“The moment we accept the literal truth, we are once again faced with the urgency of vehicular symbolism. To be led astray by the crassness, the materialistic character of the symbolism so that in the end we reject the literal truth, is to deny is to deny life itself of its dignity and man the right or necessity of dimensional fulfillment. In such a view the present moment is all there is—man is no longer a time binder but becomes a prisoner in a tight world of momentary events—no more and no less. His tragedy would be nothing beyond the moment could happen to him and all his life could be encompassed within the boundary of a time-space fragment. For these slave singers such a view was completely unsatisfactory and it was therefore thoroughly and decisively rejected. And this is the miracle of their achievement causing them to take their place along side the great creative religious thinkers of the human race. They made a worthless life, the life of chattel property, a mere thing, a body, worth living! They yielding with abiding enthusiasm to a view of life which included all the events of their experience without exhausting themselves in those experiences. To them this quality of life was insistent fact because of that which deep within them, they discovered of God, and his far-flung purposes. God was not through with them. And he was not, nor could he be exhausted by, any single experience or series of experiences. To know Him was to live worthy of the loftiest meaning of life. Men in all ages and climes, slave or free, trained or untutored, who have sensed the same values, are their fellow pilgrims who journey together with them in increasing self-realization in the quest for the city that hath fountains, whose Builder and Maker is God.” – FOR THE INWARD JOURNEY, “Deep River,” by Howard Thurman (1984), pp. 222-223.
