"Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child..."

Charleston, South Carolina.

Too many people have said almost all there is to be said.  Any meditation on the spirituality of Black people in the United States of America must contemplate the scene (as St. Ignatius would advise in the Spiritual Exercises). And what do we see? Mothers and sons; sisters and brothers; preachers and teachers and community elders gather in a circle, making where they sit truly sacred space.  The intuition vibrated in the circle when the grotesquely twisted soul imprisoned in the young white man announced itself to them.

They made room for him. And they composed themselves and shared their faith. This was not a preternaturally wise young boy losing himself in the Temple long ago. This was not a sojourner returned from the wilderness to share the vision that would benefit the people. This was the fire that came to destroy the earth.

Never sent by God.

But the light shone in the darkness. We can see it.  The dead eyes that stare at us in every picture he took of himself was a true “black hole” of the universe sucking in all matter, all light. But this darkness could not quench that light.

It was as much an eternal flame as any ever lit upon this soil.

Starting with the men satiated with and sick from the poison of slavery who gathered, began their song and their march across the Stono river in 1739, a long time ago; to the whispering men who sat in a similar dark circle in 1822 with Denmark, an elder of the church, and decided to yank their lives out of the dehumanizing machine of oppression, knowing the consequences, and just as surely knowing the death that attended them if they did not act; to those who bent the trees and met in secret, always singing, “Come by here…hear the cry, the song, the groaning…Come by here.” 

They built, they forged, they plowed and planted and plotted. Always for the freedom defined from the beginning – the freedom that was the first great assault on the darkness and the void, when the first word was uttered: “Let there be light.”

They knew.

And in song and word and gesture and lives integrally lived, they never doubted that death would push itself into whatever refuges they could construct, no matter how brief or long.

For more years than I can feel, I have returned to the book my father sent me for my birthday. In The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin makes a statement that has caused me to tremble mightily, trying to make sense with his prophetic certainty while holding on to what Resurrection must mean in my life of struggling faith.  In “Down at the Cross,” he says:  

Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.  It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death – ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life.  One is responsible to life:  It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us."

But there is something beyond that darkness. If there was not, then I would not be reading and talking to and thanking James Baldwin from my first encounter with his words in 1963, with the evening of conversation we shared in 1983, to this day when I am seeking some rock in a very weary land.  Baldwin is light, for me. All of my ancestors; all of the singing and speaking and thinking voices that I collect on paper and in every other medium; all of the children who tell me, clearly and confidently, just how they intend to own this world when it becomes their inheritance: they are light.

And so are the 9 Slaughtered in Charleston, South Carolina, June 17, 2015. Mr. Tywanza Sanders.  Ms. Cynthia Hurd. Ms. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton.  Ms. DePayne Middleton-Doctor. Ms. Myra Thompson.  Rev. Daniel Lee Simmons Sr. Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney.  Ms. Ethel Lee Lance.  Ms. Susie Jackson.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mM6GVw5bmKE

When they said, “Young man, come and sit with us,” they knew – and on this point no argument is possible – that they were responsible for life. They knew, as surely as any of us can know anything on the level of intuition, that from the beginning of our existence in this place we have earned our death by the lives we have lived.  So their children, and daughters and siblings, and mothers and fathers stood up in the assembly and said, “Young man, you have ruptured our hearts, severed our bonds. You have taken away our loved ones, our heroes. And we forgive you.”

That is the act of complex love that has been just as much a part of our lives and our history as has been the rage that seeks to obliterate whatever is decent, hopeful and redemptive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ce8ix4VGR2w

And yet the light endures.  Let us, in this struggle to find rest in the storm that seems to be raging over and over and over, let us pray. As our sisters and brothers in Charleston are teaching us to pray. For ourselves; for strength. For those who are sought out by the wolves of chaos and claimed as “sons and daughters of darkness.” For those who teach hate and violence.

For those who show us how to be more than we could ever dream of being. Light. And as such, inheriting that unfathomable strength, we must say it: This madness, this death must stop. This death must stop. Why else do we pray for strength, except to join together to say: “Death you shall not have dominion. We are children of light.”

