the point where I knew I was hearing nothing new spoken in the pulpits, that the preaching had ceased to provoke me intellectually or emotionally. At some point I decided that all the moral instruction of the churches I attended, especially the Protestant churches, came down to loyalty to the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have others do unto you. If one needed that rule developed, turn to the Ten Commandments. If one wished a deeper explication, read and study the Sermon on the Mount. However, I know that I was never so arrogant as to disparage the preachers or their churches. I simply put them into perspective, while continuing to respect their authority.
When I started playing tennis seriously, I tried to follow my father’s wishes about churchgoing and made it my business to be aware of the place of religion in the lives of most of the people I played with. I found out that American players were mainly Episcopalian, Presbyterian, or Methodist. I couldn’t play in the South, where the preponderance of white Baptists lived, so I didn’t meet many Baptist players. Of course, almost all the Latin American players, and many of the Europeans, were Catholic. Because of my year in St. Louis, I thought I understood something of their lives away from the tennis court. I thought I had some degree of entry into their psychology; certainly they were more familiar for my having attended mass.
My first trip abroad as a player, to England to play at Wimbledon in 1963, was the beginning of years of religious exploration for me. I discovered for the first time the close connection between the Church of England and the Episcopalians back home. However, the fact that Queen Elizabeth II was not only the head of state of Great Britain but also the head of the Church of England jolted me into my first true bout of religious skepticism. How could a secular ruler also be, ex officio, the head of a religion? It made little sense to me, but this seemingly illogical arrangement was part of the grandeur of Great Britain and its culture, which I greatly admired.
On the tour, I made a point to visit not only museums but also historic places of worship. I went to St. Paul’s in London and St. Peter’s in Rome. I visited celebrated Islamic places of worship in Cairo, Teheran, and elsewhere, and Buddhist temples in Thailand. The more non-Western the religion, the more I was fascinated by its places of worship and its tenets. My good friends and fellow tennis professionals Torben Ulrich of Denmark and Jeff Borowiak, an American like me but one gifted (he is a fine pianist) and curious, were crucial to my development of a broader understanding of religion. Borowiak and I read The Three Pillars of Zen and sought to probe into its meanings. We even tried to apply the lessons of Zen to tennis, as did a popular book, The Inner Game of Tennis; I certainly think it helped me to concentrate.
I was able to compare the beliefs of other peoples in other parts of the world to what I was taught growing up in Richmond. I think I grew, but I also came to know the feeling of alienation, when you come home and your family and friends expect you to be the same but you are not.
As powerful and persistent as the African American church has been in my life, its influence has been tempered by my own life experiences. That is an essential part of the pragmatism I try to bring to my life. I do not have the rock-solid, literal belief of my aunts, but I do not think of myself as being incapacitated as a result. My aunts had probably never known anyone who was Buddhist or Shinto. Like my aunts, I believe in God, in a Supreme Being, and I believe in the Bible. I also choose to dwell on the common areas shared by the religions I have known, rather than their differences. Meditation, contemplative states of mind, personal reflection, prayer—all are part of Catholicism and of Buddhism, Methodism, and other religions.
I suppose that the religion I practice now is some mixture of all these influences. I do not place dogmatic faith in any single religion. Each one claims authenticity and uniqueness, as far as I can tell; which means that many of them are bluffing, since they cannot all be the religion of God. I do not hold their grand claims against them, but I cannot imagine shifting from Presbyterianism to another on the basis of its credibility. No; I would rather see myself as open to all religions, even if each religion seems to demand my exclusive attention.
One thing I know for certain is that I cannot know much. My mind clearly has a scientific bent but I know the limits of both science and my mind. Some time ago, Life magazine published a feature story about religion. “Is there a God?” the cover asked. Chosen as one of the respondents, I tried to make two main points.
First, I believe that I am part of a continuum of life that has existed, exists, and will exist into future generations. At most, I am only a ripple in this mighty river of life, but I am nevertheless a part of it, and a unique part, as well. Second, I cannot believe that life started haphazardly. Life must have come out of a design, from a First Mover, a Prime Cause. I believe in an original source or cause of life, which we call God, and which may have evolved over the billions of years of time. I do not believe that because we cannot scientifically and objectively prove the existence of God, we can therefore dispense with religion and the Bible. I know that I turn my back on God only at my peril. This I shall never do.
