Christian Leaders

"Rubin, Leslie and Pauli Murray (1961). The Constitution and Government of Ghana, Sweet & Maxwell, London. African Universities Press, 1964*Murray, Pauli (1970). Dark Testament and other poems, Silvermine, Norwalk, Connecticut,"

"Murray, Pauli (1987). Song In A Weary Throat: An American Pilgrimage, Harper & Row, New York City. ."

"Murray, Pauli (Davison Douglas, ed., 2d ed. 1997). States' Law on Race and Color, University of Georgia Press."

"I have accepted the challenge of being a Negro in America and of being an American first."

"I want to be an American — without the hyphen."

"On the afternoon of the first day we heard presentations on Black women, racism, and the American legal process. Pauli Murray, one of the senior female attorneys in the country, told us a story which has stayed with me. Thirty years ago, Murray was just out of law school, the only woman in her graduating class at Howard. After great difficulty she secured a job with a New York law firm, and one of her first clients was a woman from Spanish Harlem, who was accused of prostitution. The case went to trial, and the chief witness for the prosecution was the "john." The prosecutor elicited every detail of the sexual transaction and in conclusion asked the witness to identify the woman with whom he had had this sexual association. Without a moment's hesitation the witness identified Pauli Murray. The Washington audience gasped, of course, as she told the story, and then we started to laugh. Pauli Murray laughed with us, saying she could laugh thirty years after the fact, but still, she wanted to be sure that we understood the complete humiliation to which she was subjected. When she rose to move dismissal of the case, the judge ordered her seated, denied the motion, found the woman from Spanish Harlem guilty, and sentenced her to a prison term. It occurred to me later how hard it had been for Pauli Murray to tell us that story, even after thirty years."

"This society is not hospitable to persons of color, women or left-handed people."

"We had been led to believe that American education is inferior. We have been impressed with American technology, however, and through your Constitutional law class—the first time we have ever been taught by an American—we have come to change our views. We used to accept without questioning whatever the lecturer said. Through your class we have learned to inquire."

"I did go to Howard University, and that was where I was arrested for the first time. I went with two of my friends who were undergrad coeds, downtown in Washington, DC, which was about as segregated as anyplace in the United States at that time. I went to Howard in 1941. This was in '43 though, at the beginning of the year, I think. And we went to a drugstore that had a lunch counter-asked for some hot chocolate. We were told, "We don't serve Negroes." We said, "Well, we'd like to see the manager." "The manager isn't in." And we said, "Well, we have plenty of time. We'll just sit here." And finally they brought the hot chocolate, but they gave us tickets, bills for 25 cents, when it clearly stated on the board that hot chocolate was ten cents a cup, so that's what we put down. And I always like to say that's probably all we had anyway. But, then we walked out and were met by-my recollection is-seven of DC's finest, that is, the police. And they put us in the paddy wagon and took us to jail. After we had this incident, a woman who became a very dear friend, Pauli Murray, was there. She was about ten years older than us coeds. She was in law school, and she knew about CORE that had started. And we formed the Howard's—I think it was called "Civil Rights Committee" and actually opened up a restaurant on the edge of campus in one week, less than a week. I never had such a quick victory, never since that time. It was just a sort of a greasy spoon restaurant, but it was a heady victory for us. We had a picket line; we had a sit–in; lots of people agreed with us, and he capitulated. (By "opened up") I mean we desegregated it."

"How seldom do we look at the mythological pattern as it moves deep within the lives of individuals, prompting them to meet fate, to meet events following almost exactly the meaning outlined by the myth."

"Morton Kelsey, the most prolific writer among twentieth century Christian mystics."

"Psychologically and spiritually, whether one calls them complexes or spiritual beings, they can be either upbuilding, creative forces, or negative and destructive influences."

"Myth and ritual act as transformers in bringing people the value of spiritual reality, just as an electrical transformer... The dream also provides the same kind of stepped-down encounter."

"The problem confronting the modern church is... to discover this new, and yet very old way of looking at reality mythologically. This is the Platonic, the psychological, the Christian way of expressing spiritual reality, through images and symbols, and it is the only way of approaching this realm as a living reality. Otherwise it must be broken down into elements and is dead."

"There is no painless way of coming into contact with spiritual reality."

"Religious practice provides three... mythological methods of coming to terms with spiritual reality and finding the treasure within it. One way is to study the myth in its historical context... And for modern Christians this means trying to see the psychological meaning of myth in the development of human consciousness. A second way is through ritual in which the mythological story is acted out... And third, he can sometimes step into the myth imaginatively through meditation, actually entering the spiritual world... and becoming active and effective in it."

