A Reflection from the Rev. David Hoster
Dear People of St. James’,
Last week, I wrote to you about your “true self,” that holy person you are in your soul, known best to God, apart from all the things you’ve done or left undone in this life. That said, I hope I didn’t leave you with the impression that the true self is the ultimate feel-good self. That would be narcissistic. So, today I’d like to say more about how that true self impels us outward beyond ourselves.
About ten years ago, the Australian palliative care nurse, Bronnie Ware, published a book called The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, based on interviews with her patients in the last twelve weeks of life. The five regrets were:
- I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the one others expected of me.
- I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
- I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
- I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
- I wish I had let myself be happier.
Hiding not far beneath the surface of each of these disarmingly simple desires is the truest self within each of these people, a self denied during ordinary living, yet a self that finally breaks out tragically close to the end. What might have happened if this true self had been set free to act and fulfill these desires earlier in life, when it wasn’t so safe to let the true self out? Souls passionately seek other souls. Souls seek union through love for the souls of those near at hand. Souls seek justice by merging with the grief and yearning of souls more distant. When genuine love and justice are in motion, true self has been set loose in the world and astonishing things follow.
The two people who spoke as true selves most clearly to our nation were Abraham Lincoln and Dr. King. They are our most exemplary Americans and our brightest beacons.
Speaking before the Civil War had even ended, Lincoln’s Second Inaugural was a clarion call to reunion among souls set to unspeakable brutality against one another: “With malice toward none, with charity for all…let us care for him [north and south] who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and orphans, to do all which may achieve a just and lasting peace.” Still guided by “the better angels of our nature” of his First Inaugural, Lincoln saw beyond bodies fallen on the battlefield or men rejoicing drunkenly in victory or despairing drunkenly in defeat, and allowed his very soul to yearn out loud for a nearly unthinkable justice that would enable charity for all to overcome bitterness because all God’s souls, in Lincoln’s holy vision, were worthy. Lincoln brooked no distraction from the grey or blue uniforms that only separated souls from one another.
Speaking to Memphis’ sanitation workers the night before his assassination, Dr. King said, “We are determined to be people…we are God’s children…we don’t have to live like we are forced to live.” He yearned for justice for the city’s garbagemen at the cost of his life. So, that same night he declared that he had been to the mountaintop and “seen the Promised Land…I’m not fearing any man…mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.” No act, by any man, could separate Dr. King from a justice that acknowledged the eternal souls of men who hauled off rich peoples’ garbage in Memphis, grieved for the souls of the police who beat them, loved the demonstrators who stood shoulder to shoulder with him, understood the soul of the man in the White House and prayed to God almighty for the soul of any man who might kill him—in other words, all the souls that burned with holy brightness in a vision such as his, even if many of them could not see the soul within themselves.
True selves such as Lincoln’s and King’s—and yours and mine when we break free—reach far beyond the pessimism and fatalism of the life we are dealt. What might you do when your true self peeks out through the cracks of your careworn life—looks without hesitation past the differences of race, gender, orientation, class or politics that always seek to separate souls and put them down—and seeks, instead, to draw them close in love and justice? Can you glimpse the burning truth that God created us all when you look into the faces of your brothers and sisters, and seeing, then act?
The Rev. David Hoster