IN RECENT YEARS, Jeanne and I have found true solace in the teachings of the preacher, mystic, philosopher, and theologian Howard Thurman. I was introduced to the writings and tape-recorded sermons of Dr. Thurman by my good friend the Reverend Jefferson Rogers, with whom I later worked to help save Thurman’s birthplace from destruction and to restore it as a memorial to him. One day, we hope, it will be on the National Register of Historic Places. I certainly believe that Thurman deserves such recognition. Andrew Young is also a devotee of Thurman’s writings, as is Dr. Paul Smith of the First Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn Heights. In the past months, I have spent some happy hours talking with Paul about Thurman and his works.
Thurman was born in Daytona Beach, Florida, in 1900. His childhood was marred by the death of his father and by Thurman’s sense of being out of place in the world; he took refuge in nature, in the woods near his home, the Halifax River, and the mighty Atlantic itself. However, he shone as a student in high school and at Morehouse College in Atlanta, from which he graduated in 1921. Later, he trained for the ministry at the Rochester Theological Seminary in New York. In 1926, he took his first position, as minister of Mt. Zion Baptist Church in Oberlin, Ohio. In 1932, he joined the faculty at Howard University as a professor of theology and, later, dean of Rankin Chapel.
In 1944, Thurman gave up his professorship to co-found the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples, in San Francisco. By all accounts, this was the first integrated congregation in America—that is, integrated in its leadership as well as in its following. Then, in 1953, in a daring move, Boston University selected Thurman to be dean of its Marsh Chapel. That same year, his influence was so wide that a panel of judges at Life magazine named him one of the twelve greatest preachers in America. Martin Luther King, Jr., it is said, always carried in his briefcase a copy of Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited. Toward the end of his life, Thurman returned to San Francisco. A prolific writer and lecturer, he published more than twenty books before his death in 1981.
For me, Thurman is the supreme example of the black American’s capacity for achieving spiritual growth and maturity despite the incessant blows of racism. Born in the shadow of slavery, black and poor, he developed his understanding of the human and the divine to such an extent that he influenced thousands of people; Thurman became, as Jesse Jackson accurately and elegantly called him, “a teacher of teachers, a leader of leaders, a preacher of preachers.” He did so by opening himself to a wide range of ideas and influences unlimited by race or nationality, borrowed gratefully from this religion or that philosophy. From his childhood, his sense of religion was brilliantly colored by poetry and mysticism. When he found an intellectual basis for this tendency in the book Finding the Trail of Life by Rufus Jones, a Quaker philosopher-mystic on the faculty at Haverford College, he sought out Jones for guidance. In 1929, Jones accepted him as a special student. His months at Haverford, Thurman later said, were “a crucial experience, a watershed from which flowed much of the thought and endeavor to which I was to commit the rest of my working life.”
In 1935, a visit to the “colored” lands of Burma, Ceylon, and India in a delegation of African Americans also proved powerfully influential. In a meeting with Mohandas K. Gandhi, the Mahatma sharply questioned Thurman and his companions about black America, its acceptance of Christianity in spite of the destructiveness of Christians, its need to accept nonviolence, or satyagraha, and to emphasize morality in its quest for justice. At the Khyber Pass, Thurman also underwent a mystical experience, “as close to a vision as I ever had.” This visit to the East was crucial in Thurman’s development of his identity as a Christian mystic and preacher dedicated to the exploration of the complexities of the self and of the divine, as well as to exposing the spurious nature of most of the barriers that separate human beings.
Little in Dr. Thurman’s teaching is clearly original. Like most ministers, he borrows readily from the work of other ministers and thinkers. His power lies, on the one hand, in his eloquent fusions of ideas concerning the self, society, and the divine, and, on the other hand, in the appropriateness of his teachings to the problems that we face every day. Although Thurman was an African American, his writings make few references to race, or concessions to the idea of race. Like Rufus Jones, he spurned social divisions based on race, class, and gender. And yet his mysticism is of a practical, active kind, rather than one that leads to seclusiveness and denial. Spirituality for him must be a dynamic force, gathered and refined in solitude but applied in the world for the betterment of humanity.
The epigraph to one section of his book Meditations of the Heart captures something of both the substance and style of his ministry. In graphic images, Thurman describes the integrity of the self and the determination that should move each individual to guard and nurture that self, which is our one sure conduit to God. Thurman wrote:
There is in every person an inward sea, and in that sea there is an island and on that island there is an altar and standing guard before that altar is the “angel with the flaming sword.” Nothing can get by that angel to be placed upon that altar unless it has the mark of your inner authority. Nothing passes “the angel with the flaming sword” to be placed upon your altar unless it be a part of “the fluid area of your consent.” This is your crucial link with the Eternal.
