Space for the Spark | June 28, 2026 | Rev. Dr. Kathryn Benton
- The Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples
- 11 hours ago
- 6 min read
At the center of our being is a point of nothingness…, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God… It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody…I have no program for [seeing this]. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is every-where.
The opening words come from Thomas Merton in his book, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. It is a book that was handed to me when I was a teenager by a close friend and it blew me away. It spoke to realities that I was experiencing at the time…a knowing that there is, at the center of our being…a spark. I think I returned to these words in light of the continued terror we are experiencing in this country. I spoke last week about the killing of a baby in a store parking lot…the brutal execution of a child. We continue to experience the unleashing of the terror of hatred and violence…the uncovering of the legacy of our history in this country. James Baldwin put it like this, A nation that shut its eyes to the reality of fascism simply invites its own destruction. And that seems to be what we are experiencing, again; our own destruction. I wish it were not true, but I have another terror to report on that has actually been ongoing since the birth of this nation…lynching. There was another person found hanging from a tree, Tonea Nicole Miller in Miami, Florida. Of course, authorities say she died as a result of suicide. Whatever the truth of this particular example, lynching still goes on in this country. This is an alarming truth that people of color understand viscerally…and if we are aware of our connection to each other…our common origin…our common relationship to the all-pervading presence of that spark within, white people can understand it as well. As Thurman stated:
Every living thing, include the human being…every living thing belongs to every other living thing. I can never be what I ought to be until the last living manifestation is what it ought to be…for better or for worse, tied into the idiom of everything that lives.
This is the central theme of my dissertation and, I noticed, of the film by Arleigh Prelow, The Psalm of Howard Thurman. It is the truth that we must embrace before it is too late…before Balwin’s prophesy becomes reality. For as Thurman asserts:
If I forget this, I profane God’s creation.
If I remember it I come to myself in you and you come to yourself in me.
So, remember it, we must, if we do not want to profane God’s creation and so that we can come to ourselves in each other. This can be a starting point that may cause us to open our eyes.
I want to go back to the title of Merton’s book, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. Like Merton, I feel the need to confess my guilt…but more importantly our collective guilt. Unlike James Baldwin and so many others, we are sitting on the sidelines…as bystanders to this reality going on right before our eyes. And we have been bystanders for so long, sometimes making excuses for it, but always looking the other way…from suffering and our complicity in it. Now, I am not accusing anyone else of this, I am speaking for myself only. But at this time in the history of our country, we cannot look the other way…we cannot make excuses.
Yet there is an issue that Merton points out. He writes:
To be a solitary but not an individualist: concerned with merely perfecting one’s own life (this, as Marx saw it, was an indecent luxury and full of illusion)…
True solitude is deeply aware of the world’s needs.
It does not hold the world at arm’s length.
Merton often quotes Karl Marx in his writings. He saw his ideas as valuable and brings them into his so-called moral arguments. He is saying that we are more concerned with our own life, rather than our common life. We are disconnected from each other, not recognizing that we are deeply interdependent…all made from the same stardust. And he is also stressing the need for solitude…a solitude that Thurman also talks about…taking time to center down…to take time out to reflect. Of our little lives and big problems, he writes:
Our little lives, our big problems – these we place upon Thy altar!
The quietness in Thy Temple of Silence again and again rebuffs us:
For some there is no discipline to hold them steady in the waiting
And the minds reject the noiseless invasion of Thy Spirit.
For some there is no will to offer what is central in the thoughts –
The confusion is so manifest, there is no starting place to take hold.
For some the evils of the world tear down all concentrations
And scatter the focus of the high resolve.
Thurman says we need to enter into the quietness of the Temple of Silence, saying that our whole life may be regarded as a prayer. Of solitude he says: The sheer physical necessity is urgent because the body and the entire nervous system cry out for the healing waters of silence. This is an urgent necessity! For without it we succumb to the confusion…where the evils of the world tear down our concentrations. To scatter our focus…the focus of the high resolve may be what is happening today for so many of us.
Coming to that place of rest…or pause not only makes us aware of the nature of the world’s problems and our own, but it heals the nervous system, making space for that spark we alluded to…that pure truth that one is certain has been there the whole time. Yet, this is a tall order for people in our society. We are inundated constantly with emails, social media posts, news reports…we are in a state of confusion, as Thurman points out, our minds reject the noiseless invasion of the spirit. The confusion is such that there is no starting place to take hold. This is a reality that so many are confronted with. It is a place in which we are tempted to give up…to hide and deny. If there is no starting place, we become paralyzed. This paralysis is, according to Merton, the result of that confusion and is a form of violence. He writes:
To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.
This violence kills the root of inner wisdom…and it obscures the spark within. It also makes the realization of the need for pause…for centering down far off and unattainable.
My hope for us then, on this Pride Sunday, is that we are able to center down…to make of our life a prayer at this moment of destruction…of violence destroying our ability to obtain peace and to connect deeply with this spark that is in each one of us…all of us. Instead, of separating ourselves into those that are worthy and those that are not, we must not come to the all-pervading presence… that place where the invisible light of heaven dwells without conditions or reservations…we must come with our whole selves…not, as Thurman says, piecemeal, so that we may be charged with the creative energy of God. This may be enough…enough for us to resist the violence of paralysis and excuses so that we are able to float on the current of life in these perilous times. May we surrender ourselves in this moment.
Amen
I surrender myself to God without any conditions or reservations.
I shall not bargain with [God].
I shall not make my surrender piecemeal but I shall lay bare the very center of me, that all of my very being shall be charged with the creative energy of God.
Little by little, or vast area by vast area,
my life must be transmuted in the life of God. As this happens,
I come into the meaning of true freedom and the burdens that I seemed unable to bear are floated in the current of the life and love of God.
- Dr. Howard Thurman
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