"On My Journey Now...Mt. Zion!"

When I was a very young Jesuit (known as a “scholastic”), studying in our humanities program (known then as “the Juniorate”), I still carried the determination to be an historian. Some of my earliest recollections are rooted in stories; just that, stories – told by my paternal grandmother, my father; my mother, very rarely; and all sorts of neighbors and visitors to our home. My grandmother, Laura Brown and her son, my father Floyd, were formal, conscious instructors of history. They told me stories. Mom showed me the pictures she kept in a bag in her bedroom. “This is my sister, Mary, and me.  This is one of our old family friends. This is… and this is… and…” And I drank in the stories. My father provided commentaries on the pictures in the magazines and newspapers he brought home every day, every week. “You see this man? He is Dr. Du Bois. I met him at Wilberforce….He… And this woman, here, I knew in school (Josephine Baker)…And this man (Earl Hines) was playing the piano in Chicago when I met him… And….”

And I drank in the stories and memorized the faces.

What other option could I possibly have had, but to be someone who remembered – or found – the old stories about the old people and saved them up, somewhere in the room of my mind, to share them with the next set of young people “in the family”?

But, then, in the Jesuit juniorate, we had a mandatory U. S. history course, taught by someone who was, in my mind, most charitably, a near-total disaster as a human being. And he wasn’t – in my mind – a very good teacher either. So, in a moment of extreme shortsightedness, I said to myself, “if that is a history professor, then I won’t be one.”  No one ever accused me of infallible judgment. Not in those days, anyway.

Now, fifty years later, I am reflecting on how everything I teach is modeled on the pedagogy so brilliantly employed in bedrooms, living rooms, automobiles; and on front porches. Every class, no matter what the subject matter, is grounded in history. Given the fact that Africana Studies, in all of its substantive embodiments, serves, first of all, as corrective to the perversion of world history, a perversion that has always been a principal strategy for economic and political oppression of so much of the populations of the world; given that, how can any of us not teach history?.

Knowing the power of history, I remember, salute, grieve and rejoice in knowing Reverend Cyprian J. Davis, Order of St. Benedict, monk of St. Meinrad’s Archabbey, who died on May 18, 2015. At the age of 84. He has “gone to that Gospel Feast…that Promised Land where all is peace.”

Cyprian Davis. Perhaps one of the most radically situated scholars of 20th century U. S. Catholicism.  Everybody and her cousin will bring up his writing of The History of Black Catholics in the United States, and all praise is proper and due to that accomplishment. But from the day when he decided to become a Catholic because of the soul seduction of the historical account of the Catholic Church, to his final days of preaching teaching editing and writing, Father Cyprian did much more than most to give a shape and texture and nuance to being “authentically black and truly Catholic” (a phrase he had much to do with, as one of the primary contributors to “What We Have Seen and Heard”, the U. S. Black Bishops’ Pastoral Letter of 1984).

As part of the 1978 gathering of Black Catholic theologians at the Motherhouse of the Oblate Sisters of Providence, Father Cyprian presented “Spirituality: The Christian Experience of the Black Experience.” Papers from that proceeding were gathered in Theology: A Portrait in Black.   In the style that is so much his signature, his nine-page, double-columned essay, has 27 footnotes and a bibliography with 26 entries.

The radical intervention he performed with this essay is a corrective every stereotype, every trivialization, and every dismissal of the power of the Black Catholic experience. Not only does he simply and quietly offer this corrective, he does something that most of the scholars subsequent to him, both in African American Studies and in Black Catholic Studies, no longer do. He takes us, the readers, “back to Africa,” and not in a delusional, romantic, obsessive way. No; Father Cyprian finds the sources, quotes them generously; interprets his examples and connects them (albeit in the quietest tone possible) to the presently-lived experiences of Black Catholics in the United States at the end of the 20^th century.