"In the early years of Christianity the Church was known to be a place to bring those who were sick, either mentally or physically... A vital Christianity still has this power."

"The greater the man, the more subject he is to the ravaging effects of the negative side of this reality."

"Almost any reality which we fail to confront and deal with in some way, will try to possess us. This is as true of autonomous complexes or spirits as of germs and bacteria."

"Protestants have tried to make their religion completely logical and sensible... The result is that the average Western Protestant, completely cut off from his own myth, turns to the Vedas or theosophy, to Masonry, or to a struggle for power, or even war, to give him mythological symbols which his faith does not encompass."

"Even the church, which in ages past was custodian of man's myths, has turned its back upon myth, has forgotten its meaning, and has lost the ability to interpret and use it."

"Myth can act almost like throwing open a window to reveal reality that is not being touched by the rational, Aristotelian approach."

"The success of a ministry depends more upon one's capacity to relate and to care, than [on] one's theological background."

"I learned that all people can be touched, with genuine caring and understanding."

"Western man, religious or not, came to believe that he was nothing but a shell of mechanically functioning matter, built to house his rational consciousness. ...Strangely enough, just as people were trying to get used to that kind of world, science began to see it differently. ...the scientific truths they had once considered universal and absolutely certain were only partly true."

"The neurotic, it has been said, worries about castles in the air, while the psychotic lives in them. ...The hysterical person can copy reliably nearly any disease syndrome. ...Destructive emotional causes or influences may play a part in any disease, whatever the class or immediate cause."

"If humankind is open to another dimension of reality, then the dream may be one of the most common avenues through which God reaches out to us."

"The inner journey is as individual as our thumbprint. We need to guide others on their way and never impose our way upon them."

"One of the most important ways of understanding the unconscious—indeed, as Freud saw it, the royal road to discovering the nature of its contents—is the dream. And what is a dream but a series of images that tell a story?"

"The unconscious reveals its meaning imaginatively, through symbols and images, and it speaks... a basically mythological language."

"As Jung worked with patients from all over the world, he began to study the mythologies of different peoples... Folklore and mythology... appeared as the collective dreams of a people, expressing for the group what poetic imagination, phantasies, visions and dreams express for the individual. Both the individual and collective types of experience are vital to human life."

"One interesting confirmation of this viewpoint comes from the widespread dream research of William Dement... Not only did these subjects who were deprived of their dreams step up the frequency of their attempts to dream, but if they continued to be cut off from completing their dreams, they soon began to show signs of nervous breakdown."

"The Eastern or Greek Orthodox tradition has never turned its back upon the dream or the myth. ...it has continued to believe that spiritual reality is mediated to men through mythological images in story and actions, and in the pictorial representation of the icon."

"Man cannot remain well psychologically, let alone socially, if he loses contact with the unconscious and its symbolic and mythological life."

"It is evident that thought is also necessary for action. But the Church has for centuries ... focused on orthodoxy and left orthopraxis in the hands of nonmembers and nonbelievers."

"I would like the angels of Heaven to be among us. I would like an abundance of peace. I would like full vessels of charity. I would like rich treasures of mercy. I would like cheerfulness to preside over all. I would like Jesus to be present. I would like the three Marys of illustrious renown to be with us. I would like the friends of Heaven to be gathered around us from all parts. I would like myself to be a rent payer to the Lord; that I should suffer distress, that he would bestow a good blessing upon me. I would like a great lake of beer for the King of Kings. I would like to be watching Heaven's family drinking it through all eternity."

"Mystical union with the divine, according to Jones, was not a privilege reserved only for the great spiritual athletes. But Jones did not just theorize — he also popularized. His willingness to market himself to the masses was a critical stimulus towards the popular embrace of a mystical emphasis in liberal Protestant spirituality, both because of his own direct influence and because of his influence on even more popular writers such as Howard Thurman and Harry Emerson Fosdick. This middlebrowing of mysticism paved the way for the success of a wide range of mystical writers to come, starting with Thomas Merton and lasting into the New Age."

"We shall not be able to rebuild our shattered world until we recover our faith in eternal realities, and we shall not do that until we discover spirit within ourselves."

"There is very great need to have the unique aspect of spirit in man and its relation to the divine spirit in the universe freshly interpreted in a world that has become bogged down with material conceptions of life and the world. There is very great need of a more vital grasp of the unique Person at the headwaters of our faith linked up with the Real Presence of the inward Christ who is the Life of our lives…"

"If we are to reach and garner the present day seekers who exist in every neighborhood, persons who are disillusioned over the effectiveness and value of the ordinary run of church service, our Quaker meetings must become unique centers of spiritual life, where there is felt a thrill of reality. That means that they must be occasions when life is lifted up and seen and felt in its true divine possibilities. I am looking for a time, and not counting on it, when we shall have a Society of Friends not composed of a few awakened leaders and a body of unkindled quiescent members who move in the ancient grooves of habit and routine. But instead a live membership of persons who have thought out their principles of life and not merely adopted them second hand."