Aside from the Bible, Dr. Thurman’s two dozen or so volumes are the most important books to me both in my moments of crisis and in my extended struggle with disease. First, Thurman confirms my faith in God. “There is in God,” he insists, “strength sufficient for all my needs whatever they may be.” He notes how virtually all the religions of the world affirm this point, no matter how each religion interprets or represents God. Divine power is sufficient to aid every human being, no matter what his or her trials and needs. This belief is true of all the major religions, including Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Taoism, and Buddhism. One may doubt one’s acceptance of God, or one’s understanding of God, but one must never doubt God’s sovereign power.
Dr. Thurman’s concept of “centering down” also appeals to me. It is both a practical process I try to employ and an idea about the mind, the soul, and the world. In one of his many prayer-poems, he wrote:
How good it is to center down!
To sit quietly and see one’s self pass by!
The streets of our minds seethe with endless traffic;
Our spirits resound with clashings, with noisy silences,
While something deep within hungers and thirsts for the still moment and the resting lull.
With full intensity we seek, ere the quiet passes, a fresh sense of order in our living;
A direction, a strong sure purpose that will structure our confusion and bring meaning in our chaos.…
Resembling Zen Buddhist teachings about meditation, but also akin to the Christian meditative tradition, centering down is the process of bringing oneself to the state of serenity that would permit the believer to gain insight for the purpose of drawing closer to God. Centering down is not the same as prayer. Rather, it often precedes prayer. Dr. Thurman speaks approvingly somewhere of a rabbi who once suggested to him that genuine prayer is less an agency than the consequence or result of an inward journey or a centering down inside oneself. Prayer then has a chance of developing into a genuine dialogue with God, rather than the whining and importuning that it often becomes.
Much has happened in my life, but Dr. Thurman’s teaching helps me to maintain control despite these changes. In fact, he insists we remember that the self is not static but constantly changing in accordance with new episodes and facts involving the individual. The self is not a purely ethereal or a purely physical entity but one composed of earthly as well as transcendental properties. Thus any journey into the self, any effort at centering down, must take into account new facts and events in the individual’s life; all important new “self-facts” must be integrated harmoniously into one’s self-image. Such exploration must not be undertaken in willful avoidance of these facts, as if they did not exist. As a devoted pragmatist, I relish the practicality of this teaching, how it respects the concrete aspects of existence even as it facilitates a search for divine grace. In my case, heart disease and AIDS are absolute facts that I must integrate into my sense of my own reality, my self. Mysticism is not escapism, in Dr. Thurman’s view. Mysticism is aware of its own evanescence, its slippery, delusional nature, which can prevent someone seeking grace from ever attaining it.
As I face heart disease and AIDS, perhaps the most important concept offered by Dr. Thurman is the idea of the sacrament of pain, or the ministry of pain, as he calls it elsewhere. No doubt this is his attempt to answer the most haunting and perplexing question of Christianity and of many other religions: Why does a benevolent God tolerate or even encourage the presence of suffering in the world? Collectively, black Americans (and other oppressed peoples) have often asked God this question. “What did we do to deserve slavery? What did we do to deserve a century of segregation? Didn’t our famed love of religion, our adoration of God, count for anything with the divine?” Those questions are woven into the fabric of historical African American religion and religious music In the spirituals or sorrow songs, mainly in coded ways, they are posed again and again.
Dr. Thurman distinguishes between pain and suffering that might be deserved, as a response to evil deeds, and the more enigmatic kind, which seems unearned, gratuitous. He believes that humanity is protected and enfranchised by its participation in this innocent suffering. In his meditation “Pain Has a Ministry,” he raises the possibility that “pain has a ministry which adds to the sum total of life’s meaning and, more importantly, to its fulfillment.” Nevertheless, he sees as a danger the idea that a specific kind of pain might be sent into the life of an individual in order to perform a ministry in his or her life. Indulged, this idea can lead to fatalism and despair. God certainly did not give me AIDS. Still, Thurman writes, “any tragedy has inherent in it positive good.… The pain of life may teach us to understand life and, in our understanding of life, to love life. To love life truly is to be whole in all one’s parts; and to be whole in all one’s parts is to be free and unafraid.”
