Last night I passed a church on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia displaying a quote in large black and white letters in a glass-encasement attached to the building. Every so often the quote changes. Light shining on the words make them easy to read at night. Once in a while a quote seems to demand special attention from a passer-by whose imagination it manages to capture. Tonight Horace Mann’s words: “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity” got me to stop, stare and reread those simple words strung together in a deeply moving way.
In recent years magazines and books tend to write about how caught up we are in surface things, and if we were to catorgize many of them we’d have to put them on our meaningless list. The writers of these magazines and books want us to consider a whole other way of living in the world. That sounds like a fair suggestion considering the way the world is at the present time. And so the quote by Horace Mann seems a good starting point to think about what exactly we could do for humanity before we die. There are many people already living this way. They don’t get write ups; they don’t want write ups.
The quote by Horace Mann gives those of us who have more on our meaningless list than our meaningful list a chance to consider how we’ll go about winning some victory for humanity before we die. Now’s as good a time as any because we’re in the midst of a season that tends to put joy in our hearts whether we strive for it or not.
And so, I say to myself that it’s time to shorten my meaningless list, and begin to figure out why that quote by Horace Mann grabbed my attention. Oh, Yes!