There is no hiding

[The following is my weekly reflection paper for my class Howard Thurman: Finding Common Ground.]

When it is all said and done and we have lived our lives out to their earthly end, our lives will be measured by the quality of our relationships--to each other, to God and to our work. When I say work, it is not necessarily a job that I am talking about; what I mean by work is our life’s work, our call or that which we contribute to the world.

What is the quality of those relationships? How would our lives be described in a poem, a ballad or a movie? Is it fair to expect that we traveled through our journey with consistent of moral or ethical values?

Dr Howard Thurman in “Jesus and the Disinherited” explores deception as a survival tool that the underprivileged have used to gain some control over their lives and a mechanism that the strong have used to deprive others of their civic, economic, political and social rights without its appearing so be so. He espouses that honesty is not part of the question in dealing with others where there is no basis of equality. This pattern conspires to silence and eliminates the question of morality on everyone’s side. It also weakens the moral fiber of a person and by extension a society who condones the system. “The penalty,” he says, “of deception is to become a deception, with all sense of moral discrimination vitiated.” To the habitual liar, the boundary between lie and truth is lost and becomes increasingly impossible to discern which is which.

The disinherited, the put upon of society’s structure, often seem justified to compromise their moral compass on the assumption that one small deception in the face of overwhelming limitation could be seen as a sin of survival--an amoral choice of consequence. It is in this realm that many of our systems operate; the most glaring example is our use of the death penalty as the ultimate penalty for the taking of a life.

In defense of the reasonableness of this position one has to consider the hiding of slaves on the Underground Railroad. If a soldier were to come to your door and ask if you are hiding a slave, is the only answer that has moral integrity “yes”? Here we understand that morality is not part of the question. And until the center of people’s lives change from survival, there is little alternative to maintain totally moral and ethical lives.

But aside from that shift, Thurman advocates one viable alternative of “a complete and devastating sincerity.” Here, there are no excuses, no extenuating circumstances, or viable option beyond speaking the truth, without fear and without exception. Gandhi in a letter to Muriel Lester wrote, “You are in God’s work, so you need not fear man’s scorn. If they listen to your requests and grant them, you will be satisfied. If they reject them, then you must make their rejection your strength.” It seems that within these words he is advocating that the individual is totally in charge of his/her transcendence over limitations.

Interestingly enough, in terms of power struggle and victory over injustice, sincerity packs a powerful punch. Thurman writes, “in the presence of an overwhelming sincerity on the part of the disinherited, the dominant themselves are caught with no defense, with the edge taken away from the sense of prerogative and from the status upon which the impregnability of their position rests.”

The analysis is brilliant in its simplicity and in its pin-pointing of a universal truth. There are no excuses that we can provide for ourselves that justifies deception. What you see is what you get; honesty is the best policy. Why would we think there was anything else?

When it is all said and done and we have lived our lives out to their earthly end, our lives will be measured by the quality of our relationships--to each other, to God and to our work. For all of our complexity and need for complexification it is a humorous and inverted truth, that less is more and that “a man is a man, no more, no less.”

“The awareness of this simple fact is the supreme moment of human dignity.”