The models he uses for the purpose of instruction and edification are presented in a way that is original and compelling. He says:

There are four Black models of sanctity in Catholic tradition. The fact that they were Black was and is as significant to their history as St. Francis of Assisi’s middle-class background is significant for him.

[Let the Church savor that concentrated challenge for a minute or two. “Black” is capitalized. OK. The people about to be listed are “models” – worthy of emulation. OK.  “In Catholic tradition.” Oh; you mean, Father Cyprian, that these “models” serve as examples to all Catholics?  Just asking…Since you use Francis of Assisi as context for this assertion, I figured you were going for “Catholic means ‘universal’”.]

The four are: St. Moses the Black, St. Benedict the Black, Alfonso the Great, and St. Martin de Porres. Finally, we would look briefly at a fifth person who was not of the Catholic tradition but still exemplified the same characteristics of the others within that tradition, namely Sojourner Truth.

Since this reflection is necessarily brief, there can be only the slightest bow of appreciation and astonishment at the way Father Cyprian sets up as bold an argument as can be imagined, back in the beginning of Black Studies as we were all learning it in the late 1960’s and 1970’s.  His linking of these figures from religion; politics; and politics and religion into an argument that challenges the traditional understandings of each of these exemplars. Moses the Black was one of the great figures of the desert monastic tradition. And several of the “sayings of the Fathers” attributed to him make quite plain that he was singled out for abuse and humiliation because he was black. Father Cyprian uses these incidents to assert that “only conjecture can suggest the possibility that his [Moses the Black’s] humility was more prophetic than accommodating.”

“Only conjecture”, indeed.

At the end of this essay, Father Cyprian says:

The spirituality expressed by five diverse holy men and women is striking similar in many instances. All five practiced a very practical form of charity and service to others….Suffering as a direct result of their black skin color was experienced by all. Suffering becomes an element in the spirituality.

Finally, one final word.  Humility is the favorite virtue that a dominant group wishes to ascribe to saintly representatives of the oppressed. “Humility” insures that the oppressed remember their subordinate position. 

[Editorial clearing of the throat: Do you think Father Cyprian might have known something of the view of radical philosophers such as Fanon or Freire? In the midst of a reflection on humility, he goes for the “rule of the privileged class”? Say, Amen, please.]

This kind of “humility” – a travesty of the virtue – never seems to be attested to by the sources nearest to the saint.  Humility is the result of one’s encounter with God. Only in His presence are we conscious of our nothingness. But for the Christian this is never the whole reality; for it is the Word Incarnate that makes this mortal dust something glorious.

And so spoke Father Cyprian Davis, in 1978, as he helped parent into existence the Institute for Black Catholic Studies. Along with Thaddeus Posey and Joseph Nearon and and Thea Bowman and Bede Abram, Cyprian Davis was one of the founding faculty of the Institute; and like them he is also, now, another Saint gone marching in…”

At the end of Taking Down Our Harps: Black Catholics in the United States, which Father Cyprian edited with Diana L. Hayes, he talks about his place in our history and our hearts – even though he seems to be talking about the other contributors to the book.  As he refutes some criticisms levelled at Black Catholics by James Cone and J. DeOtis Roberts, Davis gently serves notice:

The Catholic theologian, Black or white, works within a tradition, a tradition, in fact, which has more of North Africa, Egypt, Syria, and the Mediterranean than the European model that Cone criticizes. It is within this tradition that the authors in [Taking Down Our Harps] have presented their works. In fact, they have done more. They have demonstrated that Catholic theology today must include issues raised by Black theologians. The same writers have shown that American Catholicism can no longer ignore the rich field of Black Catholic history.