Believing that pain has a purpose, I do not question either its place in the universe or my fate in becoming so familiar with pain through disease. Quite often, people who mean well will inquire of me whether I ever ask myself, in the face of my diseases, “Why me?” I never do. If I ask “Why me?” as I am assaulted by heart disease and AIDS, I must ask “Why me?” about my blessings, and question my right to enjoy them. The morning after I won Wimbledon in 1975 I should have asked “Why me?” and doubted that I deserved the victory. If I don’t ask “Why me?” after my victories, I cannot ask “Why me?” after my setbacks and disasters. I also do not waste time pleading with God to make me well. I was brought up to believe that prayer is not to be invoked to ask God for things for oneself, or even for others. Rather, prayer is a medium through which I ask God to show me God’s will, and to give me strength to carry out that will. God’s will alone matters, not my personal desires or needs. When I played tennis, I never prayed for victory in a match. I will not pray now to be cured of heart disease or AIDS.
I do not brood on the prospect of dying soon. I am not afraid of death. Perhaps fear will come to haunt me when the moment of death is closer. On the other hand, perhaps I will be even less fearful, more calm and at peace. I think of my lack of fear as being, in some ways, different from true courage. My bouts of surgery have made me a veteran in fighting death. Familiarity has not bred contempt of death but has given me practice in learning to face it calmly. In any event, the courage I yearn for is that described by Dr. Thurman: “There is a quiet courage that comes from an inward spring of confidence in the meaning and significance of life. Such courage is an underground river, flowing far beneath the shifting events of one’s experience, keeping alive a thousand little springs of action.”
I think that we must do our best to face death with dignity. I hope that I can be strong when my time comes. A true hero in facing death was Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, once vice-president of the United States and, in 1968, candidate for the presidency against Richard Nixon. Ten years later, as he faced the final onslaught of death by cancer at his house on the shore of Lake Waverly, near Minneapolis, Senator Humphrey’s glowing optimism, even ebullience, was an example of true heroism I will never forget. I remember how it was said of him that in his splendid career as a liberal he taught us how to live, and that in his magnificent battle with cancer he taught us later how to die. I hope that I learned something from his example and can emulate it when my time comes.
I believe with Dr. Thurman that “death is an event in life. It is something that occurs in life rather than something that occurs to life.” Death is but one of many occurrences in life, “none of which exhausts life or determines it.” I believe, too, “that what a man discovers about the meaning of life … need not undergo any change as he meets death.” So I go calmly on with my life. Keeping as busy as my health allows, I press on with my modest efforts at striving and achieving.
Above all, I have faith in God. Dr. Thurman has looked at the fear of death and reminded us of the infinite power of divine grace. “When I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,” he writes, alluding to the Twenty-third Psalm, “I will fear no evil because God is with me.” God’s presence “makes the difference, because it cancels out the threatening element of the threat, the evil element of the evil.” God does not promise a pleasant end; far from it. “Of course I may linger, or I may die; I may suffer acutely, or all my days may rest upon an undercurrent of muted agony.” Nevertheless, God is sufficient: “I shall not be overcome; God is with me. My awareness of God’s presence may sound like magic, it may seem to some to be the merest childlike superstition, but it meets my need and is at once the source of my comfort and the heart of my peace.”
Thus far, I have been steadfast. At night, I get into bed and I go straight to sleep. Is this bravery, or only denial? My wife, Jeanne, thinks that I practice denial a fair amount of the time. Wisely, she makes a distinction between good denial and bad denial. The latter is when I walked around with a pain in my chest but brushed off the hurt and declined to go to my doctor. Good denial is my refusal to dwell on the idea of death, or even to accept as a fact the notion that I will die soon from heart disease or from an illness related to AIDS—to me, this is not denial, but a simple acknowledgment of the facts of my case.
I am a fortunate, blessed man. Aside from AIDS and heart disease, I have no problems. My stepmother, about whom I care deeply both for my sake and for my dead father’s, is in fine health; my wife is in fine health; my daughter radiates vitality. I have loving friends in abundance. I have the support of skilled doctors and nurses. I need nothing that money can buy. So why should I complain? And beyond them, I have God to help me.
Perhaps my favorite prayer-poem by Howard Thurman is “The Threads in My Hand.” The speaker of the poem says that he holds only one end of a number of threads, which come to him from “many ways, linking my life with others.” Some threads come from the sick and troubled, some from the dreaming and the ambitious; still others are knotted beyond the speaker’s power to understand and unravel. But one thread is different from all others:
One thread is a strange thread—it is my steadying thread;
When I am lost, I pull it hard and find my way.
When I am saddened, I tighten my grip and gladness glides along its quivering path;
When the waste places of my spirit appear in arid confusion,
the thread becomes a channel of newness in life.
One thread is a strange thread—it is my steadying thread.
God’s hand holds the other end …