Reaching Our Whole Self

If you have read my blog over the last couple of years, you know I have been thinking a lot about whether or not we can truly know ourselves. At the core of this inquiry is whether or not we can ever disentangle ourselves from all of the cultural, familial, and other influences that pour themselves into us on a daily basis. These factors wrap themselves around us, creating a ball of entangled ideas and memories that form our very being, and untangling them, to dive into our selves and explore the essence of our very being, becomes a monumental undertaking.

Lillian Smith details the effort it takes to unravel ourselves from the myriad of strings that constrict us, specifically the threads that cause us to hate and fear others. At the beginning of “Three Ghost Stories,” in Killers of the Dream, she writes about the Southern strictures the encircle white southerners and the process of disentangling oneself from them, “The raveling out of what had been woven so tightly was usually a slow process. One thread at a time came loose. Then another. Sometimes a great hole was torn by a quick stabbing experience. However it happened, it was not long in the little southerner’s life before the lessons taught him as a Christian, a white man, an American, a puritan, began to contradict each other.”

These threads that taught the white child to love Jesus but to look at his Black neighbor as…