Once, during a talk in Louisville, Kentucky, I took the opportunity to critique some preaching that had occurred during an enthusiastic Black Catholic liturgy that took place during an anniversary celebration of the Joint Conference of Black Catholic Clergy (including Black Catholic priests, deacons and brothers), Sisters, and Seminarians.  Needless to say, my critique was clear, pointed and probably just a little “over the top.” Nevertheless it was my own style.  Comparing three different styles of preaching known to the assembly, I mentioned, first, “Fr. Cyprian Davis. Now we all know that when Father Cyprian Davis begins a homily, it will be clear, precise; contain ideas that are fresh and challenging. We know that he will not bounce around or get too dramatic. And it will be a homily, not a revival.  I would call his style of preaching similar to sipping a very fine, rare and expensive brandy. The merest sip and you are warm all over.”  I then added my own style to the comparison…something along the lines of a very good, but not too expensive imported or domestic wine.  The third comparison – and the reason for the critique -- was to a performance that had taken place the night before. I merely said, “And last night what we had was a cheap beer…”

In fairness (and after 15 years, I can be fair), the target for that last remark is as good a preacher as we have in our community of Black Catholic clergy today.  As I said to him, then, better me than Thea Bowman offering a critique. Oh, yes, dear Lord.

Father Cyprian Davis, OSB. One of the finest, most compelling of our elders. A teacher and a preacher and a prophet. You made us alert and warm and grateful.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kx3MzncLEu0&list=PLbrjbumNvOk2Sd7GI25ZEMsaK858RVNQN&index=13

And it was a journey that was a grace for us all.

We Will Dance When You Sing

We Will Dance When You Sing

-- for the episcopal ordination of Fernand Cheri, OFM

They would send the boy

to the edge of the land

                                       when

one of the old ones smelled a storm

See if a stranger walks in need

and bring them

                               He was the child

who did not doubt

                                 they

had seen his haze-haunted eyes

and knew

                        One new seeking

found the man who walked   pushing

a song far before him

                                      Boy and man stood

still

         unlocking the curved bone

and stone necklace    the man

leaned to the fence

                        You belong

to this

               And his song faded

before clouds blackened the sky –

Later

           one by one   they fingered

his skin   his shirt    his hair

What must we

                         carry

Tell us

what

and how

and where

                     the circle will appear

We will dance

when you sing

                               Sun sparks

the stone

                  and then

they swim in his eyes

                                      home

to where his dream-song

led

23 March 2015
New Orleans

While this poem has its own integrity, one note is offered as background. Decades ago, the first Black Catholic Bishop of the 20th century, the Most Reverend Harold R. Perry, SVD, made a gift of his pectoral cross to then-Father Fernand J. Cheri, III -- with the blessing of "you will need this some day."  

Bishop Perry was the ordaining prelate for my own ordination, May 27, 1972, in East St. Louis, Illinois. Bishop Cheri has been a constant support and collaborator of mine for many years, including his authorial contributions to Sweet, Sweet Spirit: Prayer Services from the Black Catholic Church. This man brings what is useful of our past into the present, in order to help us walk and sing and dance into our future --which is, of course, the foundational meaning of "Sankofa". 

         

“Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning”

Very specifically, this meditation is grounded in a time and place that seems a convergence of desires; frustrations and hesitations; anger and rage; and hope. As the country is drawn into commemorating the 50^th anniversary of the Selma marches, the country is also forced into staring at the children who began marching in August of 2014, declaring with their bodies, their selves, that the death of Michael Brown made the stone before the tomb of silence and submission shatter and turn to dust.

So what does “Spring” possibly mean in a week when the United States Department of Justice declares that former Officer Darren Wilson will not be prosecuted for the murder of Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri; and simultaneously declare that Darren Wilson was surrounded by a culture of policing that diminished Black lives and that trivialized and corrupted the very notion that the duty of all police and “public safety” officers is to “protect and serve the citizens of the community.”  The great “Constitutional Project” that Robert P. Moses has focused on for years deals with just who is covered (and not covered) by “We” in “We the People”.  Young people across continents, cultures; across racial, ethnic and gender identities have found solidarity in saying, first, “Black Lives Matter,” and then, inevitably, that “All Lives Matter.”

Not “us” and “them” but “we” – We the People…

And yet.

