Sound of the Genuine, Part 2

In part of a baccalaureate address to Spelman students, Howard Thurman said:

There is in every person, in you, something that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself. Nobody like you has ever been born. And no one like you will ever be born again. You are the only one.

His affirmation that everyone has something uniquely special in them that is waiting to be tapped, waiting to be revealed, is an ethos endemic to HBCUs that I appreciate deeply. It pushes back against the deficit thinking that too often envelops Black, Brown, and Indigenous students.

But, here, I want to connect to another major thrust of Thurman’s homily on the “sound of the genuine.” And really, I just want to share my paraphrasing of what I think is a powerful call for a very deep kind of connection and shared humanity.

If I were to ask you, what is the thing that you desired most in life, you might say a lot of things off the top of your head. And for many, most of what was shared, you wouldn't believe. You might say, for example, things that you thought you ought to say for one reason or another.

But I think that if you were stripped to whatever there is in you that is literal and irreducible, and you try to answer that question, it might actually be something like this:

I want to feel that I am thoroughly and completely understood so that now and then, I can take my guard down, look out around me, and not feel that I will be destroyed.

I want to feel how this is. I want to feel completely vulnerable, completely naked, completely exposed, and absolutely secure. 

This is what you look for in your partner, if you get one. This is what you hope to have with your children, if you have them. This is what you’d be fortunate to have with the friends and loved ones you hold dear.

I want to be able to engage in radical exposure and know that the eye that beholds my vulnerability will not step on me. To feel secure in my awareness of the active presence of my own idiom in me.

So as I live my life then, this is what I'm trying to fulfill. It doesn't matter whether I am a doctor, lawyer, housewife, house husband. This is not important.

I will be secure if I hear the sound of the genuine in myself; and having learned to listen to that, I then become quiet enough, still enough, to hear the sound of the genuine in you.

Now, if I can hear the sound of the genuine in me, and you hear the sound of the genuine in you, it is possible then for me to go down in me and come up in you. So that when I look at myself through your eyes, having made that pilgrimage, I see in me what you see in me. And the wall that separates and divides us would disappear.

And we would become one, because the sound of the genuine makes the same music.

Thurman sets an extraordinary bar for us to achieve. I pray that we all have people in our lives with whom we can "engage in radical exposure" and can only imagine what kind of world we could have if we could achieve anything even close to this across humanity.