Perhaps one of the most profound experiences of my life was interviewing my 95-year-old great-grandmother, Martha Cunningham, for a college project. A couple of times a year our family visited and I delighted in her jovial nature and great cooking. Yet until I turned 19, I had never truly tapped into her embodied legacies.

As we chatted on the porch, sweltering in the South Carolina heat, she recalled her life as a sharecropper. Grandma Martha reluctantly told me about scraping together food, combining leftovers into Christmas feasts. Yet, if one sharecropping family along the dirt road had extra food, they would share it with everyone. I got a sense of where her pride and faith came from. Her faith was fortified by the providence of our family's survival.

I began to experience what I would now call ontological chills, the tingling we feel when we're moved to the core of our being. I saw my essence embedded in my great-grandmother's existence; her story became my story and I left with a greater sense of identity and purpose.

In neo-soul singer-songwriter India.Arie's song "Better People," from her album Testimony: vol.1, Life & Relationship, 2006, she implores us to engage in dialogues with each other. She suggests that if "young people would talk to old people, it would make us better people all around."

I worry that in our culture of rugged individualism, we'll lose our oral history, lose the tradition of the griot, and in the process lose ourselves. As a gadget junkie, I must admit that email and text messages are wonderful but something gets lost in the process. India.Arie reminds us, video games won't teach you "your ancestor's name."

India.Arie suggests that generationally, racially, and politically we can begin to make peace and justice a reality if we would earnestly talk to each other (which also requires listening). She urges us to "Listen to Mahatma Gandhi's words. Be the change you want to see in the world. Start with yourself and healing will multiply."

As a theologian-in-training, I aspire to ascertain what gives other people ontological chills, what makes them tick. When I say goodbye to my Grandmother, she urges us "Don't ever be afraid to move." She has urged generations of our family to take chances, to branch out, to learn more. I learned from her, and from India.Arie, the importance of venturing to dialogue across differences, because it is only through dialogue that we gain windows to the soul.