[Thank you to the volunteer crew for recording and transcribing this small offering on our second night together!]

Good evening, my siblings. How good it is to center down, to see oneself pass by. The streets of our minds seethe with endless traffic. We look at ourselves in this waiting moment. And we wonder, "What am I doing with my life? What are the motives that order our days? What is the end of our doing? Where are we trying to go? What is our treasure and what do we love most in life? What do I hate most in life?" 

The questions persist.

How good it is to center down and to see oneself pass by. 

Rev. Howard Thurman has been a companion for me since my teenage years. So I sit among you as one of the scholars of Howard Thurman, having come to Howard Thurman (for an entirely different reason) at an earlier age than many of my colleagues.

But there is something you should know. Thurman knew Gandhi, and Gandhi knew Thurman. 

In 1935, one of the global recurring global headliners in English speaking newspapers in the US and the UK was Gandhi. Gandhi showed up over and over again in the news outlets. So, who in their right mind would turn down an opportunity, an invitation to go and not only meet Gandhi, but to sit with Gandhi in his ashram and to have a conversation about world affairs?

That was Howard Washington Thurman in 1935. The YMCA and YWCA invited Thurman to lead the first African American delegation to India, Burma and Ceylon, and Thurman wrestled with an internal question -- how can I go and represent American Christianity as an African American in the time of lynching? In the time of Jim Crow, in the time in which my children cannot play in the playground across from their home, how can I go as a representative of that Christianity, a Christianity that I do not know?

He would wrestle with himself for several days but then, he would hear a different sound in himself that said -- "I must go." 

So after turning it down, he heard something that changed his mind and said that he had to go. What you are going to hear is not something from that moment, what you are going to hear are two selections from the last public presentation that Thurman would make in May 1980.

Few people know of this public presentation at Spelman College, the premier all women's liberal arts college for African American women, a leading HBCU in the country for years. It was May 1980. Just 11 months before he passed in April 1981. Thurman would go and speak this address: The Sound of the Genuine.

Few people know that he was frail and feeble. He was pretty confident this would be his last word. I invite you to hear what Thurman says to the graduates of African American females on their lawn, May 1980, in which he invites them into a similar kind of centering down a similar kind of wrestling, a similar kind of listening.

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, your ambitions, so 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.

Do not be distracted by all the sounds around you. Thurman invites the women upon graduation into a deep listening of themselves. And for Thurman, it is not about getting silent enough, quiet enough. When Thurman invites them into that space, he is inviting them into not quietness, but stillness. It is a rootedness that sees the flow of the river in you, that flow into the rivers of others as a part of the larger baccalaureate, the address.

So as I live my life then, this is what I am trying to fulfill. It doesn’t matter whether I become a doctor, lawyer, housewife. I’m secure because I hear the sound of the genuine in myself and having learned to listen to that, I can become quiet enough, still enough, to hear the sound of the genuine in you.

Now if I hear the sound of the genuine in me, and if you hear the sound of the genuine in you, it is possible 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 will disappear and we will become one because the sound of the genuine makes the same music.

That's the pilgrimage for Thurman. 

He heard a sound that made him reverse course, and he ended up sitting in a bar dully for three hours, according to Gandhi by the watch, because they had to catch a train. And at the end of that three hours, that pilgrimage, Gandhi asked Thurman and his delegation one question. 

"Would you do me a favor?" Thurman said yes. "Would you sing?" "I'm not a singer," Thurman said. But Sue Bailey Thurman was a singer. She was a trained singer from Spelman. And Gandhi said, "Would you sing the spiritual -- Were You There When They Crucified my Lord?" 

So they would sing. And Gandhi and his secretary and those around bowed their heads in prayer and in song, and when they finished singing, as the accounts go (Gandhi attests to this in a correspondence to Thurman), the group sat in stillness. 

What they would say is -- drunk. Drunk with the music of the spirit that was shared between this Hindu man and this African American and Christian man. And they would get up, they would hug, and they would depart a pilgrimage, a song, many sounds. They went down into each other and they came back up.

What do you hear, I ask.