In this second week of March 2015, the Oklahoma University members of a chapter of a long-notorious fraternity [Sigma Alpha Epsilon], are discovered singing, “There’ll never be a nigger SAE…You can hang them from a tree, but they will never sign with me…there’ll never be a nigger SAE.” The fraternity is the largest in the U. S, with over 15, 000 members and was founded before the beginning of the Civil War.  Hearing the chant and the subsequent pseudo-apologies of the first two members of the fraternity to be expelled from Oklahoma University, I am confronting once again the enduring darkness that is the foundation of racism in America.

At the same time as the publicity attending this public display of the camaraderie of some of this country’s future leaders, there were also public displays of yet more gatherings to mourn the deaths of unarmed black men, killed by police. – all within a week of each other. One man, Anthony Hill, in DeKalb County, Georgia was not only unarmed but was also naked – obviously manifesting signs of severe mental disassociation.  Anthony Robinson, the unarmed teenager in Madison, Wisconsin, had been a concern to his family for a long time because of his issues with mental instability and behavioral disorders.  The third man, Naeschylus Vinzant, was shot in the chest, in Aurora, Colorado, while being handcuffed by police.

The apologies of the young men who got caught – and is this not the pattern for apologies in this society? “I am sorry, less for what I did, than for being caught at doing it" – these apologies are cushioned by the protestations, “But I am not a racist.”  [A modest suggestion: before any education professional, from pre-K to graduate school, is allowed to enter a classroom as an instructor, he or she must prove competence in explaining what racism, prejudice and bias are; how they are similar and how they are different.  That simple requirement should be part of the test of any national “core” curriculum.] Yes, young person; you are a racist. But so are the people who raised you, taught you, rewarded you – and supplied you with the liquor you consumed while under the legal age.  The light has captured you and you are discovered.

Besides Sigma Alpha Epsilon, there was another Civil War era “fraternity” formed at the same time; only this other fraternity was not formed in the South and its members did not fight for the Confederate cause. This second fraternity consisted of the men who became brothers as they formed one “colored regiment” after another and joined the fight on the Union side. Because they knew who they were, and what their goal of liberation could cost them, they too sang chants as a way of deepening their band of brotherhood.  One of the great songs they used, the night before a battle, is detailed in Army Life in a Black Regiment (1869), written by Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, one of the officers of the Massachusetts 54th regiment. 

Using music in the tradition of warriors preparing themselves, these Black men were clear in their understanding that if they did not prevail in battle, they would be slaughtered, since the Confederate Army had that as a policy; taking no “colored soldiers” as prisoners. So when they stood around a fire and sang, “Keep your lamps trimmed and burning,” they did much more than make a seemingly odd appropriation of the New Testament parable of the “Wise and Foolish Virgins.”  They were declaring that, indeed, in the darkest hour before their ultimate confrontation they must (as they sang elsewhere) “hold on the light, the beautiful light.” It was not merely a rhetorical device to exhort each other, "Children don't get weary until your work is done." Indeed.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIfr5ETw9p0

When else do we more need light, but when we must confront the terrifying and terrible darkness that is without and within? And what greater lesson of culture could there be for all who are born, dwell or seek to live in this so-called “land of the free and home of the brave,” than to declare that no one can be free without a journey into the wilderness that is within the heart – the darkness for which so much collective effort is expended to keep shrouded in denial and falsification?  America has never needed a Joseph Conrad to teach itself that Jacob wrestles with the midnight angel at all times and everywhere. The singers of these songs, the freedom singers, have always been with us.

Every electronic device that has been employed to be the light that our young are keeping trimmed and burning is being used to shed light where the darkness of anonymity and denial and the transferring of blame have long ruled in this land. The victim can no longer be easily blamed. We have seen the bleeding, choking victims, splayed on the sidewalk of our cities. The threat of violence can no longer be waved as a flag of defense: not when the sufferers of post-traumatic stress (and what Black person in America is free of that condition?) are naked and stumbling toward their extinction.