"I have a profound faith that the times are ripe for a signal advance in religious belief and life and practice — for a Christianity translated into the terms of life and thought and action of the age in which we are actually living. There cannot be any great continuing civilization without the undergirding of religious inspiration…."

"There has always been in the Society of Friends a group of persons pledged unswervingly to the ideal. To those who form this inner group compromise is under no circumstance allowable. If there comes a collision between allegiance to the ideal and the holding of public office, then the office must be deserted. If obedience to the soul's vision involves eye or hand, houses or lands or life, they must be immediately surrendered. But there has always been as well another group who have held it to be equally imperative to work out their principles of life in the complex affairs of the community and the state, where to gain an end one must yield something; where to get on one must submit to existing conditions; and where to achieve ultimate triumph one must risk his ideals to the tender mercies of a world not yet ripe for them."

"Most persons are awakened and set on their new track of life through the quickening and kindling power of some person who becomes for them the instrument of inspiration and of the creation of faith and the vision of a nobler way of life. Persons are set on fire by someone who is already aflame. It is a trumpet call to high adventure that starts the forward movements away from old forms. That is one of the greatest stories in the long history of religion. It was through a long and wonderful circuit of souls, in a succession of forerunners, that the kindling idea of “Something of God in the soul of man” came to George Fox."

"Mysticism has been for the most part sporadic. It has found an exponent now here, now there, but it has shown little tendency toward organizing and it has manifested small desire to propagate itself. There have been types of mystical religion which have persisted for long periods and which have spread over wide areas, but in all centuries such mystical religion has spread itself by a sort of spiritual contagion rather than by system and organization. It has broken forth where the Spirit listed, and its history is mainly the story of the saintly lives through which it has appeared. The Quaker movement, which had its rise in the English Commonwealth, is an exception. It furnishes some material for studying a "mystical group" and it supplies us with an opportunity of discovering a test and authority even for mystical insights"

"The point I am trying to make clear is the fact that if we are to see a resurgence of life and power in our beloved Society we must open the way for vital, kindling, inspiring persons to visit, or better still to live in, the communities where there are, or ought to be, meetings."

"If we are to prove that Fox really struck a jet of living water, we ourselves must tap that same fountain."

"No person can ever hope to gain an adequate idea of the religious movement which has been called by the name of Quakerism until he has discovered what is meant by the "Inner Light." It is the root principle of an important historic faith, and it deserves a careful examination. The term "Inner Light" is older than Quakerism, and the idea which is thus named was not new when George Fox began to preach it. But this idea received a meaning and an emphasis from the Quakers which make it their own peculiar principle and their distinct contribution to religious thought."

"There is a dearth of genuine philosophy of life and of a convincing interpretation of spiritual reality. It may well fall to our lot to be the remnant body to maintain and uphold the genuine spiritual interpretation of life and of man’s divine endowment as our founders dd against the prevailing Calvinism of that formative epoch. Anyhow, whether my prophecy is real or vain, our task under God is plainly marked out for us. We must get ready, and my mind turns all the time to the local meeting centers where the issues will be settled."

"I want to make perfectly clear the act that the world is in the fringe, in the penumbra, of a tremendous Revolution, with a big R. We have called it a war and the fighting has been with mechanized weapons, but we shall soon be face to face with awesome situations against which weapons are vain things, as ineffective as Canute’s futile attempts to stop the irresistible tides of the ocean. Nothing is ever going to be the same again and we cannot assume our Quakerism is to be unaffected by the euroclydon that is in front of us. The time has passed for “the complacent assumption of an unchanged world.” This situation which I see coming — though I am afraid most Americans are looking forward fondly to a new period of “normalcy” — this situation makes it more urgent than ever to have our Quaker Society inwardly prepared to be a purveyor of light and leading when the crisis comes. The Christian faith of the ages will be tested more severely than in any former Revolution, because it will be confronted with its supreme enemy, a completely economic, materialistic, and mechanistic interpretation of the word and of human life."

"The Inner Light is the doctrine that there is something Divine, "something of God," in the human soul. Five words are used indiscriminately to name this Divine something: "The Light," "The Seed," "Christ within," "The Spirit," "That of God in you." This Divine Seed is in every person good or bad."