Listen to the song.
The first one, as the beginning. Simple truth. Nothing could be farther from “metaphor” or
“symbol.” Go in the Wilderness. Leaning
on the Lord.
If I had known this song, the morning of August 14. 1962, it
might have staved off or at least diminished the occupying enemy that was the
migraine that grew and grew, from 8:20 in the morning, when I boarded the train
in Beloit, until 7:10 that evening when Fr. Bill Renn met me at the
Minneapolis train station, so that he could drive me the 30 miles to St.
Bonifacius, Minnesota. The land was
reclaimed swamp – or wetlands, today?
– and the building whose door we faced sprawled across the land like a true
fortress, built of bright stones quarried from the region. It struck me as
humorous, even with the migraine, that we arrived just about 9 pm, when the
bells rang out “De Profoundis” – “Out of the depths I call to you, LORD; Lord,
hear my cry! May your ears be attentive to my cry for mercy.” While I had to
have explained to me the monastic significance of the tolling, and the prayer
that was to be said during that period, it soon made much sense, that I should
hear those bells that night.
Over the next four years the signal for night prayer would
be a constant for all of us; and the sentiments of Psalm 130 could very easily
have summed up my most constant prayer for those same years.
Fifty-four years ago, this night, I began my journey into
the wilderness.
No one provided cross-cultural competency training for the
priests and brothers who staffed the house, nor for the other young men who had
arrived much earlier that day and with a sense of entitlement bolstering them
on this new adventure. No one said much of anything to me when I left my
family, except my mother’s embracing last directive, “Pray for your
brother.” The previous six years of my
life – which I still cannot write down in any detail – was an intensive
immersion in cultural dislocation and re-assemblage. My younger sister and I probably survived the
experience of desegregating a school system by being somewhat innocent of what covert
racism was. Only the largest insults were dealt with. The small harms were
accepted as something to which we adjusted. Each instructive episode about how
easily privilege can be wielded to inflict a thousand tiny wounds into an
adolescent’s mind heart and spirit was nevertheless packed into my
consciousness; but not as neatly as all the clothes that were packed into my
one suitcase.
I walked into a dark and silent building, wishing only to
lie still and alone.
And Jesus was waiting to meet me, in the wilderness.
Much earlier in these reflections the gifts from my father
and mother have been lifted up. The books. The phonograph records. The letters.
The one visit every year that must have cost them so much more than they would
have ever said. How did Jesus touch me,
then? Protecting me with art. The
language of Baldwin and King, the sounds of Billie Holiday and Mahalia Jackson.
The music that I fearlessly and calmly claimed as my therapy – practicing the
flute every day, for only 30 minutes gave me, me. “I will practice. Because I must.” And so the house rules were changed. The poetry that had already been my way to
hear myself dream was also there, a covenant with my imagination that promised
me flight from the meanest times and the most wounding words of the mostly
ignorant and sometimes thoughtless men who surrounded me.
But any of those who remain from that time who will read
this will most likely say, “But we had so much joy and we learned so much and
we bonded so deeply and forever.” Yes. That is true. Not all the “Sorrow Songs”
were sad. And not every blues song is filled with existential despair. Being in
the wilderness was the great endeavor in which I forged the armor of my faith.
Persistence in the face of the shadows taught me steadfastness and resilience.
And most of all, at least as I see and feel this memory this night, I learned
to listen, to deeply listen, much like any creature dropped into a wilderness
that could either sustain or utterly devour.
I learned to listen. In The
Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois elevates the folk belief that some special
ones are “born with a sort of a veil, and are gifted with second sight.” This
folk belief stems from some babies being born with part of the placenta still
covering their heads – the “veil” that bestowed a “double vision” on the
fortunate few. And that gift, like all gifts articulated in African culture,
was given for the benefit of all the community. Prophecy is not the vision; it
is the articulation of the vision once the vessel of the word of power has
returned to tell “what has been seen and heard.” In that same way, I had to learn to listen on
several simultaneous frequencies. Otherwise, the unfortunate, ignorant and
utterly misspoken remarks would have been fatal – to me, if not to the
speaker. I had to learn to hear beyond
the depression, the confusion, and the loneliness that rolled into my horizon
and often brought me low. I had to learn to hear my grandmothers say, “You
gonna be all right, baby. You gonna be just fine.”
But the formation of my spirit, the forging of my armor of
resistance, the cultivation of my “dogged strength...which alone kept me from
being torn asunder” (again, the words of Du Bois, early in Souls), were my private schooling, done in addition to learning the
history, traditions and excesses of community that were the laboratory of
assimilation in which we were being reassembled. “Learning to be a Jesuit” meant in the
deepest sense possible, that I had to learn what it would mean to be “a Black
Jesuit.” No one was there to teach that
syllabus. Not until one someone too many asked me if I knew Ted Cunningham.
Finding out that there was one other Black man in the Society of Jesus,
Wisconsin Province, triggered my by-now legendary decisiveness. I wrote to him.
He came to visit, along with his other classmates, at the time of their
ordination to the sub-deaconate. We
walked. We talked. We laughed. We shared silence.
“And if Jesus Himself shall be our leader, we shall walk
through the valley of peace.”
And now I wonder, fifty-four years later: did anyone else ever learn to listen, as I
was forced to do? The half-century of my surviving with my first vision still
intact has made me ask that question, more and more. Did any of them, of you,
ever learn that my gift to this brotherhood was the fact that I did not assimilate into a culture that
was designed to grind me and those like me (including Ted Cunningham a few
years after we met) into a fine dust that the slightest breeze would scatter
into oblivion. And a further wonder, to be played as the second drumming of
this dance of remembrance: Have those
who claim a ministry of service of faith through justice been willing to spend
the needed time in the wilderness that is this country’s culture of forced
inequality, violence, and degradation toward the automatically inferior
“other”?
In order to both survive the wilderness and to grow strong
enough to be a wilderness guide for others, I had to learn to listen. The question for the Church of the United
States, for the Society of Jesus in the United States, for every institution of
higher learning; for every government agency; every social work office, every
police department; every hospital emergency room – the question is this: Have you learned to listen, to be conscious,
to know that what seems like howling threats in the wilderness around you just
might be the sound of the whirlwind that precedes the stillness that is the
voice of God?
This question is now being shouted with urgency all over the
land. But each one must journey to the wilderness, one fearful step after another.
And then each will learn the glorious secret in the only way any of us can
learn. Step into whatever death you most
fear. And choose to live.
Can you listen to me, so that you can learn to hear the
deepest truth inside your deepest self? Can any and all who believe that their
obligation is to keep the wilderness at bay, at all costs, ever hear the
whispering in the darkness: “Know this: the wilderness is already within you.” The prayer is always “Out of the depths, I call
to you O Lord. May your ears be
attentive to my cry for mercy.”
Young men and young women from beyond the walls of cultural
sameness will never enter in the gates fashioned to keep them in the wilderness
of another’s devising. These young women
and men will not hear the bell calling them, will perhaps never understand that
the net being cast to draw them in is firmly in the hands of their ancestors.
We need to tell them what only Jesus was there to tell me, all those many years
ago: “You are already a Child of God, formed before you were born. Don’t let
nobody turn you ‘round. You are just who we need you to be.”
In the wilderness I learned it: may my ears be attentive to
my own cry for mercy.
How did you feel when you come out the wilderness?
August 14