The argument of false innocence -- “But I didn’t know” – has the simplest refutation. “If I have to know, you have to know.”  “If I am not exempt, you are not exempt.”  The toxic cloud of racism that corrupts the spirit of all who walk in our land is dark, indeed. But at this very specific moment in my life, I sing, “Nobody knows the trouble I see,” knowing full well that the warrior children, the men and women who have kept their eyes cast down far too long, are now holding up the light.

It is an exorcism long prayed for. Now, “everybody knows the trouble some of us have seen waking and in our nightmares."

Sooner than we may have thought, the burden is being transformed, here and there, more and more into a story that can bring power.

And courage.

Walk together, Children, don’t you get weary. And please, keep your lamps trimmed and burning. 

As Rev. Gary Davis sang a long time ago:  “Don’t get worried, for this world is almost done. Sister (Preacher/Brother) don’t stop praying (shouting); for this old world is almost done.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHayOpWimlM&index=33&list=PL5384FE34170E9995

Even when the light shone in the darkness, and the darkness knew it not, it kept on shining. 

And so it shall be now.

Nunc Dimittis

Nunc Dimittis

“…Whose Name was Simeon”

Luke 2:25-35

Smelling the smoke

                                   he sat leaning

on his stick     no more children     he prayed

enough of the squalling   the rancid odors

the stumbling  nagging parents

                                                     asking God

for what

                  he wondered

sin-free lungs    food   more cloths to cover

withered legs   and dangling useless arms

No

         more children  only break

the silence   the heart   the hope

leaning on his stick

                                   he feels the air

cool from the outside

                                      and

sudden   still   shimmering  light

not only from the greening bronze

doors pushed wider

                                    She walks

past him    nearly

                                no more than a child

who will not cry

                                    Oh   how at

last   have you found me

                                             God I threw

away    when all my little hopes

had been buried

He sits in the cloud of dark

comfort

                  and she waits

And he says

                        Now

Give him to us

we will feed

                       and feed

and feed

-- Luke 

 21 December 2014

"Ain't No Grave Can Hold My Body Down"

Out of the depths I call to you, Lord;

Lord, hear my cry!

May your ears be attentive

to my cry for mercy.

I wait for the Lord,

my soul waits

and I hope for his word.

My soul looks for the Lord

more than sentinels for daybreak.

More than sentinels for daybreak,

let Israel hope in the Lord,

For with the Lord is mercy,

with him is plenteous redemption…” [Psalm 130: 1-2, 6-7]

And the Psalm continues the act of radical faith by proclaiming over and over that God will hear, God will forgive; God will save.  And in this summer of 2014, yet again:

A voice was heard in Ramah,

weeping and great mourning,

Rachel weeping for her children;

and she refused to be comforted,

because they were no more. (Jer. 31:15; Matt. 2:18)

The mother of Oscar Grant, the young man killed at Fruitvale Station, Oakland, California, in 2009, writes to the mother of Michael Brown, the manchild killed in Ferguson, Missouri, on August 9, 2014. Attending to Michael Brown’s mother is the mother of Trayvon Martin, the child killed in Sanford, Florida in 2012.  The old song says, “Mary don’t you weep/ Martha don’t you mourn…”

But we have no one’s permission to tell the mothers of sorrow when and how to grieve their sons. We can only say, "For as long as your heart is full, we are with you."

And also weeping: the grandmother of Kajieme Powell, who was 25 years old, when he was killed, “holding a steak knife” in front of a convenience store in north St. Louis, on August 19, 2014.

And the parents of Gregory Towns, who, on April 11, 2014, in East Point, Georgia, died after police shocked him with a Taser as many as 13 times because he said he was too tired to walk, due to a foot chase.

And those who are weeping over Ezell Ford, of Los Angeles, John Crawford, of Beavercreek, Ohio, and Eric Garner, of Staten Island, New York.

And the children of Rachel are male and female,

 created in the image of God,

 reflecting the beauty of our people.

