As a professor, I went to scores of graduations. I remember the beaming faces of the graduates, their proud families, and my satisfaction at seeing my students triumph. I can barely remember any of the speeches. While speakers droned on, students fidgeted waiting to receive their diplomas, and the faculty were known to slip paperback novels within the folds of the program.
So, this speech grabbed my attention. "The Sound of the Genuine," is a baccalaureate address delivered at Spelman College on May 4, 1980, by Howard Thurman, the remarkable writer, theologian, educator, and civil rights leader. I found it quoted in Brian McLaren's Faith after Doubt, and sought out longer excerpts.
Here a couple key paragraphs:
There is something in every one of you that waits, listens for the genuine in yourself—and if you can not hear it, you will never find whatever it is for which you are searching and if you hear it and then do not follow it, it was better that you had never been born. You are the only you that has ever lived; your idiom is the only idiom of its kind in all the existences, and if you cannot hear the sound of the genuine in you, you will all of your life spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls
“If you cannot hear the sound of the genuine in you, you will all of your life spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls.”
Who are you? How does the sound of the genuine come through to you. . . . The sound of the genuine is flowing through you. Don’t be deceived and thrown off by all the noises that are a part even of your dreams [and] your ambitions that you don’t hear the sound of the genuine in you. Because that is the only true guide that you will ever have and if you don’t have that you don’t have a thing. You may be famous. You may be whatever the other ideals are which are a part of this generation, but you know you don’t have the foggiest notion of who you are, where you are going, what you want. Cultivate the discipline of listening to the sound of the genuine in yourself.
Meditate on this for a while. Give it to a graduate if you are so moved. They might slip it into the folds of their commencement program.
Photo by Jason Dent on Unsplash