Sound of the Genuine

I think we are all born with a sense of val­ue, a ground of val­ue, and our sense of right and wrong is the content of this ground of val­ue. But the sense of val­ue is giv­en, it is not some­thing that is de­vel­oped by the mind, it is not some­thing that is a re­flec­tion of how one is trained or one’s ex­pe­ri­ence in grow­ing up, it is a part of the given­ness of God in the sub­stance of the life process. The given­ness of God is there.

And here I may be de­ceived, you see, be­cause there is no pro­tection against the pos­si­bil­i­ty of self-de­cep­tion. But this is the risk God took when God breathed into us the breath of God’s life. I can’t ever ar­rive at the place that I am sure, ab­solute­ly. I am al­ways get­ting sure, but I am not quite sure.

I do not need some ex­ter­nal judg­ment to point the fin­ger. If I lis­ten to the sound of the gen­uine in my­self, I know when I’m out of touch. And of­ten I am the first to know and I have spent a great deal of time try­ing to keep any­body else from know­ing.

And the search­ing ques­tion is: What am I do­ing now to drown out the sound of the gen­uine in my­self? And the sec­ond half of it is: there is something in every per­son that waits and lis­tens for the sound of the gen­uine in an­oth­er per­son. And sometimes it is the sound of the gen­uine that I hear in anoth­er per­son that caus­es their ear to be­come at­tuned to the sound of the gen­uine in them­selves. They didn’t know it un­til I heard it and the sound of it bounced from me back into their spir­it and they stood on their feet as a per­son again.

Now if I 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.