 All unarmed, all killed by police officers:

Tarika Wilson, 26 (Lima, Ohio); Aiyana Jones, 7 (Detroit, Michigan); Miriam Carey, 34 (Washington, D.C.); Shereese Francis, 30 (Queens, New York); Shantel Davis, 23 (Brooklyn, New York); Sharmel Edwards, 49 (Las Vegas, Nevada); Rekia Boyd, 22 (Chicago, Illinois) Tyisha Miller, 19 (Riverside, California) Yvette Smith, 47 (Bastrop, Texas). [Compiled by Khadijah Costley White, Assistant Professor, Department of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University in New Brunswick]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xt-af4wp_nU&index=20&list=PLbrjbumNvOk2Sd7GI25ZEMsaK858RVNQN

Let us be truly attentive. For if we do not hold on to this act of radical faith, then our children are dead. Finally dead. Simply dead. And we do not have their permission to leave them unfinished and defamed.  Their names shall not be “scandalized.”

A meditation that might be useful is to consider that when Abel offered a sacrifice pleasing to God, his brother, Cain, grew increasingly angry.  What is often overlooked in this story (Genesis 4: 2 – 16) is that God spoke directly to Cain and said: “Why are you angry and why has your countenance fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is lurking at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it.” Cain would not listen to God. Inviting his brother into the country, Cain slew his brother Abel. When God confronted him, asking where Abel was, Cain said, “I do not know, am I my brother’s keeper?”

God indeed did place a mark on Cain – but not a mark of “blackness” as the proponents of racism have maintained for centuries. God marked Cain with a sign that would prohibit others from slaying him. Abel, the innocent, beloved of God, was killed by his brother. And Cain was forgiven. And the world saw that sign.

Today, do we need to pray over the signs that protect those who would kill their sons and daughters, brothers and sisters? We hear the dying gasps of the children, the weeping and mourning of the fathers and mothers, the grandmothers and grandfathers, the children of the slain. And we wonder. We wonder.

Is the mark of Cain today, the police uniform, the badge, and the riot gear? And just what do they protect? And whom do they serve? Those who are captured by their own fears? Their own nakedness? Their own doubts? How deep the source, how thick the wall that must be maintained at all costs – and from the beginning to now, how do we reckon the price, the worth of a child of God?

“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.” James Baldwin

For every generation of those who are determined to hold on to something larger and stronger than the dark abyss -- otherwise known as the Valley of the Shadow of Death – there has been a song.  The assembly of those who crawled out of the cabins or who slipped away to the hush harbors or who gathered in the yards and kitchens of the grief-stricken, told one another to look for something to cling to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukYKKIvwjr0

And today, in the language of the harrowed heart, some of the young are finding out the wisdom of the people:  find your song and bring others within the sound of your voice to the truth you and they will need. 

This is one voice -- among many others -- emerging from the silence after the whirlwind. And he says it is “we” who sing.

J Cole: “LIFE HITS. We become distracted. We become numb. I became numb. But not anymore. That coulda been me, easily. It could have been my best friend. I’m tired of being desensitized to the murder of black men. I don’t give a fuck if it’s by police or peers. This shit is not normal.

I made a song. This is how we feel.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPzPqVqoYV8

Once a song runs through the body, the spirit awakens. 

“Deep River…My Home is Over Jordan”

An article in the New York Times for July 7, 2014, dealing with the “surge in unaccompanied minors” across the southern borders of the United States, refers to a law against human trafficking, overwhelmingly passed by both houses of the U. S. Congress in 2008.  The law is called, the “William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008.” 

[http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/08/us/immigrant-surge-rooted-in-law-to-curb-child-trafficking.html

Another NYT article presents another context for the “surge” in fleeing towards the U. S. borders -- the epidemic of children being killed by gang-generated violence in Central American countries.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/10/world/americas/fleeing-gangs-children-head-to-us-border.html?ref=us&_r=0] 

The countries that are the focus of this – and most of the -- reporting are El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQJjMifOIpQ&list=PLbrjbumNvOk2Sd7GI25ZEMsaK858RVNQN&index=19

