The Sound of the Genuine
Seminal Texts of the Phygital Fellows
There are some readings you remember because of what they say. There are others you remember because of how you encountered them. Howard Thurman’s The Sound of the Genuine became that kind of text for the Phygital Fellows.
During our Boston Learning Journey, as we were spending time exploring Thurman’s life and legacy, Rimes McElveen invited us into an encounter with his words. But before he began reading, he gave us an unusual instruction.
Find a partner. Stand face to face. Look into one another’s eyes.
Then, as we held one another’s gaze, Rimes slowly read The Sound of the Genuine. When he reached the end, he began again. And then, a third time.
Some Fellows loved the experience. Others found it deeply uncomfortable. All of us remember it.
Perhaps that is because Thurman’s words are not meant to be consumed as information. They are an invitation.
“There is in every person something that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in herself… There is in you something that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself.”
Thurman goes on to describe the challenge of hearing that genuine voice. We live surrounded by “so many voices… so many noises… so many echoes,” until it becomes difficult to know which voice is truly our own. His question is simple but demanding: Can we become still enough to hear “rumbling up from your unique and essential idiom the sound of the genuine in you”?
It is tempting to hear Thurman as offering advice about authenticity or self-expression. But his invitation runs deeper than that. The genuine is not simply the self we invent. It is the deepest truth of who we are before all the competing voices tell us who we should become.
As Rimes read those words, something unexpected happened.
Looking into another person’s eyes while listening to Thurman’s invitation transformed the experience. The essay was no longer only about listening within ourselves. It also became about seeing another person beyond first impressions, roles, accomplishments, or assumptions.
Fellow Tamice Spencer-Helms reflected on the experience:
“One of my favorite experiences from our time with Howard Thurman’s work and The Sound of the Genuine was a guided meditation. We didn’t only listen to a reading of the speech; we listened while staring into the eyes of a colleague.
My colleague was an incredible person named Phil Dieke, and there’s no real way to explain what happened except to say that Howard Thurman was right. As I looked into the eyes of a white man whose social location in life is opposite from mine, I could see myself in him. I could see his pain. I could feel his pain in me. And I knew that he could see my pain and feel it, too.
There is something about being so deeply connected to your own genuine that you become able to find resonance with other people.”
I have returned to that reflection many times. In a digital world, we often assume connection begins by expressing ourselves more clearly, sharing more content, or building larger platforms. That same tension surfaced for Ryan Dunn.
He reflected:
“Can you find a way to hear the sound of the genuine in yourself?” Howard Thurman asked this question 50 years ago. The question unsettles me. I have no answer. Culturally, I feel like we have made it more difficult for people to find an answer to this question in the years since Thurman posed it. And I am more unsettled because I fear I contribute to the noise that bars people from finding their answer.
This is one of the ways in which digital technology and connectivity may harm us. Digital technology pulls us out of ourselves. It distracts from genuine encounters with ourselves and often confronts us with disingenuous encounters with others.
My question, then, is can we subvert digital technology as a means for inviting people to listen to the genuine within?”
Thurman suggests another possibility. Connection begins by becoming quiet enough to hear the deepest truth within ourselves. Only then are we able to recognize that same depth in another person. Perhaps that is why this text has continued to shape the work of the Phygital Fellows.
We spend much of our time asking how technology might foster authentic community, spiritual formation, and deeper human connection. Thurman reminds us that no platform, app, or digital gathering can substitute for the work of listening—to God, to ourselves, and to one another.
Near the end of the essay, Thurman offers one final encouragement, “the sound of the genuine is flowing through you… Cultivate the discipline of listening to the sound of the genuine in yourself.”
That discipline may be one of the most countercultural practices available to us today. Not because it teaches us to withdraw from one another. But because, as we discovered while quietly looking into another Fellow’s eyes, the path to genuine community begins with learning to hear the genuine within ourselves.