The Moral Mercury of Life

“The penalty of deception is to become a deception, with all sense of moral discrimination vitiated. A man who lies habitually becomes a lie, and it is increasingly impossible for him to know when he is lying and when he is not. In other words, the moral mercury of life is reduced to zero.” These words come to us out of the wise witness of Howard Thurman who hailed from Daytona Beach, traveled widely, and eventually landed at Boston University. They were published in 1949 in his most widely-read work, Jesus and the Disinherited, which functions as something of a sacred text for many students of Beloved Community. I first heard about it through the Reverend James Lawson. When I told Hortense Spillers that I was reading Howard Thurman, she mused aloud that he might be among the only people she can think of who can be rightly described as a mystic. Martin Luther King, Jr. is said to have carried a copy of Jesus and the Disinherited wherever he went and drew on its counsel constantly.

One can really tell. For Thurman, there are worse things than dying a violent death. There’s the danger of becoming so far-gone in one’s patterns of defensiveness and self-legitimation that one becomes a living deception, something other than a completely present person, a being which, while breathing, plays host to a kind of death in life. If “anima” is the current of conviviality most English New Testaments translates as soul, I believe Thurman is giving us an illuminating phrase for what we risk forfeiting when we start speaking and thinking according to the generalizations that serve as a kind of protective strategy when we’re obsessed with power and influence. “The moral mercury of life” slowly dissipates when our imaginations are relentlessly captivated by the drive for control and more control. One can almost feel it vanishing sometimes when claims to deal-making, impact, and administration predominate in boardrooms and social gatherings across the world. 

Beloved Community, of course, is also interested in control, but not the kind that marginalizes or humiliates people, shuts down dissent, or tries to force-feed a realization. Thurman understands that when we’re resistant to the space in which we might honestly voice what matters to us in our exchanges with others, we carry around—and even conjure—a kind of hell in which the moral mercury of life is not welcome and is even viewed as a threat to our own identity, the deception we’ve become. 

This hell operates in every sphere of life throughout the human barnyard. It’s the hell of social deception in which “leadership” and “values” mostly connote well-funded cover-ups and the steady suppression of conscience, the selective outrage that worships at the altar of optics.

Our souls, it turns out, are in play. It’s hard to want to know what we don’t want to know, but to really love a neighbor, a country, or a culture is to go to that place of not lying, of wanting to know what’s true more than we want to feel safe and assured. Or as the poet Fanny Howe observes, “There is a point when you realize you are spending more time covering the traces of your dishonesty than you spend plotting it.” Denial is a heavy yoke. It can wear a body out. 

Here too, Howard Thurman has a helpful adage: "Sincerity in human relations is equal to, and the same as, sincerity to God.” How do we rise to the challenge of sincerity with courage and conscience? What feats of sincerity await us this week?

May soul, the moral mercury of life, abound in our every exchange. Howard Thurman goes before us.