Each article, each television commentary, each opinion piece that I have read about this wave of sorrow, at one point or another, will creep into a discussion on whether this phenomenon is a crisis of immigration or an humanitarian crisis. My small mind is reduced to an even smaller space when I am confronted with the pictures, the stories, the “noise” that is being generated. My perennial question surfaces, “Who defines the terms by which we live?”  And I would speak that question for the children. But our failure in our long-standing tradition of collective denial has silenced that question throughout whatever it is that we call American history.  Who spoke for the hundreds of thousands of children – children the same age as these suffering migrant children – who were culled from the villages of Africa and harvested for the centuries of transatlantic enslavement?  Who spoke for the children who ran – and Frederick Douglass was a teenager when he ran – from the unutterable cruelty and abuse of domestic slavery?  Who spoke for the Mayan and Aztec and Lakota and Algonquin and Shoshone and Mississippi and Seminole children who crawled out of the woods to see their parents, grandparents and siblings slaughtered by the purveyors of “Manifest Destiny”?

Who defines the terms by which we, by which they, live?

When U. S. military went into Central America years before the Civil War; when much debate in Washington at one time focused on how to invade Caribbean countries for the expansion of slavery; when drugs and guns infested the inner cities; when gangs in Chicago and Detroit and Atlanta and Los Angeles and Houston threaten the same generation of children on this side of the border as are walking northward – then who is defining any term, in any language, that would lift up the children and say, “We stand indicted by our own hypocrisy.” Let not the judgement stand that we do not value the lives of children, anywhere. Not in Nigeria, not in Bangladesh. Not in Chicago, not in San Pedro Sula, Honduras.

In the Book of Deuteronomy, clear (and, perhaps, surprising) injunctions about tithing are set down (Deut. 25:19 -- 26:15). Setting aside the first fruits of the harvest, the Israelites were to distribute the produce among the Levites (the priests of the temple); the aliens, the orphans and the widows, “so that they may eat their fill within your towns.”  So that they may eat their fill within your towns.  How radically apt is that commandment, especially for the children who are hungry and frightened and orphaned and abused and sexually assaulted all along their flight from home. Much of the hunger is due to those who appropriated their land for the diets of the industrialized north. Much of their fear of assault and death flows from the behaviors of those who scramble in the dung heap of drugs that feed the addictions of the civilized, prosperous nations in control of the resources of the planet.  Our children are aliens in their own home land. Other children, even more brutalized, more abandoned to the engines of death, are meeting them in this desert in which we wander.

Who defines the terms? And how do we live?

The sin about which the Israelites were warned by Moses was of profound importance to all of us who are narcotized by denial. “Do not forget.”  Nowhere is it more clearly articulated than in Exodus and Leviticus. It seems a compulsion of mine to repeat these verses, over and over and over. It is the foundation stone for every act of liberation that we can exercise:

“You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. You shall not afflict any widow or orphan. If you do afflict them, and they cry out to me, I will surely hear their cry, and my wrath will burn, and I will kill you with the sword, and your wives shall become widows and your children fatherless.” [Exodus 22: 21-24] 

“When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. The stranger who sojourns with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.” [Leviticus 19:33]

The sin is to forget.

The sin that today infects so many of our souls, I think, is to deny that we ever knew. But some of us are part of the unbroken story, the unending song: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPslJMheiPU

Of course, James Baldwin understood sin, and the price one paid when one chooses denial. But he also speaks, prophesies about salvation:

Salvation is as real, as mighty, and as impersonal as the rain, and it is yet as private as the rain in one’s face.  It is never accomplished; it is to be reaffirmed every day and every hour. There is absolutely no salvation without love: this is the wheel in the middle of the wheel. Salvation does not divide. Salvation connects, so that one sees oneself in others and others in oneself…It is a mighty fortress, even in the teeth of ruin or at the gates of death. It protects one from nothing except one thing: one will never curse God or man. [“To Crush a Serpent”, in James Baldwin: The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings, edited by Randall Kenan, p.203]

We do not dare trample the children as if we and they are not the same. We define the terms by which they live. Or do not live. And they define us, when they stare at us and cry.